Taming Youtube in 2023

Matt Pengelly - 2023-02-11

It’s 2023, YouTube is more useful than ever as a tool for learning new skills, catching up on niche news, delving deeply into topics, or anything else you might use it for.

Unfortunately, it has also become more addictive than ever. Below are a set of useful Chrome extensions for taming & customising your Youtube experience to better suit your needs.

Making Youtube less addictive/annoying:

• Unhook - blocks addictive portions of youtube like recommended videos and the homepage.
• Blocktube - additional blocking layer, that allows filtering “shorts” out via Settings.
  
• Sponsorblock - crowdsourced sponsor blocking, skips in-video sponsors.
• Ublock Origin - generic ad blocker.

Bonus utility that I like:

• Picture in Picture (by Google) - PIP but the picture will follow you across multiple browser tabs.
  
• Looper - loop youtube videos as much as you want.

These all work out of the box with the exception of Blocktube “shorts” filtering which is a setting so be sure to checkout those pages for each extension.

Note: Extensions like Sponsorblock and Ublock Origin affect ad revenue for creators and YouTube in general