ClearView — Customize YouTube: Hide Distractions & Limit Shorts

What is ClearView?

ClearView is a Chrome extension that lets you rebuild YouTube into a focused tool instead of an attention trap. Hide Shorts, sidebar recommendations, comments, end screens — whatever pulls you off-task. Cap daily Shorts watch time. Lock the settings behind a password so a weak moment at 1 a.m. can't undo your decisions.

If YouTube is a learning tool for you — tutorials, courses, podcasts, lectures — ClearView strips the interface down to the video you came for and keeps the rest out of reach.

The problem

YouTube is a productivity sink by default. Shorts autoplay, recommendations derail, comments distract, and the end-of-video carousel throws six more videos at you the second the one you wanted ends. Native settings barely help — you can pause watch history, but you can't hide Shorts, you can't time-box them, and you can't stop yourself from turning "focused mode" off mid-session.

The result: a tool that should compress learning time ends up stretching it. Research turns into a 90-minute rabbit hole. A 10-minute tutorial becomes an afternoon.

What it does

• Hide Shorts (homepage, sidebar, in-feed, dedicated tab)
• Hide sidebar recommendations, comments, end screens, chat
• Daily Shorts time limit — auto-blocks after N minutes
• Playback speed control with custom presets (1.75x, 2.25x, 3x)
• Password-lock every setting so future-you can't disable it impulsively
• Per-profile config — strict mode for weekdays, relaxed for weekends

How it works

ClearView runs as a content script inside the YouTube tab. On every page load it reads your config, then applies CSS rules and small DOM mutations to hide the elements you've disabled. The Shorts limiter uses a local timer tied to the current date; once the daily budget is hit, the Shorts surface is swapped for a quiet placeholder until midnight.

The password lock is stored as a SHA-256 hash inside chrome.storage.local. You set it once, and every time the settings page is opened it asks for the password before unlocking. There's no reset button — no "I forgot my password" escape hatch — by design. That's the whole point of self-binding.

Everything runs on-device. No accounts, no analytics, no external requests.

Who it's for

• Students using YouTube as their primary learning platform
• Knowledge workers who open YouTube for one thing and leave an hour later
• Parents who want a distraction-free YouTube for kids without switching to YouTube Kids
• Anyone who's tried "YouTube without recommendations" browser tricks and found they don't stick

Real scenarios

Studying for an exam. You're prepping for a cert exam, watching a playlist of lectures. You lock ClearView with Shorts disabled, comments hidden, sidebar empty, and a 15-minute daily Shorts cap. For the next two weeks, YouTube behaves like a video-only reader. No tangents.

Recording from tutorials. You follow video tutorials and take notes in parallel. End screens used to yank you into the next recommendation the moment the video ended. With ClearView, the player just stops. You finish your note, then decide what's next.

Family laptop. One shared Mac, kids use YouTube for school projects. You set a strict profile, password-lock it, and hand over the laptop without worrying about the recommendation feed steering them into a two-hour Shorts binge.

Why I built it

Every productivity extension for YouTube I tried had the same flaw: it assumed you'd always want the extension on. Which means the switch that enables focus is also the switch that disables it, right there in the toolbar, one click away. That's not a constraint. That's theater.

The password-lock on settings is the detail that matters. You configure it once when you're thinking clearly, lock it, and future-you can't undo it at 1 a.m. Self-binding as a feature. Like website blockers that require a 60-second timer to disable, except stricter: if you forget the password, you reinstall the extension, which takes a conscious act of capitulation.

Everything else in ClearView — the speed presets, the element toggles — is just UI polish on top of that one idea.

Alternatives and how it compares

• DF Tube / Distraction-Free YouTube: similar element-hiding, but no password lock and no Shorts time budget. Easy to disable in a weak moment.
• Unhook: polished, closer to ClearView's feature set, but freemium — the time-limiting features are paywalled.
• Site-wide blockers (Cold Turkey, LeechBlock): nuclear option. They block all of YouTube, which is useless if you use it for learning.

ClearView sits between these: surgical element control + time budgets + hard lock, free, no account.

FAQ

Does ClearView work on YouTube mobile or the TV app? No. It's a Chrome extension, so it runs only on desktop Chrome (and Chromium-based browsers like Brave, Edge, Arc). For iOS/Android, YouTube's native "Take a break" reminders are the closest substitute.

What if I forget the password? There's no recovery flow. Uninstall the extension and reinstall to reset — which is a deliberate friction floor, not an oversight. The whole value is that future-you can't wave the lock away in thirty seconds.

Does it slow down YouTube? No measurable impact. The content script is small and runs once per page navigation. CSS rules do the heavy lifting, which the browser handles natively.

Does it track what I watch? No. Zero analytics, zero network requests. Everything is chrome.storage.local.

Try ClearView

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ClearView is shipped under DRISH LABS — see the full catalog for every other app.