I open youtube.com to grab one specific video, and forty minutes later I'm three recommendations deep into something I never went there for. The homepage feed is one of the platform's most effective attention traps, and it's designed to keep you watching.
The obvious fixes all overreach. Block the whole domain and you lose search, video pages, subscriptions, and watch history along with the feed. Install a heavyweight "site blocker" and you hand it broad permissions, a background worker on every tab, and usage tracking to justify a subscription. I wanted the opposite: remove only the home feed, leave the rest of YouTube fully working, and ask for the least a user has to trust. That turned into a Manifest V3 extension that's about 30 lines of vanilla JS — no build step, no dependencies, no background service worker. Here's how it works and the few decisions that actually mattered.
Why Not an Existing Extension?
Plenty of tools touch this problem, and for many people one of them is the right answer. Unhook and DF Tube hide YouTube UI elements — the feed included — behind a rich options panel. uBlock Origin can do the same with a single cosmetic filter rule. LeechBlock and Redirector are general-purpose site blockers and URL rewriters you can configure to cover this case.
