How to Quit YouTube Without Losing the Useful Parts

This morning someone on r/nosurf posted under the title "Desperately need to quit YouTube. But I can't replace it." The post explained why in three short lines:

"Documentaries, diy videos, long plays to sleep to. It's all there. Yet it drains my time." (r/nosurf)

Deleting the app would fix the time problem, and it would also take away the tutorials and channels you actually use. Most people who want to quit YouTube are after something narrower. They want to get rid of the parts that choose the next video for them: the recommendations on the home page, the Shorts feed you can swipe through for as long as you like, and autoplay.

YouTube and the iPhone now have a setting for each of those. They're spread across different menus, so here they are in one place. Setting them all up takes a few minutes.

Set the Shorts feed limit to zero

In the YouTube app, tap You, then Settings → Time management → Shorts feed limit, and pick 0 minutes. The zero option started rolling out in April 2026.

With the limit at zero, swiping through the Shorts feed stops with a message that you've reached your limit. A Short a friend sends you still plays, and Shorts from channels you subscribe to still appear in Subscriptions and in search. What you lose is the endless swipe from one clip to the next.

People report different results on the home page. On Hacker News, one person wrote that after setting the limit and refreshing, "I don't see Shorts recommendations at all," while another still saw Shorts there. On an adult account the limit message also has an Ignore button, and Shorts come back for the rest of the day. So treat this as the first step, and use the next one for the home page.

Turn off watch history to empty the home page

This setting comes up a lot when people describe how they stopped scrolling YouTube. Recommendations are built from what you've watched. When YouTube isn't saving your watch history and there isn't much recent history left, it removes the recommendations from the home page, and what's left is search, your subscriptions and your playlists.

On iPhone, tap your profile picture, then Settings → Manage all history, open the Controls tab and turn off Include the YouTube videos you watch. Watch history belongs to your Google account, so this also applies on a computer or TV where you're signed in.

If the home page keeps showing recommendations afterwards, delete your older watch history from the same screen. YouTube notes that deleting watch history also deletes your search history for the same period.

One person on Hacker News described what YouTube looked like after the change:

"YouTube for me now has just become who I'm subscribed to, which is a much more pleasant experience - there's an 'end' where I'm finally caught up and can move on to doing something else." (Hacker News)

Someone else who switched this spring was straightforward about the trade-off: it's "less fun, but also less of a timewaste" (Hacker News).

Turn off autoplay

Tap your profile picture, then Settings → Autoplay, and switch it off. When a video finishes, nothing new starts, and you decide whether to watch another one.

Save useful videos for later

A repair video you'll need on Saturday doesn't have to be watched on Tuesday night. Tap Save under the video and add it to Watch later or to a playlist for the topic, such as "Bike repair" or "Recipes". When Saturday comes, you open the playlist instead of the home page.

In a Hacker News discussion from January 2025, another person described a fuller version of this setup. They removed the app and watched in the browser, paused watch history, turned off autoplay, kept playlists by topic, and after that only found videos through search, playlists or subscriptions:

"This was a big shift from a 'push' to a 'pull' model and has effectively stopped my doom scrolling habit in just a couple of weeks." (Hacker News)

If you fall asleep to YouTube

Long videos at bedtime are hard to give up, and for some people they do help with falling asleep. You can keep them and make sure playback stops after you're asleep. Open the Clock app, go to Timers and set a time, for example 45 minutes. Tap When Timer Ends, scroll to the bottom of the list and choose Stop Playing, then tap Set and Start. When the timer runs out, the video stops, and with autoplay off nothing else starts after it.

When the settings aren't enough

Everything above can be switched back on in a few taps. For a lot of people that's fine, because once the feed is gone there's much less pulling them back in. If you notice you keep tapping Ignore or turning history back on late in the evening, put the limit somewhere outside the YouTube app:

• A Time Allowance for YouTube in Screen Time. In iOS 27, App Limits were renamed Time Allowances, and adults can use them too. Here's what changed in iOS 27 Screen Time.

• A Screen Time passcode someone else sets, so you can't raise the allowance on your own. Check the recovery step before you rely on it: how to set up a Screen Time accountability partner.

• FlyOut. Its shields block the apps you choose on a schedule, after a time limit or at a place, and its daily plan helps you decide what to do with that evening instead. To get past a shield, you open FlyOut, answer why you want the app right now and do a short breathing exercise. If you really do need a repair video at 10pm, you can still watch it after that.

None of these can make YouTube impossible to open, and no iPhone blocker can. There's a longer explanation in Is there an app blocker that can't be bypassed?

FlyOut is available on the App Store: calm screen time for iPhone.