Make YouTube Less Annoying by Changing These Eight Settings
YouTube used to be a cool site where you could spend hours watching entertaining videos from other users like you with little to no interruptions. However, management has made a number of decisions in recent years that have made it harder for users like me to use the site. From shoving YouTube Shorts into every corner of the site to playing videos in low resolution, there are a number of things that have made YouTube objectively worse than it used to be. Luckily, there are some things you can do to fix some of these issues and make YouTube work better. Here’s a list of tweaks and tools you can use to fix YouTube’s worst annoyances.
If you can, consider subscribing to YouTube Premium
I hate to tell people to pay for a better experience, but YouTube’s aggressive monetization has left us with no choice. Luckily, YouTube Premium is one of the best digital subscriptions out there , so if you can spend $14 a month and use YouTube a lot, it’s worth it. I only recommend it for the ad-free experience, but it also lets you download high-quality videos. If you’re really strapped for cash, you might want to check out these YouTube apps that offer ad-free streaming . There’s even an $8 a month YouTube Premium Lite subscription that cuts down on ads significantly, which could be worth it for some people.
Enable helpful privacy settings
In the YouTube app, you can pause tracking of your watch history and search history, and turn off ad personalization. These features will improve your privacy while using YouTube, but they may have some side effects, such as showing you less relevant ads or not having your feed on the YouTube homepage. I can live with these tradeoffs because they reduce the time I spend watching videos, but if you value YouTube’s recommended videos, pausing tracking of your watch history isn’t worth it.
To enable this feature, open the YouTube app and tap the profile icon in the top-right corner. Then go to Settings > Manage All History . In the Controls tab, you can turn off YouTube history. You can also tap Manage History in the same tab and delete all your data. Also, turn off Personalized Ads in the Ads Control Center . After that, take a minute to review all your data in YouTube Settings > Your Data on YouTube to make sure there are no traces of any saved YouTube data left.
Improve image quality
YouTube sometimes defaults to low video quality, and frankly, this can get annoying fast, especially considering all our devices have such cool displays now. You can fix this by going to YouTube Settings > Video Quality Settings . Tap On Wi-Fi and select High Image Quality . This will make videos play in a higher resolution by default, at least when connected to a network.
Fix important playback settings
I really don’t like YouTube’s habit of automatically playing video previews as I browse through pages in the app. You can turn this off in YouTube Settings > Playback . On that page, turn off “Autoplay next video,” “Show suggestions in videos,” and “Play in feeds.” This should fix YouTube’s most egregious auto-interruptions.
Reduce spam notifications
If you prefer to receive fewer notifications, try changing YouTube’s notification settings. Go to YouTube Settings > Notifications and turn off any unnecessary notifications. I prefer to turn off notifications globally through the iPhone settings, but doing it through the YouTube app lets you receive specific notifications while turning off the most annoying ones.
Keep your subscriptions private
For most people, I recommend not showing your YouTube subscriptions on your profile. Random strangers don’t need to know what videos you’re interested in, and it’s easy to set up on the YouTube website. For some reason, this option hasn’t appeared in the YouTube iPhone app, so I recommend signing into YouTube in a browser and going to Settings > Privacy . This will take you to your YouTube account privacy settings page, where you can toggle the “Keep all my subscriptions private” option .
Use an extension to change hidden YouTube settings
My colleague Justin Pot recently wrote about Untrap , a great extension that lets you hide all the unnecessary content on YouTube. It works with all popular browsers and lets you clean up your YouTube feed in just a few clicks. It lets you hide a lot of things, including short YouTube videos, recommended videos, chats, and more. It lets you make about 300 changes to how the site works.
Try third-party apps to watch YouTube without algorithms
If you’re tired of being trapped by YouTube’s algorithms, you can use third-party apps to get rid of that feed entirely. My colleague Khamosh Pathak wrote about Play and a few other alternatives that will help you do just that. Depending on your platform and preferences, you might want to try Play , Unwatched for YouTube , or NewPipe to gain more control over what you watch and prevent algorithms from determining your viewing habits.