Today in a Privacy community a post about YouTube. No word about privacy but all about which software or settings are needed to watch videos and the money needed to host videos. It made me wonder whether some of you can lead a meaningful life without YouTube. Or will a cold turkey bring the worst out of you ?
Of course anyone can live without YouTube, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of enjoyable content that I would miss without it.
Yes. I blocked it a year ago, and it’s been such an improvement.
So I think the answer for me is no, but I definitely think I use it very differently than most people who watch YouTube. I don’t watch new things on YT, I don’t follower any YouTubers, it’s basically a repository for MST3K for me, old music videos, and then I will pull movie clips/scans of old films from it for my academic work. I don’t know who the baby gronk rizz king is or whatever, but I’ve found a lot of stuff on YouTube that I probably would not have found elsewhere (other than sometimes Internet Archive)
Also, I always watch in private and I use a downloader tool to make my own copies
I spend most of my free time watching YouTube. At times I wish it would go away. Even though they are a lot of valuable videos, there are also far more videos that I’m not interested in. I also don’t view YouTube with ads. I refuse. I’ll up YouTube before I watch ads.
I watch it basically all of the time but if they made it paid-only I would drop it immediately.
I did for years before it existed. Did for years after it came around.
It’s a great thing to have the video guides and lessons that are available there, but the rest is just entertainment, and there’s always entertainment somewhere that isn’t full of shit.
And those useful things, well, humanity made do with written directions for decades before video became a realistic option back in the eighties with VHS. TV “lessons” before that amounted to being only cooking shows, and a handful of PBS awesomeness that wasn’t really aimed at practical, modern things.
I will absolutely miss instructionals for specific devices being that easy to find, but as long as places like ifixit exist, I can do just fine.
No, not really
While I have revanced on my phone and smarttube on my chromecast, the last time I watched a youtube video for an extended amount of time was two month ago. I did open those apps a few weeks ago, but only to see if youtube finally blocks them. So yeah, I guess I can quit youtube cold turkey now.
It would be a lot easier to not look things up with YouTube if search engine results weren’t destroyed by quora and Reddit posts
I barely watch YouTube as it is. Sometimes I have to watch a tutorial or review that I can’t find information on elsewhere, but literally every time I wish it was a blog post instead.
When I inevitably move away from Google, YouTube will be the last thing that remains. I use it a lot, and there is absolutely no sufficient replacement.
Can I? Yes, I grew up before YouTube and got to see both the growth of the public internet and YouTube. So, I know how to get along without it.
Would I want to? Not really. YouTube is like many things which have come about in human history, it’s got it’s good parts and it’s bad parts. But, on the balance, I think the good outweighs the bad. The important bit is finding that balance where you get more good out of it than bad.One of the great and terrible things about YouTube is the low barrier to entry. It’s very easy for someone with a passion in a niche area to start posting videos. This means that we can get hundreds of hours of videos showing people removing hornet nests. Or, any other random thing I would have never seen in a world of serial TV. You can also get videos showing you how to do almost anything. Granted, those videos can be outright wrong, dangerous or just really bad. But, you may also be able to discover and start a hobby you would have never known about. YouTube has democratized video sharing in a way which didn’t exist before it. And I suspect that, were YouTube to disappear tomorrow, something would pop up in it’s place to replace it. People want easy video sharing. People want to be able to find copious amounts of weird and strange things. Sure, if you dig too far into the darker corners, you are going to find something you find objectionable. But, that’s always a problem with large groups of people, there’s always a few rotten apples which need removing.
So overall, I’m pretty positive on YouTube. Yup, it has problems and those need to be worked on. However, I’m far happier to have a place where video sharing is highly democratized, which has problems with that ease of sharing being abused; than I would be without it. The free flow of information necessarily means that objectionable things will be able to flow as well. That sucks, but it’s much better than the alternative.
Best answer.
The problem with YouTube is there isn’t an alternative.
Anytime I think it’s morphed to a state where people will leave for the next great thing, they don’t.
The content is there, and alternatives don’t have that backing them so it’s too inconvenient to move on. Once people have that pain point, they go back.
YouTube has one use for me - the occasional video on how to do something technical
How people watch hour after hour of other people’s inane ramblings I will never know. You must have have an incredibly low bar for what you consider entertainment 😂
The people that say it’s their main form of entertainment must have to wade through so much crap to get to anything good, I just don’t see the point.
I mean, you can say the same about every form of entertainment. Music? Majority is crap. Movies? Crap. Sports? Crap. Books? Crap. Video games? Crap.
I’ve been using Youtube so long that it kind of isn’t a problem. I’ve got a bunch of creators I follow, most of whom have stable release schedules. The likes of RedLetterMedia, Astrum and SEA (two unrelated yet adjacent “European guy talks calmly about space” channels), Summoning Salt, TierZoo, etc. Recently the folks behind The New Yankee Workshop have been uploading the show to Youtube, and I’ve been enjoying that.
Yeah I guess if you’ve been using it for a long time and have favourites built up that would work. I remember when YouTube started and it was pretty good, but with every video trying to game the algorithms I couldn’t imagine trying to start afresh now.
What do you do for entertainment?
Personally, YouTube isn’t other people’s inane rambling for me. It’s science education, it’s about how to identify and forage for food, it’s video essays about nuclear disasters… it’s constantly introducing me to new concepts— like why lawns are bad for the environment, how other countries tackle the problem of traffic and public transportation, why DIY air purifiers are more effective than nearly every commercial air purifier on the market, etc.
It’s a platform where the medium is video form content. Everything is available there. Both garbage and gold. It’s the way that you use it that determines which one you get. For me, it’s like Wikipedia in video form. With the occasional bit of entertainment on the side, as a treat.
Wikipedia in Video Form is a great line! I feel much the same way, but I think that’s not the entire picture. Wikipedia is a lot of declarative knowledge (i.e. what things are and Al’s maybe why they are), but YouTube is a lot of procedural knowledge for me. That is how to X. My GF and I finally found an apartment. I don’t know how to replace broken light switches, but in five minutes YouTube taught me how.
I didn’t know how to replace a faucet - now I do. I did not know how to insert a metal screw fitting into the furniture I was constructing - now I do. I wanted to measure our energy consumption, figuring there had to be a way to it it smart/connected and Open Source. YT content creators showed me how.
The list goes oooonnnnnn
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