YouTube without the algorithm: how to follow channels chronologically

of YouTube watch time comes from recommendations (YouTube, 2018)

~70%

of videos people regretted watching were recommended (Mozilla, 2021)

71%

How much the algorithm steers

In 2018, YouTube's then chief product officer Neal Mohan said around 70 percent of watch time on YouTube comes from recommendations, with the goal of something like a personalised, synthetic channel for every viewer. There's no newer official figure, but the direction has only intensified: the home feed, autoplay and Shorts are more personalised than ever.

Recommendations aren't bad as such – sometimes that's how you find great channels. The problem is that they're optimised for as much watch time as possible, not for good time. In 2021 the Mozilla Foundation asked more than 37,000 volunteers which videos they regretted watching. 71 percent of those had been recommended by YouTube, and recommended videos were 40 percent more likely to be regretted than ones people searched for.

What the EU says

Under the Digital Services Act (DSA), very large platforms like YouTube must offer EU users at least one recommendation option that is not based on profiling (Art. 38 DSA). In March 2026 the digital rights network EDRi filed a complaint alleging that YouTube's option is hard to find. Nothing has been decided yet – but the debate shows that “without the algorithm” has become a political topic too.

5 ways to use YouTube without the recommendation spiral

1. Open the Subscriptions feed instead of Home

Under “Subscriptions”, YouTube lists videos from the channels you subscribe to in chronological order. It's the easiest step. The catch: the app still opens on the personalised home feed, and Shorts sneak in.

2. Pause your watch history

Since 2023, if you turn off watch history and have no significant history, the home feed stops showing recommendations and only shows search and subscriptions. The downside: handy features like “continue watching” suffer too.

3. Turn off autoplay

The little switch in the player decides whether the next video starts on its own. Off is off – that alone prevents a lot of “just one more” evenings.

4. Follow channels via RSS

Little known: every YouTube channel has a public RSS feed at youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=…, so you can follow channels in any feed reader. It's very clean, but fiddly, and videos end up separate from your podcasts and music.

5. Use an app with its own inbox

That's the approach we took with zentr: you follow the channels you care about, and new videos land in the same inbox as new podcast episodes, audio dramas and albums – newest at the top. No home feed, no suggestions, Shorts hidden by default.

Why zentr deliberately has no algorithm

When we planned zentr, the obvious question was whether to add recommendations. We decided against it, for three reasons.

• You know best what you want. Your favourites are already a very good selection. An algorithm would mostly push other things in between.
• Complete, not curated. With an algorithmically ranked feed you never know what's missing. In the inbox you see everything your channels published – and at some point you're done.
• No profile. Recommendations need a profile of your behaviour. zentr has no usage analytics and keeps your library on your device and in your iCloud.

Under the hood zentr uses YouTube's official interfaces and channel feeds. Playback goes through YouTube itself: you choose whether a video opens in the YouTube app or plays in YouTube's official player right inside zentr. So zentr doesn't replace YouTube – it makes sure you go in with intent and come back out again.

How scattered podcasts have become between Apple, Spotify and YouTube is covered in Podcasts are everywhere: how to hear and watch them in one place again.