Switch YPM in “Productivity Mode” to blur all the thumbnails on YouTube so that the catchy and clickbaity thumbnails don’t grab your attention. So now if you get redirected to YouTube while working/studying, the recommended thumbnails won’t catch your eyes.

Hello PH Community :) It's a delightful moment for us to share our product with you all. After using it ourselves and a few friends who helped us with their feedback, we are excited and hopeful that you will find our product valuable. This product is inspired from Indistractable by Nir Eyal. According to the book, one source of distraction are the external triggers that lead us to distracting activities and thus leave less time for things that we actually intend to do. YouTube is one such place on the internet where we often wander and get lost from the focus track that we plan to be on. No doubt YouTube is a great place to learn but it does have a lot of distracting content too. Taking cue from the book, we created YouTube Productivity Mode, with an objective to reduce the triggers. Switch YPM in “Productivity Mode” to blur all the thumbnails on YouTube so that the catchy and clickbaity thumbnails don’t grab your attention. So now if you get redirected to YouTube while working/studying, the recommended thumbnails won’t catch your eyes and you will hopefully switch back to your task again without losing your focus. By default, YPM works on “Leisure Mode”, only blocking ads without blurring the thumbnails. It means browse YouTube™ the way it is. Fun & Entertaining! We would love to hear about our product from you all. Have a good day :) EDIT: We are making our project open-source. Play around and add something cool and valuable to it. https://github.com/webtaculars-c...

Wonderful! I can't tell you how happy this makes me! I'm so glad my book, Indistractable, inspired you to create this! What a great way to "hack back" distractions. Congrats to @siddharth_nahar1 and the entire team!

Thanks @nireyal for your words of appreciation. It means so much to us to see that our creation is delivering value to the community. It's sheer JOY OF CREATION for us and we are dancing here.. :D We have made our piece of software open-source and we are hopeful that fellow hackers would make more improvements to this. Thanks again. Have a good day :)

hi! congrats on the launch. Great product! I would love to blur the titles of the videos too. Is that possible?

Thanks @matias_tucci for your kind words.. What exactly do you plan to achieve by blurring the titles? I would like to understand this a little more and we can then happily spend more time and hack some solution out for it.

@siddharth_nahar1 thanks for answering. In my case most of the time I click on a video is because of the title, not the thumbnail. So if I'm watching a video but I read an interesting title in the suggestions panel I want to instantly click it.

@matias_tucci I understand your point. When we built this out and took early feedback, we noticed that majority of the viewers take action bcz of the thumbnail. It also felt intuitive to us as well. Also, no matter what, YouTube actually is a place of good resource for learning and that's the reason we shy'd away from blocking YouTube completely and tried only to reduce the visual stimuli. I take your feedback and will form an opinion over it. Change or not, I'll keep you in loop :+1

YouTube Productivity Mode

Reduce distractions on YouTube and gain back your focus

Do you use YouTube Productivity Mode?

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