u/Stunning_Coat_1114

You know that feeling when you open YouTube to watch one specific thing and 45 minutes later you're watching a video about someone's trip to Iceland and you don't even know how you got there?

That was me every single day. The homepage is the trap. Not the videos themselves the homepage. It's designed to show you something slightly more tempting than what you were about to do.

What finally worked for me was removing the variable reward. Instead of seeing a fresh feed every time I open YouTube, I locked it to the same set of videos. Nothing new loads unless I manually tell it to. The scroll just... stops.

It's been three weeks and I've genuinely not lost an afternoon to YouTube since. I still watch things I planned to watch. I just don't get pulled into the algorithm anymore.

Anyone else found that the homepage specifically is the problem rather than YouTube itself?

The YouTube homepage is a slot machine. Every time you open a new tab or scroll down, it loads a fresh set of videos specifically calibrated to keep you there longer. I wanted to break that loop without deleting YouTube entirely.

FreezeTube locks your homepage to a static snapshot. The feed doesn't update unless you click refresh yourself. No infinite scroll, no new algorithm bait, no one more video trap.

It's fully local no account, no server, no data collection. 80kb.

Would love any feedback on the extension or the concept. Happy to answer questions about how I built it.

Link https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/freezetube-%E2%80%93-stop-youtube/jbhihladabkggdgbhkgdgpbjjogehgnk?authuser=0&hl=en-GB

https://preview.redd.it/fenfn1izteih1.png?width=2816&format=png&auto=webp&s=f3b6f56d8589dd4ec1f6a1cb80b1e42349c289b7

You know that feeling when you open YouTube to watch one specific thing and 45 minutes later you're watching a video about someone's trip to Iceland and you don't even know how you got there?

That was me every single day. The homepage is the trap. Not the videos themselves the homepage. It's designed to show you something slightly more tempting than what you were about to do.

What finally worked for me was removing the variable reward. Instead of seeing a fresh feed every time I open YouTube, I locked it to the same set of videos. Nothing new loads unless I manually tell it to. The scroll just... stops.

It's been three weeks and I've genuinely not lost an afternoon to YouTube since. I still watch things I planned to watch. I just don't get pulled into the algorithm anymore.

Anyone else found that the homepage specifically is the problem rather than YouTube itself?

i got so annoyed with youtube wiping my homepage feed every time i hit the back button. you click a video, hit back, and the dom just completely re-renders a new algorithmic feed and you lose whatever was there.

couldnt find an extension that just froze the feed (most just block recommendations entirely), so i built a small mv3 extension for it.

tbh the biggest headache was intercepting the json payloads before the ui actually paints. ended up injecting a script into the MAIN world to override window.fetch and XMLHttpRequest. it caches the richItemRenderer objects and forcefully injects them back when the page navigates.

also threw some native-looking buttons straight into the youtube masthead so you can toggle the freeze or get a 'new batch' without having to open the extension popup.

getting this to play nice with mv3 and youtube's infinite scroll was annoying as hell. has anyone here dealt with SPA interception like this? let me know if there's a cleaner/less hacky way to handle it without hitting cors or mv3 limits.

ill drop the link in the comments if anyone wants to mess with it.