The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.

At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.

I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.

I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.

Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.

Check out the Unhook extension (available in various browsers), it can turn YT into search box + video player.

> The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a > horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's > collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - > sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, > but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.

I rarely ever open anything else but https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions