YouTube'southward silent autoplay characteristic—found in the home and subscriptions tabs—isn't the most intuitive concept Google's ever cooked up. For starters, if a video autoplays for too long while you're scrolling through your feed, the video gets added to your history, even if you don't click on information technology. So if you decide to watch the video at a after time, information technology starts correct where the autoplay left off, instead of back at the commencement. These quirks alone are enough to brand you desire to pull the plug on autoplay altogether. Luckily, there is a way to banish information technology from your YouTube feeds.

Deactivate autoplay on YouTube's home and subscriptions tabs

The autoplay setting for the home and subscriptions tabs is incredibly like shooting fish in a barrel to miss if you don't know where to expect. Start, open up the YouTube app on your favorite device. Then instead of navigating to the "autoplay" tab within the Settings bill of fare (where you'd await information technology to be), head over to "General." Five rows downwardly, you lot'll see "Muted playback in feeds."

As Android Police's Rita already explained in a previous story, this setting is very confusingly named. Instead of muting or unmuting video in your feed (autoplay content is always muted until you lot tap on the video), this choice actually controls whether or not the muted videos automatically showtime to play when scrolling through your YouTube.

Once you tap "Muted playback in feeds," the options from there are pretty straight forward: The default "Always on" way means that videos volition start to autoplay in your feeds as long as an internet connection is bachelor. "Wi-Fi but" is reserved for those connected to a Wi-Fi network. Then "Off" will preclude videos from autoplaying in your feeds, period. Cull that last option, and voilà, no more than unwatched videos filling your history.

Pros and cons of leaving autoplay activated

If you're still on the debate about what to practice with autoplay, there are valid arguments for either side.

On one hand, autoplay allows you to preview a video — consummate with closed captions — to aid you determine if the video is worth watching in full. This characteristic may also help you discover new videos that normally wouldn't have piqued your interest.

On the other hand, limiting or fifty-fifty deactivating autoplay can aid conserve data for phones running on metered connections. Without that little autoplay teaser, you also lower your take a chance of being sucked into a video that you otherwise wouldn't accept cared to view. Finally, autoplay ensures simply the videos you actually watch country in your history.

Whichever option fits your needs boils downward to personal preference. Luckily, YouTube gives users the freedom to cull, even if that choice is filed in the wrong settings menu nether a misleading name.