Dumbify - Customizable text-based YouTube, no thumbnails or distractions

Turn YouTube into a clean reading list: no autoplay, no recommended videos, no clutter. Custom fonts, sizes, dark mode, focus mode.

📺 Dumbify turns YouTube into a plain, readable list of text. No thumbnails, no autoplay, no recommendation rabbit holes — just titles, channels, and durations you can actually scan. It is not a separate site. Dumbify sits on top of youtube.com, so you stay signed in and your subscriptions, history, watch later, and comments all keep working exactly as before. You just stop getting yelled at by the interface. 😌 🤔 WHY YouTube's interface is built to maximize watch time, not to help you find or finish a video. Thumbnails are engineered to grab attention. Autoplay picks what you watch next. The sidebar exists to pull you sideways into something else. Dumbify strips that back to what a feed actually is: a list you scan and choose from. ✨ WHAT YOU GET 📄 Text-first feed — titles, channel, views, and upload date across home, search, channel pages, history, subscriptions, and watch later. No thumbnails anywhere. 🎬 Distraction-free watch page — the video, its description, and comments. No autoplay, no end-screen suggestions, no "up next" sidebar. 🎯 Focus mode — press F for a full-screen player with no interface at all. 💬 Real interactions, not a read-only mirror — subscribe and unsubscribe, like comments, reply, and read replies. 🔤 Typography controls — 8 font sizes, 8 font families across serif, sans, and mono, light and dark themes, and a custom background. ⌨️ Keyboard-driven — Cmd/Ctrl+K to search, F for focus mode. ♾️ Infinite scroll — loads more of the real feed as you go. ⚙️ HOW IT WORKS Dumbify does not scrape the rendered page and does not route anything through a server. It reads the same underlying data YouTube itself renders from, and calls the same API YouTube's own frontend uses for pagination, subscribing, and posting comments. Everything you do goes straight to YouTube with your existing session. There is no middleman account and no separate write path. 🔒 PRIVACY Dumbify collects nothing. There is no server, no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, and no tracking of any kind. Your display preferences are saved locally in your own browser and are never transmitted anywhere. Requests go only to youtube.com. Permissions, and why each is needed: • storage — saves your font and theme preferences on your device • scripting — reads YouTube's own page data in order to render the simplified view • access to youtube.com — Dumbify runs only on YouTube and cannot see any other site 📋 Full privacy policy: https://edenreb.github.io/dumbify/PRIVACY 💻 OPEN SOURCE Dumbify is free and open source under GPL-3.0, with no runtime dependencies and no remote code. Read every line, or build it yourself: https://github.com/edenreb/dumbify Made with ❤️ by Eden Rebello and Gabriel Tan