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 ?
Yeah it’s undeniable that YouTube is getting difficult to get rid of. There do exist some alternatives like Vimeo or peertube, but as others say, lack of content is their biggest problem. Using alternative frontend is relying on YouTube after all, so there’s no way we can live without it, unless they do something very horrible, like what Reddit did to us.
Vimeo is explicitly not competing with youtube
I don’t get the appeal of YouTube. I use it for maybe the odd music video or something, but often you’ll just get someone’s annoying commentary instead of the actual thing.
I live without it and it’s great! Try it.
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.
I sometimes take music from there to add to my offline collection, other than that I very rarely use it.
Everything I need can be found somewhere else
Yes. I blocked it a year ago, and it’s been such an improvement.
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.
100% agree. I found information to help me file my taxes correctly. I used it regularly to supplement lectures when I was still in school. I use it as one of many tools to learn a new language. With some effort, I have found a couple news channels that help me stay informed on politics to the degree I want, with minimal amounts of partisan BS.
I also watch YT videos for entertainment.
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.
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.
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 alternate interfaces? Absolutely.
If not though… I mean I would live, but I’d really rather be able to at least use it occasionally — at least for educational purposes. There just aren’t any adequate alternatives.
I have been living without YouTube for years. That includes alternative front ends too.
Although I must admit, i have a Netflix subscription which I use very actively.
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.
No, not really
I only primarily watch two channels on YouTube and while I would miss them I could get the content from articles that they reference anyway so it wouldn’t kill me but I wouldn’t particularly like it either.
I haven’t been to YouTube in over a decade. Granted, many embedded videos have been hosted on YouTube. I see a need for video hosting, and I’m not sure how that could be sustainable without advertising.
Perhaps there could be something like a a torrent, where people volunteer a certain amount of free space, and files are downloaded in chunks from whomever is available at the time? There could be one central repository, with clones, that keeps track, and distributes these chunks in the most efficient way, and moves frequently accessed data to faster hosts.
Ahh yes IPFS is exactly what we need.
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.
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.
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.
