We have a special form of capitulation that occurs at some point between the credits of one video and the opening shot of the next. You sat down to watch a ten-minute explainer. But one hundred-and-forty minutes later you have fallen again down three algorithmic shortcuts and you are watching a stranger give a critique of a piece of electronic gear you will never purchase. This is not the failure of the free will. It is the intention of design. Removing the friction of choice from the YouTube autoplay feature is not a difficult task, but a gesture of calling the page back to your original intent.
The Architecture of Drift
Autoplay is not an innocent convenience. It is a lure-determined default setting designed to create as much watching time as possible, because of this generating the greatest ad revenue. The design takes advantage of a well-know paradox of the human mind: decision fatigue. When the clip is finished, your brain will be most susceptible to go with the easier option. The countdown bar-the tiny clock of time counting you down while the next program loads-is actually cunningly engineered to beat you to the choice. Knowing this is a first step to breaking it, since it takes far less than 30 seconds to counteract.
Turning It Off on Desktop
The control is right there on your browser, completely in plain view, even though the average person never notices it. Find the toggle switch that, in most players, sits in the player’s controls bar at the top right corner of the video (or mini-player). The control in question is called “Autoplay” and resembles an on/off switch.
To disable it:
- Open up any YouTube video in your browser.
- Find the Autoplay switch (it appears near the top right corner of the video player, or in the up next tab in the right-hand sidebar)
- Click once. The switch will change from blue to gray.
- This is fairly sticky down to the session level in your browser. Since cookies don’t get saved from session to session, you’ll often find this changes when you move from one video to another.
Turning It Off on Mobile
The mobile experience adds another layer of complication: autoplay preferences on the YouTube app can be different from one’s desktop experiences and can differ for Wi-Fi versus mobile connections. On the mobile app, users are able to set their autoplay preferences differently for each connection type; a feature that confuses many users when they attempt to “reset” their setting.
To adjust it on iOS or Android:
Open the YouTube application and select your profile symbol located on the top-right corner.
Choose Settings, then tap Autoplay.
Usually, there are one switch for “Wi-Fi” and one for “Mobile data”. switch them both off if you want your autoplay to vanish completely.
You could also find the switch right on the videoplayer itself- if you tap the video screen while a video is playing, the autoplay switch pops up in the top right corner of the player overlay and can be activated or de-activated right there at any time.
The Smart TV and Living Room Problem
This process is most irritating on smart TVs and streaming devices, as autoplay multiplies the already passiveness of the living room space. On most TV apps, the option to turn this setting off is found within Settings, then Autoplay, which is located on the YouTube app’s home page rather than within the video itself. Older TV models or streaming sticks may not even have a persistent setting to keep autoplay off. Because of this the best workaround is to manually click pause or back to home after each video, or to navigate verbally to the video selections with the remote control.
Beyond the Toggle: Structural Alternatives
While disabling autoplay resolves the current problem, compulsive over-consumption is built upon structural issues that are as worthy of re-visiting as the practice of auto-play itself:
Be deliberate in your use of “Watch Later” queue. Rather than default to YouTube’s recommended viewing, maintain a pre-selected queue, returning a sense of agency to viewing decisions.
Turn off autoplay of embedded videos on sites, where submitters can turn on autoplays at their will even with your account turned off (completely another layer, generally administered by extension of your browser or built-in permission).
Think of YouTube’s “Take a break” feature, accessed via Settings on the site and “Notifications” in the app, which notifies users after a certain period.
Why This Small Setting Matters
You may think, there’s just not enough here that’s interesting enough to justify an 800-word post, that autoplay is just a minor issue on the grand scale of UI issues. But the real point is this: options aren’t neutral. Defaults aren’t neutral. Defaults tell us for whose benefit really a system was built. Autoplay is better at furthering the platform’s objectives than it is at furthering the user’s expressed intent. Turning it off is a tiny act, but an interesting one. When we take the time to turn the system off, we take the time to remind ourselves we could have, should have, made a different choice.
The next time you see a video close and that countdown clock pop up you will be able to pinpoint exactly where to look and exactly why it was even there.
