The Takeaway

You click on shortcuts and stories, but you only finish the things that respect your time — and the gap between the two is costing you about a workday a month.

Your Profile

The Selective Deep-Diver

71%

Avg finished

of each video the feed served

You don't watch YouTube — you study it. When something catches your eye you go all the way in: full videos, follow-up rabbit holes, the comment section. But you're ruthless about what earns that attention. Most things get 40 seconds and a back-button. The algorithm keeps showing you more of what you half-watched; you keep proving it wrong.

Ten cards. Tap through, then share it.

Selective

Viewing Style

39h

Time Watched

71%

Avg Completion

Interest Clusters

This is your real home base. High completion, long sessions, and you regularly rewatch segments — a pattern that only shows up for content you're actively learning from, not passively consuming.
You finish almost everything here, often in one sitting. These cluster heavily on weekends — the clearest sign of intentional, leisure-mode watching in your history.
Mixed signals: strong starts, middling completion. You're drawn in by thumbnails and titles but frequently bail when the video turns into a sales pitch or padded explainer. You want the insight, not the 20-minute windup.
Short bursts — you play something, decide within a minute whether it's worth staying, and move on. This cluster is the most unpredictable in your history: the completions are either 15% or 95%, almost nothing in between.

Bars are scaled to your biggest cluster. Tap any row for what the feed is doing there.

Time You Could Reclaim

Before you look — how many hours went on videos you never finished?

The Bait Rate

34%

of what you were served was written to be clicked

Aimed at you: urgency-framed productivity and finance

Bait-styled titles (142)

How much of each you finished

Bait-styled titles19%

Everything else71%

Clicked, then quit

This ONE Habit Changed Everything (Not Clickbait)
You Won't Believe What Happened to My Portfolio
10 Productivity Hacks That Changed My Life
Reacting to My Old Videos (cringe warning)

The read

A third of what the feed put in front of you was written to be opened, not watched — withheld payoffs, stacked punctuation, and promises of a shortcut. The split is stark: those titles hold you for 19% of their runtime, everything else for 71%. The feed is not reading your taste, it is reading your reflexes, and those two things point in different directions.

Measured from how the titles are written — shouting, withheld payoffs, listicles, stacked punctuation — across 142 of your videos. It reads style, not quality, and only in English.

The Shape Of Your Attention

30%

Left in the first fifth

45%

Watched almost all of it

Every other completion number here is an average. This is the distribution behind it — one column per five percentage points of video watched.

Call It

Which one did you actually finish?

1/3

The Awards

Biggest Time Sink
Software & Programming
15.2h across 94 videos
Served Most, Watched Least
Music & Performances
22 videos, 55% finished
The One You Finish
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
91% finished across 9 videos
Most Abandoned Channel
MrBeast
11 videos, 31% finished
Seen Once, Never Again
29 channels
out of 47 the feed showed you
When It Had You
Sunday
your heaviest day of the week

Attention Gap

Clicked but abandoned

10 Productivity Hacks That Changed My Life
I Tried the Billionaire Morning Routine for 30 Days
Why I Quit My 6-Figure Job (Story Time)
Reacting to My Old Videos (cringe warning)
Unboxing the $3,000 Studio Setup

Quietly devoted

The Forgotten History of Operating Systems
How Compilers Work — Full Course
An Honest Look at Index Funds After 10 Years
Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
How to Build a Habit That Actually Sticks

The read

There's a clear pattern here: you click on things that promise a shortcut or a story, and you finish things that respect your time. The abandoned list skews toward lifestyle and reaction content; the devoted list is almost all structured knowledge. Your actual preferences and your click behavior are quietly at war.

Top Channels

1
Fireship41 videos · 6.3h · 88%
2
Veritasium14 videos · 4.8h · 82%
3
ThePrimeagen28 videos · 4.3h · 74%
4
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell9 videos · 1.8h · 91%
5
Graham Stephan22 videos · 1.6h · 38%
6
MrBeast11 videos · 1h · 31%

61%

39%

Your top 5 channelsThe other 42 channels

Channels In Total

Seen Exactly Once

New In Last 30 Days

The feed leaned on 5 channels for 61% of your watch time, out of 47 it put in front of you. 29 of them appeared exactly once. 3 first showed up in the last 30 days.

