I don't click on related videos, and have a bookmark straight to my subscriptions, but even still I get caught on YouTube for too long. My subscriptions produce almost daily content, and whilst I find it valuable, it's also just far too much content to consume in a day and still be productive, so I can get stuck on it.
So I blocked it entirely. It's just another casualty in my continued attempt to rid myself of feed content, and things that help me procrastinate in ways I no longer consider a good use of my time.
(HN is on a short leash too, but it's one of the few online communities I stick around in, and it's not mindless so I tend not to procrastinate on it for too long. I get tired of reading pretty quickly when procrastinating, whereas I can absorb YouTube mindlessly for hours)
Consider replacing your Youtube subscriptions + watching in the browser with RSS feeds of the channels + youtube-dl. [1]
My setup for a few years has been to have a "virtual desktop" for "media" that has the video downloads directory, RSS reader, and a terminal running a script. The script is essentially:
while read -r url; do
youtube-dl --... "$url"
done
The RSS reader is configured with feeds of the channels I "subscribe" to, and configured to only show the titles of the articles, not the content. (I use newsboat with a custom article list to aggregate all articles from all feeds.)
Every so often during the day, I switch to that virtual desktop, check if the RSS reader has new unread articles, copy-paste each URL from the reader to the terminal, delete the articles from the reader list, and then leave the terminal downloading the videos in sequence.
I have DSL but even then videos download faster than I can watch them (which is something youtube.com in the browser is unable to do, even though I configured youtube-dl to download the highest quality <= my monitor size). So I just make sure to queue the videos from the channels that make smaller videos first (ie live action stuff rather than video games), so I can start watching while the rest are downloading in the background.
[1]: Of course you can remain subscribed to the channels on youtube.com if you wish to contribute to their subscriptions count. I assume youtube-dl'ing a video counts towards its views count too.
I attempted going down the route of blocking completely but I always come back after missing at least one too good video, or if a song isn't being streamed on Spotify. I do agree that the majority of Youtube isn't of good use for anyone.
So I blocked it entirely. It's just another casualty in my continued attempt to rid myself of feed content, and things that help me procrastinate in ways I no longer consider a good use of my time.
(HN is on a short leash too, but it's one of the few online communities I stick around in, and it's not mindless so I tend not to procrastinate on it for too long. I get tired of reading pretty quickly when procrastinating, whereas I can absorb YouTube mindlessly for hours)