Just been watching this YouTube video about using YouTube in a ‘healthy’ way. The main point was to get away from the algorithm by staying away from the front page for the most part, and instead using your Subscriptions page to browse and choose something to watch. And to be happy to subscribe and unsubscribe freely.
I really like the idea, and actually I’m going to start trying it out. I do something a bit different though which I’m going to keep doing because I think it will still work alright - instead of diving straight into something that looks interesting, you save it to your Watch Later playlist (you can do this while you’re idly looking to kill 5 minutes on your phone). Then when you’re ready to actually watch something, you just watch the playlist.
I suppose both ways let you curate your videos before you watch them. Maybe doing both will be too much.
I like doing something similar with RSS feeds though. Like, everything gets chucked into Reeder, and I’ll sift through that every now and then, and send the interesting-looking articles to Instapaper. Then I actually read them there.