How I watch YouTube videos on my phone without getting distracted
I struggle to use youtube on my phone sensibly. In the evening when I'm tried and looking to numb my tired mind, I get sucked into shorts or other regrettable watching choices.
I therefore use a rather roundabout way of watching videos that separates the choosing of videos from the watching.
Youtube is always blocked on my phone (both by host + the app itself -- you can fully block the app with adb).
On my desktop youtube is unblocked only between the hours of 4:30pm-7:00pm). This means that I can only browse youtube in the afternoon, after work, before dinner. Usually I only have a few moments available before rushing off to cook or tidy something, so I hop on quickly and scroll through, see if anything interesting is on the front page. I don't really follow people, but I might think of a channel I've not checked in a while and manually search it. If I want to select a video to watch, I copy the url and download it using this script:
#!/bin/bash
if [[ "$1" == "--local" ]]; then
cd ~/videos || exit 1
shift
else
cd ~/Sync/media/videos || exit 1
fi
yt-dlp "$1" -S res:720 -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" --restrict-filenames --write-sub --write-auto-sub --sub-lang "en.en" --embed-subs
rm -f *.vtt # cleanup
rm -f *.part # cleanup
rm -f .trashed*
That downloads it, embeds subs (for foreign language things, vlc displays those fine on my phone), sticks it in my ~/Sync folder, does some cleanup.
Everything in that folder is synced to my phone using syncthing, so by the evening I can open the files app and go to videos and see any of the videos I have downloaded.
It turns out that my afternoon self will select wholesome, long-form, interesting videos for evening-me to watch (to evening-me's occasional frustration).
If I have nothing left to watch, or nothing I want to watch, I stop. There is nothing to scroll to, no suggested videos. I watch one. I delete it. I'm done.
Keeping the ability to watch something seems to prevent my from wanting to bypass any of the blocks most of the time, which is an issue I had with full blocking in the past, and it allows me to watch actually useful videos (building, repairing things, etc.)