If you take a break from YouTube for a few days, coming back to your Subscriptions page can feel overwhelming. There is a mix of brand-new uploads, videos you watched halfway through before falling asleep, and videos you've already finished completely.
For some reason, YouTube leaves these watched videos in your feed for days, creating a cluttered wall of red progress bars.
The red progress bar problem
YouTube marks videos you've interacted with by placing a thin red progress bar at the bottom of the thumbnail. It's a helpful visual indicator, but it doesn't actually change how the feed behaves.
If you're trying to catch up on what you've missed, you have to mentally filter out the thumbnails that have the red bar. If you use YouTube's native tools to play videos, you will end up accidentally re-watching the first 30 seconds of videos you've already seen before realizing you need to skip them.
Why the native "Hide" button is terrible
If you want to clear a watched video off your feed natively, YouTube makes you work for it.
- Hover over the watched video.
- Click the tiny three-dot menu icon.
- Select "Hide".
- Repeat this for every single watched video on the page.
Nobody wants to spend five minutes doing digital housekeeping before they can relax and watch a video. You need a way to filter them out automatically.
How to auto-filter unwatched videos
To solve this, I added a feature to QueueTube—a free Chrome extension that turns your subscription feed into a seamless playlist.
Right next to the main "Queue Subscriptions" button, there is a secondary option called Queue Unwatched. It works like magic to clean up your feed.
Open your feed
Go to your YouTube subscriptions page. Make sure you scroll down a bit so YouTube loads all your recent videos.
Click Queue Unwatched
Hit the grey "Queue Unwatched" button pinned to the top of your screen.
Enjoy fresh content
The extension instantly scans your page. If a video thumbnail has a red progress bar on it, QueueTube completely ignores it. It compiles a playlist of only the 100% fresh, unstarted videos and begins playing them back-to-back.
It is the absolute fastest way to catch up on your subscriptions without dealing with the clutter. You can install it below in one click.