YouTube used to be this cool website where you could watch hours of entertaining videos from other people like you, with few interruptions. Of late, though, its management has made a series of decisions that make it harder for folks like me to enjoy the site. From shoving YouTube Shorts into every corner of the site to playing videos in lower resolutions, there are a bunch of things that have made YouTube an objectively worse website and app than it used to be. Fortunately, you can undo some of the damage to get a better YouTube experience. Here’s a list of settings you can tweak and tools you can use to fix the worst of YouTube’s annoyances.
Get YouTube Premium if you can
Credit: Pranay Parab
I really dislike telling people to pay up for a better experience, but YouTube’s aggressive monetization has left us with little choice. Fortunately, YouTube Premium is one of the best digital subscriptions you can get, so if you can spare $14 per month and you use YouTube a lot, then you should get it. I recommend it just to get rid of ads, but it also lets you download videos in high quality. If you’re really short on cash, though, you can see if these ad-free YouTube apps still work. There’s even a YouTube Premium Lite subscription at $8/month, which significantly reduces the ads you’ll encounter, and may be worth it for some people.
Enable helpful privacy options
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On the YouTube app, you can pause tracking on your watch history and search history, plus disable ad personalization. These options will improve your privacy when you use YouTube, but they may have certain side effects such as seeing less relevant ads or not seeing your feed on the YouTube homepage. I can live with these trade-offs, because they reduce the time I spend watching videos, but if you value YouTube’s suggested videos, then you shouldn’t pause watch history.
To enable this, go to the YouTube app and tap the profile icon in the top-right corner. Now, go to Settings > Manage all history. In the Controls tab, you can turn off your YouTube History. You can also tap Manage history in the same tab and clear all your data there. Use the My Ad Center section to disable personalized ads, too. When you’re done, take a minute to go through everything in YouTube Settings > Your data in YouTube to ensure that no traces of saved YouTube data are left.
Improve picture quality
Credit: Pranay Parab
YouTube sometimes defaults to lower quality videos, and honestly, that can get annoying really fast, especially when all of our devices have such nice displays these days. You can fix that by going to YouTube Settings > Video quality preferences. Tap On Wi-Fi and select Higher picture quality. This will play videos in a higher resolution by default, at least while you’re connected to a network.
Fix important playback settings
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I really dislike YouTube’s habit of autoplaying video previews when I’m browsing on the app. You can disable that by going to YouTube Settings > Playback. On this page, disable Auto-play next video, Show in-video info cards, and Playback in feeds. That should fix the most egregious of YouTube’s automatic interruptions.
Reduce notification spam
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If you prefer to receive fewer notifications, then you should try tweaking your YouTube notification settings. Go to YouTube Settings > Notifications and disable notifications for everything you don’t need. I prefer to disable notifications globally via my iPhone’s settings, but doing it via the YouTube app lets you receive certain notifications, while disabling the more annoying ones.
Keep your subscriptions private
Credit: Pranay Parab
For most people, I recommend not revealing your YouTube subscriptions on your profile. Random strangers need not know which videos you’re interested in, and you can tweak that easily via YouTube’s website. This option didn’t show up on YouTube’s iPhone app for some reason, so I recommend logging in to YouTube on a browser and going to Settings > Privacy. This opens YouTube’s account privacy settings page, where you can enable Keep all my subscriptions private.
Use an extension to change hidden YouTube settings
Credit: Justin Pot
My colleague Justin Pot recently wrote about Untrap, an excellent extension that lets you hide all the junk on YouTube. It works with all popular browsers and lets you clean up your YouTube feed in just a few clicks. You can use it to hide a bunch of things, including YouTube Shorts, suggested videos, live chats, and much more. It lets you make around 300 tweaks to the site.
Try third-party apps for an algorithm-free YouTube experience
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
If you’re tired of being sucked into YouTube’s algorithm trap, you can use third-party apps to be free of the feed entirely. My colleague Khamosh Pathak wrote about Play and a couple of other alternatives that help you do just that. Depending on your platform and preferences, you can try Play, Unwatched for YouTube, or NewPipe to gain more control over what you watch and not let algorithms define your watching habits.
