👁️How to Hide Watched YouTube Videos from Your Feed (And What Actually Works)

What YouTube itself offers (and does not)

YouTube has no setting to hide watched videos from your Subscriptions feed. The native UI shows two passive signals for videos you have watched:

• A red progress bar at the bottom of the thumbnail, indicating how much of the video you have played.
• The 'Watched' overlay that sometimes appears on Home tab thumbnails for videos you finished, but not consistently in the Subscriptions tab.

Neither lets you hide a video from the feed, and neither covers videos you scrolled past and decided not to watch. The 'watched' state in YouTube's eyes is whether you played the video, not whether you have made a decision about it.

Why true 'hide watched' is harder than it sounds

Even if an extension claims to hide watched videos, the experience is usually unsatisfying. A few reasons:

• Hiding makes the feed shorter, which feels good, but it removes information. If you want to re-find a video you watched yesterday, it is gone.
• The definition of 'watched' is fuzzy. Did 30 seconds count? Did you skip around? Was it a Short? Different rules produce different results, and most users want to mark some videos as decided without playing them at all.
• Strict hiding breaks your sense of scale. With 25 of 30 thumbnails hidden, the feed feels suspiciously small — am I missing something?

For most people, a visible-but-marked state turns out to be better than hidden entirely.

The visible-but-marked approach with FolderTube

FolderTube takes the visible-but-marked approach. Its Mark as Watched control adds a button to video thumbnails. When clicked, the thumbnail is visually flagged — typically grayed out with a checkmark — so on your next visit you can scan past it and focus only on the unmarked videos.

Crucially, the video stays in the feed. You can still see it, click into it, or un-mark it if you change your mind. The flag is a visual signal for you, not a hard hide that disappears the content.

Why this works as well as true hiding (or better)

1. The eye automatically skips grayed-out thumbnails after a few sessions of use. You stop spending attention on already-handled videos without losing the ability to find them.
2. You can mark videos as watched even if you never played them — a decision-tracking signal, not a watch-tracking one. This is the bigger win for backlog control.
3. You can un-mark a video instantly if you change your mind. With hide-style features, recovering a hidden video usually requires turning off the hide-watched mode entirely.
4. You keep a sense of feed size. The feed does not mysteriously shrink; you just see at a glance which fraction is still pending.

Setting it up

1. Install FolderTube from the Chrome Web Store.
2. Open YouTube and click the purple FolderTube button in the top-right of the page to open the sidebar.
3. Press the sync subscriptions button to import your subscribed channels.
4. Optionally, organize channels into folders so each folder behaves like its own smaller feed.
5. Open the Subscriptions page. Each thumbnail now has a Mark as Watched control — click it to flag videos you have handled.

A daily routine that gives the same end result as 'hide watched'

1. Open the Subscriptions tab (or a specific folder) once a day.
2. For each video, decide quickly: watch it, mark it as watched, or leave it for later.
3. Marked thumbnails are grayed out on the next visit, so your scan only catches the unmarked ones.
4. Repeat. Over time, your default view becomes a clear two-state list — handled and pending — without anything being hidden.

What about hiding YouTube Shorts or the Home tab?

FolderTube focuses on the subscription feed. If your problem is the Home tab pushing already-watched content or the Shorts shelf taking over your homepage, those are addressed by separate extensions:

• DF YouTube — hides the homepage feed, related videos, comments.
• Unhook — granular control over which YouTube UI elements to hide, including the Shorts shelf.

Pair one of these with FolderTube and you cover both surfaces — focused subscription feed plus a quiet homepage. See the best Chrome extensions for YouTube roundup for context on each.

What to read next

For the original deep dive on Mark as Watched, see How to Mark YouTube Videos as Watched. For the backlog-focused angle on the same feature, see Mark as Watched: the smartest way to tame your YouTube backlog.