What You Wanted vs What You Got

Your feed is half helping

You want YouTube to make you better at building things — and to stay out of the way while you do it.

Serving that

Programming and long-form course content is your highest-completion cluster and shows up reliably
Sunday sessions are long, uninterrupted, and land almost entirely on things you finish

Getting in the way

Roughly a third of what the feed offers you midweek is productivity and reaction content you bail on inside a minute
Finance videos that open as analysis and turn into pitches — you keep clicking, then leaving
The documentaries you finish almost never surface on a weekday, so building is a weekend-only activity by default

The read

The feed has your interests roughly right and your intent completely wrong. It knows you like programming, so it serves you programming-adjacent bait — reaction videos about developers, productivity systems for developers — instead of more of the structured material you actually finish. The gap isn't discipline; it's that clicks and completions look identical to the algorithm, and only one of them is you.

Retrain Your Algorithm

Pushed on you (you bail)

Productivity and 'morning routine' lifestyle content — you abandon 85% of it within a minute
Reaction and 'story time' videos — high click rate, near-zero completion
Finance hype ('Money Is About To Be Worthless') — you bail the moment it turns into a pitch

Starved of (you finish)

Long-form structured courses and documentaries — your highest completion, but a small slice of your feed
Calm, single-topic explainers that don't pad the runtime

Action mode

Do this today

0/4

Hit 'Not interested' on the next three productivity/morning-routine videos in your feed — you almost never finish them and they're crowding out what you do.
Use 'Don't recommend this channel' on the reaction/story-time creators you keep abandoning.
When a finance video turns into a sales pitch, use 'Not interested' rather than just closing it — closing teaches the feed nothing.
Like and add to a playlist the long-form courses you finish, so the algorithm learns to surface more of them.

The read

Your feed is optimizing for your clicks, not your attention — so it keeps serving shortcuts and reactions you bail on while under-serving the structured, long-form content you actually finish. A week of deliberate 'Not interested' taps on the abandoned categories will measurably shift what shows up.

When You Watch

Sunday

Peak Day

By day of week

22%

The read

Your week has a clear shape: steady, snack-sized watching Monday through Thursday, a dip on Friday, then a Sunday spike that towers over everything else — nearly double any weekday. Sundays are also where your long-form completions concentrate; the weekday minutes are mostly quick technical look-ups.

Your Receipt

YOUTUBE ALGORITHM CO.

90-DAY STATEMENT

SERVED TO: THE SELECTIVE DEEP-DIVER

Software & Programming×9415.2h
Documentary & Long-form Essays×3110.3h
Finance & Economics×478.0h
Music & Performances×223.5h

ITEMS: 0
OF WHICH, WALKED OUT ON: 8.0h
TOTAL: 39.0h

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION

DECODEMYFEED · NO RETURNS

Surprises

You've watched over 38 hours of programming content in 90 days — that's more than most people spend on Netflix in a month.
Your average session length is 47 minutes, but your median is only 9. A handful of long weekend sessions are pulling the mean way up.
You watched the same video about system design twice in the same week, five weeks apart. Your history suggests you were working on something both times.
Despite Finance being your third-biggest cluster by video count, it ranks last in total minutes — you open a lot, finish very few.
Sundays are dramatically different from the rest of your week: longer videos, higher completion, almost no channel-hopping.

Questions worth sitting with

You keep starting finance videos and stopping — is it the content format you dislike, or is there something about those topics you're not ready to sit with yet?
Your 'quietly devoted' list is almost entirely structured learning. What would it mean to apply that same standard to what you click on in the first place?
Sundays look like your most intentional watching. What's different about that day that the rest of the week isn't?
If you had to delete one of your four interest clusters entirely, which would it be — and what would you actually miss about it?