It's becoming more and more common for modern technology to assume that a user does not know what they want or would prefer not to make decisions. On some level this is true; we all love to turn off our brain and just be entertained. Doomscrolling can be a legitimate, albeit unhealthy, coping mechanism for everyday stressors.
Where I object is that there tends not to even be an option to disable this way of using the app. I have been an avid YouTube user for a long time. I remember in high school spending way too many hours going through my subscription feed watching vlog brothers or competitive Pokemon or whatever else I was into at the time. I would get ready for bed and sit down at my computer to brush my teeth only for an hour to pass with the toothbrush still in my mouth.
Anyway, the point is YouTube has fully joined this bandwagon of algorithmically delivered feeds. You have to go out of your way to only watch channels you've subscribed to because the app opens to your home feed every time. There is no setting to instead open your subscriptions. There's no way to disable Shorts. That irks me.
So I decided to do some research and unsurprisingly I'm not alone. Enter the ReVanced project. This wraps the latest version of YouTube and opens up basically all the features I wanted but couldn't get:
- Disable Shorts completely
- Change your default home page
- Bring back subscriptions
- Automatically skip in-video ads
And much more. I highly recommend trying it. Read through the settings once you do. Note that because it's not supported by Google, you will need to manually install updates from time to time. Just takes a few minutes, and plugging your Android phone into your PC with USB debugging and ADB makes this quite easy through your favorite AI harness. That's a blog for another day.