Honest comparison
Decode My Feed vs. Unhook
Unhook is good software and it is free and open source. If all you want is YouTube with the distracting parts removed, install it and stop reading — it does that job properly and it has done it for years. This page is about the difference that is left.
Hiding and knowing are different problems
Unhook works by category: hide the home feed, hide Shorts, hide comments. It cannot look at two videos and tell you anything about either, because it does not read them — and it has no idea who you are, because it has never seen your history.
We do the category hiding too. The difference is everything that needs to know something: which titles are built to withhold their payoff and which technique each one uses, which channels you open and abandon, and whether the last four videos were your choice or the algorithm’s.
Side by side
| Unhook | Decode My Feed | |
|---|---|---|
| Hide the home feed, Shorts, sidebar, comments | Yes | Yes |
| Mark individual videos as bait-styled | — | Yes, and names the technique |
| Block specific channels | — | Yes, suggested from your own history |
| Warn about rabbit holes | — | Yes, based on how you got to each video |
| Daily attention budget | — | Yes, split by on-goal / off-goal / Shorts |
| Analyse your watch history | — | Yes, a paid one-off report |
| Free | Yes | Extension free; report paid once |
| Open source | Yes | Extension source published |
You can run both
They do not conflict. If you already have Unhook doing the hiding, ours will notice and say so in its popup rather than doubling up silently — turn our hiding switches off and use it for the parts Unhook cannot do.
One extension we do flag: DeArrow rewrites video titles before the page renders. That changes the words our scorer reads, so the bait rate would describe DeArrow’s wording rather than YouTube’s. We tell you when we detect it rather than quietly reporting a wrong number.
Use Unhook if…
You want free, open-source, category-level hiding and nothing else. That is a completely reasonable thing to want, and it is the majority of what most people need.
Use ours if…
You want to know what the feed is doing to you, not only to stop seeing it — which titles are bait and why, which channels waste your clicks, and whether any of it improves after you push back.
Free to try
The extension is free and needs no account. The report is a one-off if you want the full read on your own 90 days.