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 ?
Honestly I think I would find that one difficult. It essentially replaced conventional TV for me in the last 10-15 years. I use a privacy-respecting front-end so I'm never at youtube.com itself but if they killed it off I would find it difficult to adapt.
The majority of the online entertainment for me is YouTube, so I probably couldn't just quit it. I bailed on reddit to come here, but reddit was only 2-3 hours a day, YouTube is like 10+ hours a day for me.
No, but basically anytime I'm on my laptop youtube is running, and I spend all of my time on my laptop. If I play a game, it's typically taking up 2/3rds of my screen so i can still have youtube playing on the side.
YouTube is my streaming app. They have me by the throat. I could give up every other video app before I gave up YouTube. I wish it weren't true, but it is. YouTube just has the best content.
Yes/no.
I lived without YouTube / a Google account for years.
But I still use YouTube through a privacy respecting frontend:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/#youtubeI usually go for:
- On desktop: Invidious or Piped
- On Android: Tubular or NewPipe
I quit YouTube along with reddit last summer. I don't use alternate interfaces. I haven't found a replacement for most of the niche content I liked to watch there -- and yes, that sucks.
I've mostly been watching offline content (like DVDs and things I downloaded years ago) when I want video entertainment, and doing other stuff with my free time.
You might think that'd mean more time playing games given my interests, but I've found I'm a lot less enthusiastic about playing through games if I can't watch an LP or two of it afterwards. So, I'm actually playing (and also buying) less of those than I used to too.
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.
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
At least 60% of my internet time is YouTube. I rely on it for entertainment, news, education, discovering music, technical help, ETC...
Could I live a meaningful life without it? Probably, people have been living meaningful lives before the invention of the computer in general... But I wouldn't give it up because there is an immense amount of incredible content there that genuinely makes my life better.
I only really use Youtube to watch like a couple specific channels and sometimes to look up music. I could easily fill that space with something else.
As of today no. But I'm going by steps :
- I've stop using it without a front-end.
- I look for other source of content from my favorite youtubers (podcast host somewhere else, web site, social media, blog especially for cooks)
- I search for content on other plateform before it (but it is far for being systematic right now
My goal is not to go full private or open-source but just less dependent on YouTube. Onfortunately so many youtubers are solely there.
Anyway, I believe that the day big for-profit intrusive company will stop leading the video hosting business, the format will get noticeably less popular as it is extremely ressource intentive. It will mostly replace by podcast and illustrated articles.
Of course you can, billions of people do it allready, it'll be annoying at first, but then you'll adapt.
I watch hours of YT every day, but if it stopped working/existing my life wouldn't end, just as it didn't when I left Reddit, I'll find other things to do and services to use.
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.
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.
Especially with the Premium algorithm, it's just so good at finding super niche stuff that's pretty interesting. Been watching some Netflix shaming levels of documentaries made by super passionate people.
I kind of hate the privacy nightmare but it actually delivers really well for me.
Does Premium actually use a different recommendation algorithm?
I've been on it for way too long to know, but when I added my wife to my family plan she commented on the immediate increase in suggestion quality. Although it could also just be less junk/ads in the front page, I don't think it's advertised as a feature.
