Why I built a YouTube timeline with no recommendations
TL;DR
- I'd open YouTube to watch one video and lose an hour following recommendations. I never really tried to fight it.
- So I built a page that shows only new uploads from the channels I pick, in upload order, with no recommendations and no Shorts.
- Now I watch what's new and close the tab. That was the whole goal, and it works.
Plainfeed shows new videos from the YouTube channels you choose, in the order they were posted, without recommendations or Shorts. My last post was about running it on 10,000 API units a day. This one is about why it exists. It's short.
Where the time went
Nothing dramatic. I'd have a video in mind, open YouTube, watch it, click the one next to it, go back to the home page, find another one. After a while I'd be deep into videos that had nothing to do with why I came. The problem wasn't that the algorithm picked badly. It picked well.
The subscriptions tab didn't fix it either. Watching new uploads from the top, one by one, worked fine, but once I got to the end, autoplay would queue up videos from channels I didn't follow. Right when I thought I was done, the recommendations came in through the back door. Shorts were mixed in along the way, too.
A lot of people seem to have the same problem. A post I read recently on a community forum described opening YouTube for one long video and forgetting about it because of Shorts and thumbnails. The question was whether any habit or software could help.
What I didn't try
Honestly, I didn't try the usual fixes. Deleting the app, turning off notifications, installing a screen-time extension. They all felt like a fight I'd have to win every single time. The temptation stays on the screen; only my willpower changes.
I figured if the temptation wasn't on the screen, there'd be nothing to fight. YouTube without recommendations. That was the whole idea.
What I built instead
In short: I put time where the recommendations used to be.
- Only new uploads from channels I pick, stacked in upload order. Nobody chose the order; the clock did.
- Shorts are filtered out. Watched videos change their marker and can be hidden, so the list empties as you go. When it's empty, you're done.
- No "up next" beside the player. When a video ends, there's nothing to do. That's on purpose.
- No sign-in. Paste a channel URL and it works.
The key was a list with an end. A recommendation feed has no end, so there's no natural point to stop. New uploads from the channels you follow are a handful a day, and once you've seen them, closing the tab is the obvious next move.
What surprised me
I didn't expect so many Shorts. Of the 590 most recent videos across my 40 channels, 153 were Shorts, about 26% (October 2026, measured for my last post). Channels I thought of as long-form were posting Shorts in between. Filtering them out made the list noticeably shorter, which means I reach "all caught up" sooner.
What I didn't build
- No screen-time limits or timers. Watch as much as you want; just don't get dragged along.
- No attempt at "better recommendations." The goal was to remove them, not improve them.
- It's not a YouTube replacement. If I want to search or browse, I go to YouTube. This is one window for new uploads from channels I follow.
Closing
I'm happy with it. I open it, watch what's new from the channels I care about, and close it. Not a big life change, but I no longer forget what I came for.
Next post goes back to the technical side: running this on a single Cloudflare free plan while making sure one person can't burn through D1's daily read and write limits.