YouTube Rolls Out New Tools To Help You Stop Watching

At its Google I/O conference this week, YouTube announced a series of new controls that will allow users to set limits on their viewing, and then receive reminders telling them to "take a break." "The feature is rolling out now in the latest version of YouTube's app, along with others that limit YouTube's ability to send notifications, and soon, one that gives users an overview of their binge behavior so they can make better-informed decisions about their viewing habits," reports TechCrunch. From the report: With "Take a Break," available from YouTube's mobile app Settings screen, users can set a reminder to appear every 15, 30, 60, 90 or 180 minutes, at which point the video will pause. You can then choose to dismiss the reminder and keep watching, or close the app.

Also new is a feature that lets you disable notification sounds during a specified time period each day -- say, for example, from bedtime until the next morning. When users turn on the setting to disable notifications, it will, by default, disable them from 10 PM to 8 AM local time, but this can be changed. Combined with this is an option to get a scheduled digest of notifications as an alternative. And YouTube is preparing to roll out a "time watched profile" that will appear in the Account menu and display your daily average watch time, and how long you've watched YouTube videos today, yesterday and over the past week, along with a set of tools to help you manage your viewing habits.

Re:

[Zontar The Mindless]

You must be new around here [wikipedia.org].

No elp Needed

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Most YouTube content is all the reminder I need stop watching.

Re:

[rtb61]

Youtube, you don't care what's on, so you forget, leave it running and go do something else. A timer will probably save Google a lot of money.

Or they could just leave autoplay turned off...

[Anonymous Coward]

...when we turn it off. Seriously, the best way of slowing down a binge watch aside from an internet outage is to stop it from auto-playing.

Besides, it gets old to have to re-re-re-re-re-turn it off again-again-again.

(yes, there are extensions for this, and I do use them)

Re:

[sexconker]

There's nothing wrong with an <embed> tag. A web browser should be for navigating and displaying content. Decoding video is a complex task and it makes no sense for a browser to do it. Let the browser call on the OS or some plugin to do it. Plugins are dangerous? They're less dangerous than having that code baked into the browser. At least I can choose to remove a plugin and never have that code resident on my system. With a modern browser I get, at BEST, a flag to tell it not to render embedde

admission?

[e432776]

Interesting.. does this constitute a tacit admission that the product (YouTube videos) might possibly be harmful in large amounts? Is this like a product warning on cigarettes?

Nonsense

[ruir]

So they just bring out a politically correct tool to pretend they do something about controls...
How about new tools to filter out or in stuff by categories? For instance, I only use my private youtube for IT related things...or then give me different views I can select at will, like the IT view and the music view.
Youtube without logins does not interest anybody, only trivia popular trash.
Also listening randomly to music is virtually impossible any song marathon will converge itself to trash like Megha

Youtube Red

[VonSkippy]

"Help you stop watching"? I thought that was what the incessant yammering about YouTube Red was for. Google is fucking crazy if they think people will pay $10/month for their useless content

Old Trick

[braindrainbahrain]

Here's an old trick: Make your self a rule that you can't watch a video longer than half as much as the one you just watched.