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 ?
Nope. Just this week YouTube helped me fix a squeaky dryer for $18. Repair guy wanted $100 to come out, estimated a $300 repair. The amount I saved there has paid for premium for a year and I use it for everything. Fixed my washer, ran 220v for my new stove, countless baking recipes, woodworking tips. It’s not like Netflix where you only get entertainment from it, there is actual good info.
Many of those information are also available in other places. When I need to fix something, I’m usually able to find what I need on the web (manuals, blog posts, etc) before resorting to searching youtube videos on how to do it. Some truly niche stuff are only available on youtube though (e.g. some dude filming himself doing his niche job), but I can count on one hand the instances I needed one of those.
The video makes it so much faster and easier to understand. Plus the top comments usually have supplemental information that helps. If you didn’t use YouTube then you would still use another Google entity to find it.
If you didn’t use YouTube then you would still use another Google entity to find it.
The thing is I don’t use google anymore to search these days now that other search engines noticeably produce better results.
Which search engines produce better results than Google?
Someone actually did a comparison recently. Pretty interesting if you got the time to read it: https://danluu.com/seo-spam/ . tldr: google and bing bad.
There is also a recent study by researchers on Leipzig University that confirm google is getting worse : https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf
I’m not comment-OP, but when I use a VPN, google insists on making me do captchas before letting me search. So I just started using duckduckgo because it’s usually “good enough.”
Sure, by some metrics google is probably still better, but I’d rather not waste my time training their AIs.
Many of those information are also available in other places.
with the death of forums and the rest of the internet, for most things, not anymore.
With AI absolutely exploding… It’s very easy to ask for step by step directions to accomplish things. AI clearly still needs to mature… But… The times I’ve asked it for some basic, step by step directions, it’s been effective.
While I don’t disagree videos make a lot of things easier (I for sure am a visual learning, no question), the step by step instructions for things I’ve gotten have been good, and very easy to follow.
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No, i’ll die. What a question
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 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.
Have you timed this?
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.
He spends 13+ hours a day on just two platforms. Why would anyone lie on the internet?
I use less Lemmy than I did Reddit, and I don’t use Reddit at all anymore, so it isn’t really 13+ hours. Also youtube can run while I’m on Lemmy, so in the space of 2 hours I can be on Lemmy + YouTube for 4 hours.
Maybe you just didn’t consider that I have minimal interaction with actual people outside of work, and I don’t work much.
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.
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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
lack of content from other competitors
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.
I feel as though I missed the heyday of youtube, and only really started using it within the last few years, so perhaps my perspective is a bit skewed, but I don’t really get the point of a lot of content on there. A lot of the content I consume could easily be replicated elsewhere, or in a different format. A good deal of tech content I consume would be improved, in my view, if it were just a website with an associated discussion forum for clarifying or expanding upon any points people don’t fully get. Plenty of food channels would be better if they were just a cookbook, because they waste so much time on stuff nobody cares about in order to hit a magic length for the algorithm. Most of the long form stuff I come across could just be podcasts without losing anything of value for me.
I’m entirely willing to say this may well be my “old man yells at clouds” moment, but I just don’t get the majority of youtube content. The appeal of things like Lets Plays (outside of seeing exactly how to beat a spot you’re stuck on) and Vtubers is completely alien to me. I do enjoy travel content, but I find a lot of the stuff uploaded by independent youtube creators to be pretty exploitative and don’t enjoy watching it. I don’t think BBC or Arte or the like willl disappear with youtube. I doubt I’ll miss it very much when it eventually gets killed and Google launches a worse video site one of these days.
There are a lot of long form researched videos that I like on yt. They could definitely be hosted on a different site but having stuff like those in a central location lets people find them more easily.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/F2sk_Cy9mdU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I used to watch let’s plays as a teen because I couldn’t play the games myself… Also used to talk about some of them at school with friends so like watching a TV show I guess.
I kept saying “yes but”, as I read this. But then you said podcast, and I was like ooooh yeah I can do without YouTube. Just need my guys to ship their audio as a podcast.
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.
I used to use Reddit every day. I just replaced Reddit time with Lemmy and YouTube.
If YouTube goes down… I’ll live. It’s not a life support thing like income or housing so I’ll just find other things to fill the hole.
Will it suck? Sure. Will I live? Yep. I’d prefer they put out a reasonably affordable subscription instead of just nuking themselves with ads and more enshittification, but it’s not like life itself depends on YouTube.
Their current subscription is too pricey. At least last I looked.
They can get some of my money if they put out a sufficiently lower priced option. I paid for Reddit premium and used none of the features I just liked the site before Steve Huffman decided to be super extra shitty. I’d do the same for YouTube.
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.
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 😂
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
What do you do for 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’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.
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 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.
doing other stuff with my free time.
The real secret.
