It's been three weeks now since I've blocked YouTube on my home network. As much as I hate YouTube, I'd find myself watching stupid videos on it because of the algorithm for much longer than I anticipated.

So I was just done with the wasted time, and I was done with it making me feel like it was taking that control away from me. So I blocked it at the PiHole layer.

Here are some things I've discovered in the past three weeks.

- The most obvious is like cutting off anything cold turkey if you realize how much of a habit it is. I'll just open it on my AppleTV and put something random on just to let it play. And I kept opening it even after I blocked it without thinking, only to be greeted to a "you're offline" message.

- There are not an insignificant number of things I would learn about for the first time from a YouTube video being surfaced to me because the algorithm is so tuned into me. I didn't even know my favorite band released a new song until somebody told me directly. Without those CNN clips, or music news or whatever I went blind because I didn't replace it with anything else. I didn't know I had to. I didn't realize I was doing that.

- You don't notice how many web pages are littered with YouTube embeds until you block them all and they show up as errors instead.

- I get sent a ton of YouTube links from people. So for each one, individually, I'll disable my PiHole for a couple of minutes. Long enough to watch that single video because somebody sent it.

I realize what I really want is to be able to only watch a small group of accounts, treating YouTube like a video podcast. When a new video goes live I can download it and watch it. No recommendations, no "other videos by this creator", nothing. Just one video at a time, allowing me to watch 5 videos a week or something that I care about. I'm going to look around to see if there's a system already built around this. Otherwise I might write some small shell scripts with youtube-dl or something. Though I don't know if there's API access to a user's video list.

Any recommendations?