CleanWatch

Reduce distractions, Shorts, and algorithmic suggestions on YouTube

CleanWatch is for people who use YouTube on purpose and want it to stop pulling them back in. It removes the parts of the site built to keep you scrolling and leaves the parts you came for. What it removes or filters • Shorts: the shelves, the sidebar entry, the links. The Shorts player can redirect to the normal video player. • Recommendations: related videos, homepage suggestions, end-screen cards, autoplay, sponsored content, and the Playables mini-game shelf. • Feed noise: hide videos below a view-count threshold, videos you have already watched past a chosen percentage, live and upcoming streams, and members-only content, with an allowlist for channels you want to keep. • Interface clutter: comments, live chat, notification badges, thumbnail previews, sidebar links, and promotional buttons such as Thanks, Clip, and Join. • Keywords and channels: block by title keyword or by channel name, handle, or URL. Add a keyword straight from a YouTube page with the right-click menu. • Search: a duration range filter for results, which YouTube's own filter cannot do. Watching • Playback preferences: theater mode, preferred quality, preferred audio language, auto fullscreen on play, exit fullscreen when the video ends. • SponsorBlock: skip or mute sponsor segments, intros, outros, and other community-marked sections. Off by default. • Auto-like after a watched-percentage threshold you set, with an in-player confirmation. • Faster starts: a video server that stops responding is dropped immediately so the player fails over to its backup instead of waiting out YouTube's own timeout. Focus • Daily watch-time limit with a snooze. • Break reminders. • Scheduled active hours, so the extension only works when you want it to. Control • A popup with your chosen quick toggles. • A full Settings page with search. • A Dashboard with watch-time history, top channels, and your blocklists. • A Help page and a what's-new changelog inside the extension. • English, Dutch, German, and French. YouTube changes its markup often. CleanWatch checks its own filters in the background and tells you in the popup when one has stopped matching, with a report you can copy into a bug report. Privacy Everything runs in your browser. Settings, watch time, blocklists, and stats stay in local storage. No telemetry, no analytics, no account, and no requests to outside servers during normal browsing. SponsorBlock only contacts its API when you turn it on. Sync across devices is optional and off by default. When enabled, your data is encrypted on your device before it is sent, using a key derived from your sync code. The server stores ciphertext it cannot read. It is open source and you can host it yourself. CleanWatch is open source and independently developed. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google.