De-Googling YouTube
I decided I’d like to delete all my YouTube watch history, playlists and subscriptions. This was for a few reasons:
- I don’t like Google to know (and whoever they sell my information to).
- I am worried about things disappearing: I have a lot of saved playlists and none of it is permanent music that I own.
- I am enjoying trying things in plaintext
- When I go to YouTube, it will be to intentionally watch something. After deleting the above, all you get is a an empty screen! No shiny thumbnails screaming at me to watch them!
But I don’t actually want to lose my playlists. So I did the following:
- Go to: export to csv to grab a csv file of a playlist (note this also can check for deleted videos!), save it somewhere for posterity.
- Process a copy so the format is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch_videos?video_ids=1,2,3...50where the numbers are the actual video IDs.1 - Voila! You can have a link to your YouTube playlist in plaintext, with no need to be logged in.
IMPORTANT NOTE YouTube only allows 50 videos per playlist saved this way. You have been warned!
I’ve finished the main ones, apart from two which will need to be broken down into 16+ sub-playlists (i.e. tracks 1–50, 51–100, etc.). I am also slowly going through my watch-later list. It’s not as smooth as just creating a user playlist, but I kinda like the friction: and a sense of ownership. Even if YouTube pulls the plug, I still have a track list in csv. Another idea I have is to put it all into a spreadsheet and let some Excel wizardry concatenate my playlists for me (exporting to csv occasionally for the future though).
This is really easy to do in Excel or VSC for example.↩