Readingfeedfor YouTube™Distraction-free YouTube for Chrome
Read your feed.
Don’t scroll it.
Readingfeed turns YouTube’s wall of thumbnails into a calm list you read top to bottom, and gives it an end, so you reach the bottom and stop.
BeforeYouTube, as it ships
I Tried Living on $1 a Day for 30 Days
Harlow Tests
2.1M views · 3 days ago
How Container Ships Cross an Ocean Without Sinking
Deep Draft
1.3M views · 5 days ago
Shorts
wait for the end…
12M views
day 47 of trying this
8.4M views
nobody expected this
3M views
Every Productivity App Is Lying to You
Marta Voss
3.4M views · 1 day ago
The Real Reason Your Sourdough Won’t Rise
Crumb & Crust
486K views · 1 week ago
Restoring a 1970s Film Camera From a Flea Market
Second Shutter
210K views · 2 weeks ago
Why Nobody Can Agree What Time It Is
Plain Clockwork
902K views · 4 days ago
AfterThe same feed with Readingfeed
ReadingfeedReaderReaderHome
20 videos · no autoplay
I Tried Living on $1 a Day for 30 Days
Harlow Tests·18:42·2.1M views·3 days ago
How Container Ships Cross an Ocean Without Sinking
Deep Draft·24:15·1.3M views·5 days ago
Every Productivity App Is Lying to You
Marta Voss·9:58·3.4M views·1 day ago
The Real Reason Your Sourdough Won’t Rise
Crumb & Crust·12:07·486K views·1 week ago
Restoring a 1970s Film Camera From a Flea Market
Second Shutter·31:40·210K views·2 weeks ago
Why Nobody Can Agree What Time It Is
Plain Clockwork·14:22·902K views·4 days ago
What it changes
- Thumbnails stop shouting
- Every image turns grey. Clickbait works through faces, arrows and saturated colour, and grey takes the force out of it without hiding what the video is.
- The feed becomes a list
- Title, channel, length and age, in a row you read in one pass instead of a grid of cards you look at one by one.
- Shorts are gone
- The shelf and the sidebar entry are removed. Not collapsed: removed.
- The page ends
- No infinite scroll. Twenty videos, a button for twenty more, and then you are finished.
Summaries, before you press play
Open any video and press Summarize. Nothing plays until you ask. A short summary of what the video actually covers appears in seconds, and a longer one is written alongside it, so you can decide whether it is worth twenty minutes before it starts.
Both are written from the video’s own transcript by Chrome’s built-in model, on your machine, and each one says how much transcript it read. Nothing is sent to us (we have no server to send it to), which is also why summaries are unlimited instead of metered by credits.
How Container Ships Cross an Ocean Without Sinking
Deep Draft · 24:15 · 1.3M views
Short summaryTranscript · 19,860 characters
The video explains how a loaded container ship stays upright in open water. Ballast tanks keep its centre of gravity low, the hull turns a roll into a slow self-righting sway, and crews route around storms rather than ride them out.
Show long summary
Worth knowing before you pay. Chrome’s on-device model needs a desktop with roughly 22 GB of free disk and either 4 GB of video memory or 16 GB of RAM. Readingfeed checks your device and tells you plainly if it cannot run them.
Four quiet themes
Pick one in the popup and the reader changes at once. None of them is pure black on pure white, except the one that says so.
Paper
The default. Warm off-white.
Sepia
Warmer, like an e-reader.
Night
Cream on charcoal, for late.
Classic
Plain black and white.
What it costs
The reading view is free and stays free. The only thing behind a key is the part that uses your machine’s language model.
Free
Free, forever
- Grey thumbnails
- The text feed
- Shorts removed
- A page that ends
- All four themes
The whole reading view. No account, no key, no limit.
Trial
30 days
- Everything in Free
- On-device summaries
Starts the first time the reader runs, not when you install. No card.
Pro
$29 a year
- Everything in Free
- On-device summaries, unlimited
- One key for up to 3 computers
Billed once a year. Cancel any time.
Questions
- Does this actually reduce screen time?
- The honest answer: it makes visits shorter, not rarer. Studies of greyscale screens find people spend roughly 20 to 40 minutes less per day, while the number of times they pick the phone up barely moves. Expect calmer, shorter sessions, not a cured habit.
- Does YouTube still work normally?
- Yes. Rows link to the ordinary watch page; playback, history, subscriptions and comments are untouched, and one switch turns everything off. Readingfeed covers the feed; it does not replace YouTube.
- Does it hide YouTube Shorts?
- Yes, on youtube.com in desktop Chrome: the Shorts shelf and the sidebar entry are removed, not collapsed. If Shorts are the only thing you want gone, a single-purpose blocker changes less. Readingfeed is for when you want the whole feed calmer.
- What do you collect?
- Nothing. There is no account and no server. If you never enter a licence key, the extension makes no requests to anyone except YouTube. The privacy policy spells out every storage key and how long it is kept.
- Will it work on my phone?
- No. Chrome on Android does not support extensions, and the on-device model is desktop-only. Windows, macOS and Linux.