I use Pocket Tube [1] and I absolutely love it. I started using it 1 month ago so can't really estimate how much time it's saved me.
Before that I always found YT frustrating and never cared about subscriptions because, and correct me if I'm wrong, the subscription system is disorganized. It doesn't make sense to me. I found myself having a hundred subscriptions that I didn't know how to follow in an organized manner.
With this extension now I've organized subscriptions into groups, which get integrated into the UI in the sidebar, and you can set notifications for whichever group you'd like. It has more features - like the "Deck" feature, where you add a few columns of either playlists/groups/channels. You can also view all the latest vids from each subscription group, or all your subscriptions and filter them by groups.
I'm quite happy that I suddenly noticed I had this pain point and quickly found the perfect solution. It's one of my favorite extensions.
Funny that for me it works exactly the opposite; I'm subscribed to a lot of channels that upload many videos that don't interest me, however youtube's algorithm is pretty spot-on with videos that I will be very interested in watching, whether they come from channels I'm subscribed to, or not.
You're describing the advantage and disadvantage of the YouTube recommendation algorithm. It's really effective at recommending videos I'd be interested in/would click on.
However it's so good that it'll easily burn hours of my time I'd otherwise spend doing something more fulfilling.
It has easily saved me over 100 hours by preventing me from continuously scrolling through youtube recommendations.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-youtubes-h...