What is Disconnected YouTube?

Disconnected Youtube aims to disconnects from everything in YouTube that makes it a useless time sink.

Namely, there is no endless recommendation algorithms in place - it is just your subscription box feed, watch later page and settings to help you regain control on how you use YouTube. Once you have watched (or skipped) videos in your subscription feed, then you can be reminded to not use YouTube for the rest of the day and to move onto other things.

This project isn’t done, and I’ll be updating this page as I go.

Roadmap of future features:

1. Implement settings functionality - Night/Light mode & channel filters need to be implemented so the user has control of the appearance and the videos given to them
2. Make it so video progress is saved - videos are assumed to be completely watched currently
3. New limits in the settings - for example, you could make it so you can only watch 5 videos every day, or no more than 1 hour of videos. After reaching this limit, the website will effectively shut down until the next day.
4. Adding Instructions to deploying on the github repo
5. User set recommendation system in the settings - Ie only 5 minutes of recommendation per week, stacking to a limit of 1 hour, with a limit of 50 recommended videos shown during the limited recommendation use. That way you can find new channels and content, but time is limited, pulling you back from staying on the website
6. Being able to search videos up

I believe the ‘less is more’ philosophy holds true here. This makes me cautious of a recommendation algorithm where the user customizes the time they can spend on it (What’s stopping them from setting it to infinity?), so there will need to be clear guard rails to ensure Disconnected YouTube isn’t just a rebranded YouTube.

A Personal Experiment in Digital Minimalism

This project emerged from personal frustrations from using YouTube. I have tried existing extensions such as Unhook, but it ultimately felt like band-aids on a deeper problem. There wouldn’t be enough friction to disabling the extension, YouTube’s UI would subconsciously remind me of features I have removed which I enjoy, and most importantly, it wouldn’t cross over to my phone.

Since using this website, my phone’s overall screen time has dipped considerably from 4 hours to 1.5 hours. Time which has been great to refocus on doing the things I actually want to do, not what Big Tech puts infront of me.

Look at your screen time right now. If you feel a bit guilty, that’s ok. Everyone right now is going through this - but apps like this show how you can control your precious time and regain agency.

If the app you spent too much time on was YouTube, try deploying this project - but that wasn’t the main objective of this project.

This app was entirely made with AI, which means you can create the specific solution to your specific problems. Agentic AI democratizes coding abilities to people from any background to make MVP’s of social media alternatives. It’ll require some patience to complete, But a weekend project which can save you from losing future weekends is undeniably a great investment.

Some are admittedly tricker than others to implement due to API restrictions, but AI can give advice on circumventing these road blocks or finding alternative social medias to use.

Everyone needs to take control of our habits, even if we’re in a world designed to suck our attention away, we can suck it back too.