Not sure how you've been using YouTube but ime most of the harm with social media comes from the pressure to engage, i.e. having a constant stream of personalized content to consume (like channel subscriptions). For a while now I've been using alternative frontends -invidious instances and newpipe on mobile (android, but there's something for iOS as well if I'm not mistaken) - without an account, so YouTube is no longer a time sink for me; whenever I visit it have a specific goal in mind and don't get sucked into the void.

Blocking with hostfiles in a nice solution. Another option with Youtube is to (A) sign out and (B) turn off signed out history - you then will get really poor quality/generic suggestions on the homepage. This way you are forced to search for content or channels that I want to watch rather than clicking on something presented to me.

I think my issue is personal than technical. So it's not for everyone. I mean I can try all the soft solutions, but I see an embedded video somewhere (say in a channel in this slack) and I see it's interesting, I waste an hour 😄 Only solution for me is to block everything everywhere. Kind of ironic really being in IT and all that.

The part of the brain that goes "oh, a shiny new thing, I must forget whatever I was doing before and check it out now!" isn't good at prioritizing 🙂 I put them all in my backlog. I have hundreds of videos/books/stuff on there but at least I feel I'm somewhat in control 🙂

I'm so out of the loop that I thought you were referring to the MQ