YouTube for Hobbies, Tutorials, and Old Shows
YouTube is one of the genuinely useful things on a smartphone and also one of the worst-behaved. The video you searched for plays, then the next recommended video is suddenly something you didn't ask for, and forty minutes later you're watching a man unbox a kitchen knife you never wanted. The platform makes more money the longer it keeps you there. The good news is that with a few small adjustments, it can mostly leave you alone.
What follows is how I use YouTube. It's not a sermon about technology. It's a few specific habits that have worked for me and for the regulars in my class.
What YouTube is actually good for
Free tutorials for almost any household task. Replacing a kitchen faucet. Pruning a tomato plant. Setting up a phone (this is half of why I'm in business). Fixing a sticky drawer. Repotting an orchid. Anything you'd have asked your neighbor about twenty years ago, you can now watch someone do.
Music you can't find elsewhere. Old recordings, live concerts from the 1970s, regional folk music, marching band rehearsals. Things that aren't on Spotify but somebody uploaded.
Old TV shows and films, sometimes in full. Whole episodes of Lawrence Welk, the Carol Burnett Show, Bonanza, Westerns from the 1940s. Quality is uneven and copyright is murky, but it's there.
Long-form interviews and lectures. Hour-long conversations with people you'd like to hear from. University lectures recorded and released for free. Far more depth than what you'll find on TV.
Hobby and craft channels. Quilting, woodworking, gardening, watercolor painting, knitting, restoration of old furniture. Some of these channels have built communities of millions of people who do these crafts together by video.
What it's bad for
Letting it decide what you watch next. The recommendation algorithm is excellent at finding the next thing you'll watch and bad at finding the next thing you'll feel good about having watched. Two are not the same.
News. The news content on YouTube is heavily slanted in one direction or another and the recommendations get worse the longer you watch.
Medical information. Every health claim on YouTube needs verification from a real source.
Children's content unattended. Not relevant if you're watching alone, but worth knowing for grandchildren visits.
How to skip the rabbit hole
Three settings make YouTube dramatically less manipulative.
Turn off autoplay. At the top of any YouTube video, there's a small toggle switch labeled Autoplay (Next). Tap it to the off position. Now when a video ends, YouTube stops instead of playing the next thing automatically. You get to decide whether to continue.
Subscribe to channels you actually like. When you find a channel that's consistently good, tap the red Subscribe button. From then on, that channel's new videos appear in your Subscriptions tab. You can watch your favorite channels' new content without ever opening the recommendations on the home screen.
Use the Subscriptions tab as your main entry point. The home screen is the algorithm; the Subscriptions tab is what you chose.
Clear your watch history periodically. Settings → History & privacy → Clear watch history. The recommendation algorithm uses your watch history to predict what to show you next. Clearing it resets the recommendations. I do this every few months when I notice the recommendations getting weird.
What to subscribe to
The right channels for you depend on what you're into. Here's a starting point based on what's worked for my class:
For gardening: GrowVeg, The Impatient Gardener, Garden Answer.
For woodworking: WoodWorkers Guild of America, The English Woodworker, Stumpy Nubs.
For cooking: Joshua Weissman, America's Test Kitchen, Helen Rennie.
For history: The History Guy, Lindybeige, Hochelaga.
For "guy in a workshop fixing something interesting": Adam Savage's Tested, Project Farm, Tom Stanton.
For classical music: Voces8, OneMusic.
For old radio shows and old TV: search the show name plus "full episode." Quality varies. Some are excellent uploads from private archives.
How to actually watch a long video
Three small tricks worth knowing.
Tap once on the right side of the screen to skip ahead ten seconds; tap once on the left side to skip back ten seconds. Double-tap does five seconds. Useful for skipping past the parts you don't need.
Tap the gear icon and choose "Playback speed → 1.25x." Most YouTube videos pad themselves; speeding them up slightly often makes them better. For tutorials specifically, 1.5x is usable.
To cast a video to your TV, tap the small TV-screen icon at the top right of the video. If you have a streaming device (Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast) connected to your TV, you can usually send the video there with one tap. Watching on a big screen is much better than watching on a phone.
YouTube Premium — worth it or not?
$14 a month removes all ads, allows downloading videos for offline viewing, and bundles YouTube Music. For somebody who watches YouTube daily and finds the ads disruptive, it's a small luxury that genuinely improves the experience.
For somebody who watches a few videos a week, the free version is fine. Most ads are now skippable after five seconds.
I subscribed to Premium for a year, then let it lapse. The ads on the free version don't bother me as much as I expected. Your tolerance may differ.
The five-minute exercise
If you'd like to make YouTube genuinely useful: open the app. Search for three specific topics you'd like to learn or watch about. For each one, find a video you genuinely enjoyed, and tap Subscribe on the channel. Then close the app. Don't scroll the recommendations.
The next time you open YouTube, tap Subscriptions at the bottom. The videos you'll see are the ones from the channels you chose. That's the version of YouTube worth using. The home screen is the version designed to keep you there.
A small choice each time, over months, turns this app into something useful. The other version is what most people experience, and it's not very fun.
Written by Robert Sandoval. Last verified 19 June 2026.