Youtube is one of those tricky items that you really need, sometimes, but that’s also set up to feed you dopamine hits, and addict you. X (twitter) is similar. It’s good to check occasionally, but addiction and time-wasting can quickly follow.
Here’s what I’m doing now, that works pretty well to allow me to use these sites without the personalization, algorithm and the addiction.
- Set up your hosts file (in Windows) to redirect x.com and youtube.com. This will effectively make them unavailable. Here’s a decent overview of how to do it - [https://medium.com/@prcooltechzone/a-guide-to-hosts-file-and-using-it-to-block-websites-on-windows-linux-and-mac-os-4edc44fbd915](https://medium.com/@prcooltechzone/a-guide-to-hosts-file-and-using-it-to-block-websites-on-windows-linux-and-m…
Youtube is one of those tricky items that you really need, sometimes, but that’s also set up to feed you dopamine hits, and addict you. X (twitter) is similar. It’s good to check occasionally, but addiction and time-wasting can quickly follow.
Here’s what I’m doing now, that works pretty well to allow me to use these sites without the personalization, algorithm and the addiction.
- Set up your hosts file (in Windows) to redirect x.com and youtube.com. This will effectively make them unavailable. Here’s a decent overview of how to do it - https://medium.com/@prcooltechzone/a-guide-to-hosts-file-and-using-it-to-block-websites-on-windows-linux-and-mac-os-4edc44fbd915. The write-up is a little lengthy because it’s for all the different scenarios, but just jump to your OS and it’s pretty simple.
- Once you’ve done this, you can no longer access youtube.com. So what’s the alternative? Yewtu.be. I don’t know the details behind it, but it’s a stand-alone (no tracking, no personalization) tunnel into Youtube. It doesn’t always work right away, 100%. You may have to refresh a couple times. Consider the annoyance involved as an additional incentive to spend less time watching videos.
- You can also no longer access x.com (formerly twitter). Instead, go to xcancel.com. It’s the same - no tracking or personalization. So you can still follow some favorites, but the inconvenience involved causes you to spend less time on it.