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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
No, not really
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Honestly it depends. A lot of my online time in the last ~5 years has strayed away from YouTube. Most of my time is just spent playing musicbee while browsing anidb/ MAL/ MFC, searching for rares / chatting on soulseek, or watching anime / movies. But YouTube does come undeniably handy for those times where you want something you can’t find anywhere else online, like people going solo into hard-to-access countries to record their journeys, or tutorials that explain things in much more detail than text could due to visual demonstration, or more in-depth reviews of products where the video makes it a lot easier to feel the size / scale of the product I’m looking at.
Could I do it? Sure. But it would definitely be hard for a long time, as I track down various blogs / self hosted websites with what I liked to use YouTube for. But honestly that kind of internet might be better. Or if a smaller platform would gain more traction so YouTube wasn’t the only option. I think that would be ideal.
I used to watch A LOT of youtube. Since I started educating myself about google and corpo stuff I lost most interest I had. Now I only watch gameranx and gamers nexus from time to time.
I started watching (and hosting peertube) some time ago and slowly add new channels to my list. Its getting better. Linux and tech stuff kind of works on there imo. Everything else needs more love.
We‘re at a particularly rough time imo since peeps are trying to switch but many hurdles work against them. Federated social media in general is still WIP, funding is a huge issue, accessibility is an issue and a healthy testing workflow (asking users for consent of automated bug reports, making them actually useful, shielding devs from too much user critique, etc.)
As someone with both accessibility needs and experience in customer relations I often see wasted potential because too few peeps with a samdwich skillset (between user and dev) are actually in the foss scene, particularly in small projects.
I really hope foss will endure these growing-pains.
Do you have any recommandation that is not linux or tech related. I struggle to find content there but I’m sure I missed many things.
I‘m not really the right person for such recommendations as my interests are quite narrow. Gaming, PCs, Linux, Programming, etc.
If you can muster some patience play around with the search form on https://sepiasearch.org you should be able to find some cool stuff.
But remember, this is the same as early youtube. There were rarely any huge productions and everything was kinda indy. One needs to keep that in mind imo.
Thanks. That will be helpfull.
I use it for everything and often background noise.I could survive without it but I would miss it. Not so much YouTube but a service like it.
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.
