Remove "watch-next" sidebar

The sidebar is quite distracting when trying to focus on a single video.

Author
popular-software
Daily installs
0
Total installs
3
Ratings
0 0 0
Version
1.1
Created
2025-05-31
Updated
2025-06-08
Size
631 Bytes
License
MIT
Applies to

There's "theatre mode" which is an improvement in some ways. But sometimes you want to scroll a bit down to read the description, or maybe even read the comments while listening (eg, podcasts or talking head videos).

I find myself increasingly distracted by recommended videos, and they are engineered to catch my attention and click on them. I'll often have a goal in mind when entering youtube as a whole, maybe search up something specific, but I often end up watching several videos that had nothing to do with any of my initial intent. Usually the videos are shallow curiosities, and quite often the thumbnails are (always?) deceptive, and present themselves as highly relevant to my interests while not being very substantial at all, but it's all too late to realize this _after_ having spent 10 - 30 minutes on a video. At this point i feel the website is more of a slot machine for relevant content, sometimes it hits, more often than not it misses, to the point where I would rather miss out on those few hits and gain a significant amount of time back.

If I want to deliberately get recommended videos, there's still the homepage (this script doesn't touch that), but having that be a deliberate choice feels important. How can you prevent something from happening that is outside of your own control? This is a script to try and regain some of that control.