Essentialist

Essentialist — YouTube, minus the noise. Rewrites YouTube's layout to be less distracting and look better. More sites coming soon.

YouTube buries the video under Shorts shelves, autoplay previews, promo cards, and sidebars fighting for your attention. Essentialist strips that back and rebuilds the layout around the thing you came for. Every change is a toggle. Turn a feature on, turn it off, nothing is forced on you. What you can turn off: - Shorts shelf and Playables shelf on the home feed - Hover-preview autoplay on thumbnails - Category filter chips, channel avatars on video cards - Sidebar clutter: Explore, More from YouTube, subscribed channels list, report history - The "Experiencing interruptions?" popup - Dead grid slots left behind by filtered videos and failed ad slots What you can turn on: - Grayscale thumbnails that go color on hover, so you stop browsing by color and clickbait - A collapsed icon-only sidebar, or a sidebar that fades until you scroll to it - A minimum length filter for the home feed, so short-form clips under a length you choose stop showing up next to real videos Every default here is a layout change, not a content change, with one exception: the minimum length filter. That one ships off, since deciding what counts as "too short" is your call, not ours. Essentialist runs only on youtube.com. It reads no data, sends nothing anywhere, and has no analytics. See the privacy policy for the full picture. More sites are planned: Instagram, X, Reddit, Twitch, LinkedIn. Each will ship with the same per-feature toggles once ready.