YouTube Liberation: Anti-Distraction Skin
Samson Zhang
Like other social media platforms, YouTube is very good at showing you content that you want to watch but weren't planning to or looking for, making it super easy to get distracted and get sucked into one video after another and suddenly lose an hour of your day. Yet there are so many valuable resources and videos that you can't find elsewhere: tutorials, event coverage, specific creators you subscribe to who you know always publish high-quality content worth watching. For many of us, the value of YouTube makes it worth the sacrifice of even its most distracting possibilities, and it's impossible to just cut away. What if it didn't have to be this way? What if you could have the good of YouTube, see the content you want to see, without the platform constantly trying to drag your attention through an endless stream of productivity-draining drudgery? This is the philosophy behind YouTube Liberation. It's time to rise up, lose your chains, and join us as we march our way towards a better YouTube! YouTube Liberation works by hiding elements that lead you towards new content you don't intend to see, without compromising any core viewing features. These elements include: - The entire home page of alg-generated recommendations - Video recommendations on watch pages - Comments sections on watch pages - Extraneous UI elements, replacing the full sidebar with a much more minimal one and removing most topbar buttons YouTube liberation does not at all compromise: - Subscriptions and trending pages - Channel pages - Playlists - Video stats, description, etc. What are considered vital core features and what are considered distracting elements varies from use case to use case and person to person. For certain kinds of videos, comments might be more constructive than distracting. For creators, notifications and easy access to uploading might be important (though that's why YouTube Studio exists...). Thus, one feature I'm working on adding right now is the ability to customize what gets hidden and what is shown, with a recommended configuration as it is right now.
