Insights on YouTube habits, attention management, and building a healthier relationship with video content.
Strip back the YouTube interface and something interesting happens: the content you actually came for becomes visible again. Here's what the Customise Feed controls do and why I use them every day.
Duration tells you how long you were on YouTube. The Clarity Score tells you whether any of it was intentional. One month of personal data showed me patterns I couldn't unsee.
YouTube kept serving me videos I'd already seen. Tracking the problem revealed 37% of my homepage was recycled content, so I built a filter to remove it.
Rewatching feels like revisiting good content. My data revealed it was mostly invisible drift, the same videos, dozens of times, adding up to hours I never consciously chose.
A scheduled ten-minute review of your YouTube scores, top channels, and intentional-versus-drift split tends to produce more lasting behavioral change than any vague resolution to watch less.
YouTube Shorts and TikTok share a format but differ in one structural detail that matters: Shorts sits at the entrance to a vast long-form library, so a session that starts with a 60-second clip can quietly become two hours.