How to stop doomscrolling YouTube without quitting YouTube
Most people who block YouTube unblock it within a fortnight. Not because they lack discipline, but because the block was wrong: it took away the four channels they actually wanted along with the endless middle. Here is the alternative.
Why an all-or-nothing block fails
YouTube is two products sharing a domain. One is a library — the lecture you need, the repair video for your exact dishwasher, the four or five people whose work you genuinely look forward to. The other is a slot machine: the sidebar, the home feed, autoplay, Shorts.
Blocking youtube.com removes both. So the first time you need the library, you unblock — and the slot machine comes back with it. Two weeks later you are exactly where you started, and now you also believe you are the kind of person who cannot stick to things.
The block was not too weak. It was too blunt.
The shape that survives
- Block every video by default, everywhere.
- Allow a small, named list of channels — and only those.
- Put a delay between deciding to add a channel and being able to watch it.
Nothing is lost, so there is no moment where you have to choose between your rules and something you actually need. And the thing that made YouTube compulsive — the next video you did not choose — is simply not reachable.
Why the sidebar is the actual problem
Nobody sets out to watch six hours of YouTube. What happens is that a video you chose ends, and one you did not choose begins. The decision to keep watching was never made by you; it was made by a recommendation model optimising for exactly this.
A channel whitelist quietly removes that. When the only videos that will play are ones from a list you wrote while sober and unhurried, the session ends when the video ends. You stop needing willpower for a decision that is no longer being put to you.
Setting it up
The tool for this is Pluckeye: a filter for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android that has no password and instead protects its settings with a delay you choose in advance. Loosening a rule waits out the delay. Tightening one is instant.
The awkward part is that YouTube’s URLs do not say which channel a video belongs to, so “allow this channel” is not a rule you can write. That is what this site is for: paste a YouTube link and you get it back at a URL with the channel in the path, which is something a filter can allow.
# 1. nothing plays, anywhere
pluck + block youtube.com video/
pluck + block ytbychannel.com video/
# 2. the thumbnails are bait too
pluck + block i.ytimg.com
# 3. one line per channel you decided you wanted
pluck + allow https://ytbychannel.com/RickAstleyYT
# 4. from now on, new channels take four hours
pluck delay 4h
Try it before you install anything
You do not need a filter to see the shape of it. Paste a link and look at the URL you get back — the channel is right there in the path, which is the whole reason a rule can reach it.
Things that help alongside it
- Add channels in batches, not in the moment. Sit down once, add the eight you know you want, then set the delay. Adding one while you are already itching for it is the pattern the delay exists to interrupt.
- Clear your watch history. Recommendations are built from it, so a purge genuinely changes what gets pushed at you. Google’s activity controls do it.
- Kill the thumbnails.
pluck + block i.ytimg.com. Text is far easier to walk away from than a face and a red arrow. - Use audio-only for talks.
pluck + block youtube.com selector:.html5-video-containerleaves the sound and removes the picture, which removes most of the pull. - Expect to tune it. The first fortnight involves adding things. That is the system working, not failing.
One honest caveat
A filter changes how hard something is to reach; it does not change why you were reaching. If the scrolling is doing a job — boredom, anxiety, avoiding something — the friction buys you time to notice that, and not much more. Plenty of people find that time is exactly what they needed. Some need more than a tool, and that is worth knowing early rather than after the fourth failed attempt.