This Extension Gets Rid of Annoying YouTube Clutter
YouTube is an amazing tool. If there’s anything you want to do, from playing a musical instrument to fixing appliances, there’s a video somewhere on the site that shows you exactly how to do it. Problem: YouTube doesn’t always act as a tool. It’s easy to get caught up in the rabbit hole of related videos, comments, and other distractions (mostly because the site is designed specifically to make sure you do just that).
If you want YouTube to act more like a tool and less like a dopamine factory, I recommend Untrap . Available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, and Opera, this browser extension allows you to make nearly 300 customizations to the YouTube website, allowing you to remove distracting features and enable a few useful ones by default.
To get started, install the extension and click the icon. You’ll see a few useful options, including the ability to hide all shorts, but to find the really useful stuff, click the All Settings box at the bottom. This allows you to view settings for every page on the YouTube website, including video pages, home page, and search results.
I suggest starting where you spend most of your time: video pages. Scroll through the list and you will find various settings that you can make. The first thing I did was turn on “Hide Similar Videos” and “Automatically Show Chapters”. This immediately transforms the space to the right of the video from a rabbit hole of distractions into a tool you can use to watch the currently playing video with the intention of finding exactly the information you’re looking for.
There are even more great features here. You can turn off suggestions that appear at the end of the video. You can force theater mode, which means the video will always fill the entire width of the screen. You can automatically expand the video description, meaning you’ll never have to click the little “More” button to find the link you want. You can even turn off comments completely if you want to spend less time scrolling through them. You are in control.
There are similar options for the YouTube home page, subscriptions page, and even search results. If there’s anything in the YouTube interface that’s distracting or not helpful at all, simply turn it off. In an ideal world, YouTube (and any other site) would work this way, but it’s nice that there are tools that allow you to customize everything.