How to customize YouTube: control what you see

Most guides about customizing YouTube are for creators changing their channel page. This one is for viewers who want a different home feed: fewer Shorts, a quieter page, or no more videos about a subject they're tired of.

Updated 4 November 2026 · About 9 minutes

We make JevTube, one of the extensions below. Every other extension is described from its own Chrome Web Store listing as it read on 4 November 2026, user counts included.

15 ways to customize YouTube, compared

Users and prices from each Chrome Web Store listing on 4 November 2026. ✓ means the listing says it can; — means it doesn't say so.

1. Start with YouTube's own settings

YouTube already gives you a few controls. They're free, they work on every device you're signed in on, and they're worth a minute before you install anything.

Not interested

On a computer, click the three-dot More menu next to a video's title, then Not interested. Click Tell us why to say whether you've already watched it or don't like it. YouTube uses this to adjust what it recommends next. (YouTube Help)

Don't recommend channel

In the same menu, on Home or in the Up next list, choose Don't recommend channel. That channel stops being suggested on those pages. It still appears when you search for it.

Pause or clear your watch history

Recommendations come from what you watch. Pausing history means new views don't count; clearing it removes what's there, and you can set history to delete itself after 3, 18 or 36 months. A clean history is the closest thing YouTube has to a reset button. (YouTube Help)

Restricted Mode

Restricted Mode screens out videos marked as potentially mature, using their titles, descriptions and age restrictions. It's set per browser, and it also hides comments on every video. It's a safety setting, not a way to choose subjects. (YouTube Help)

Where these stop. Every one of them works after the fact, one video or one channel at a time. There's no setting where you can type "spoilers" or "crypto" and have YouTube leave that subject out. For that, and for changing the page itself, you need an extension.

2. Hide or limit Shorts

In the YouTube app on your phone, there are two options. On the Home feed, tap More above the Shorts grid and choose Show fewer Shorts. Under You › Settings › Time management › Shorts feed limit, you can set a daily limit for the Shorts feed, including zero. When you reach it you get a reminder, which you can dismiss. (YouTube Help)

On a computer there's no switch at all, so this is where most people first reach for an extension:

• Remove YouTube Shorts (300,000 users) does only this: Shorts disappear from search results and the rest of YouTube.
• Unhook, BlockTube and Tweaks for YouTube hide Shorts as one option among many (more on them below).
• JevTube judges each Short on the home feed against your topics like any other video, and has one switch to blur or hide every Short (where it works).

3. Tidy the page: home feed, sidebar, comments

If the problem is the recommendations themselves, the simplest fix is to stop showing them. These extensions turn whole parts of the page off.

• Unhook (1,000,000 users, rated 4.9) has toggles for the homepage feed, the video sidebar, related videos, Explore and Trending, comments and Shorts. Turn the home feed off and YouTube becomes a search box.
• DF Tube New (20,000 users) turns off autoplay, hides recommendations and removes the homepage grid by default. The original DF Tube listing is no longer on the Chrome Web Store.

The trade-off is that it's all or nothing. A hidden home feed hides the videos you'd have liked along with the ones you didn't.

4. Change how the player works

A second group leaves your feed alone and changes how videos play. They're often installed alongside one of the others.

• Enhancer for YouTube (1,000,000 users): playback speed, a volume booster, dozens of themes, cinema mode, and options to hide end screens, cards and comments on the watch page.
• Improve YouTube! (400,000 users, open source): more than 170 settings for the player and layout, plus hiding videos, channels, tags and categories.
• Tweaks for YouTube (60,000 users): over 100 tweaks, including hiding watched videos, Shorts, live and mixes, and a Zen mode that dims everything but the player.
• SponsorBlock (2,000,000 users) skips sponsor reads, intros and reminders inside a video, using timestamps other users submit.
• Return YouTube Dislike (5,000,000 users) shows dislike counts again, estimated from archived data and its own users.

5. Hide videos by keyword or channel

To keep the feed but lose certain videos, the classic approach is a list of words and channels. A video whose title contains one of them is hidden.

• BlockTube (100,000 users): video titles and channel names, with regular expressions, plus Shorts, watched videos and length. Advanced users can write their own JavaScript rule.
• YTBlock (70,000 users): titles, tags, descriptions, length, views and more. Several of those need you to create and paste in your own Google API key.
• PocketTube (300,000 users) sorts your subscriptions into groups and can narrow the subscriptions page by topic. It doesn't touch the home feed.

Word lists are exact. That's their strength and their limit. Say you're tired of political arguments. You add election, senate and debate, and the next card reads "Both leaders walk out of budget talks". It gets through, because none of your words is in it. Meanwhile debate hides a video about the great pizza debate. For a subject that comes in a hundred wordings, the list never ends.

6. Hide videos by topic, in your own words

The newest kind of extension reads each video and asks whether it's about something, instead of whether it contains a word. You describe the subject the way you'd describe it to a friend.

JevTube

Type a topic in the JevTube popup: one word like "crypto", a label like "Movie spoilers", or a whole sentence like "politicians arguing on TV". JevTube reads each video's title, channel and description and judges it against everything you typed, a screen of videos at a time in one to two seconds. Matching videos blur in place on the home feed and in the Up next list, and on search results and the Subscriptions feed if you turn them on.

Two things set it apart from a word list. It tells you why: hover a blurred video and it names the topic that caught it, with a Show button that brings that one video back. And you can choose blur, which keeps the layout still, or hide, which removes the video and closes the gap. It's free for up to 2,000 videos a day per install, with no account. To judge a video it sends the title, channel and a few other card details to its server; the privacy policy lists every field.

Other extensions that judge by meaning

A few small extensions do something similar. Each has fewer than 400 users, and all three offer in-app purchases.

• Siftube has exact, word-form and topic matching. Topic matching uses Chrome's on-device AI when your browser has it and falls back to word forms when it doesn't. It adds profiles (Study, Work) and a mode that shows only matching videos.
• Feed Diet takes one rule in your own words, with exceptions ("no politics, except the history of old elections"), and works on X as well as YouTube.
• Distraction Free YouTube (NeuroFilterAI) scores each video against focus topics on your device and adds more than 25 page controls, like hiding the feed and comments.

The main difference is where the judging happens. On-device tools keep everything in your browser but depend on what your computer and Chrome version support. JevTube judges on a server, so it works the same on any computer, at the cost of sending video details off your machine.

7. Which one to pick

• You'd rather not see recommendations at all. Unhook, with the home feed turned off.
• Only Shorts bother you. The Shorts feed limit in the app, and Remove YouTube Shorts on a computer.
• You want a better player. Enhancer for YouTube or Improve YouTube!, plus SponsorBlock for sponsor reads.
• A few channels or exact phrases. BlockTube, or YouTube's own Don't recommend channel.
• A subject that comes in many wordings, like spoilers for a show you haven't finished, crypto price talk or a celebrity's breakup. That's what JevTube is for: type it once in plain words.

These don't exclude each other. A player extension and a topic extension change different things, and many people run one of each.

8. Questions