To be fair, YouTube has far more variety and far more content overall. Personally, I have seen pretty much anything worth watching on the major streaming services. My wife and I can just ignore any top 200 list of shows or movies because we have already seen it all and anything we haven’t seen doesn’t look interesting to us. We just have to wait for new shows to come out.
YouTube though. It’s functionally unlimited considering the length of a human lifespan.
For some insight, a quick Google search says that Netflix has about 4 years of content if you sat down and watched everything they have to offer. Meanwhile, YouTube has about 18,000 years of content.
I’ve never been one to really get into the loop of watching YouTube endlessly. It’s felt like my use has been more like a search engine.
For me it’s not really been a great source of entertainment. At best background noise. Quantity of hours is a useless metric for me when most of it is stuff that feels like unnecessary content. I think it’s most telling that what makes YouTube watchable for me is sponsorblock with one of my most used functions skip to highlight, and blocktube to block the popular channels that dominate search results. And lately youtubetranscript to just save myself time watching and overly long 10+ minute long segment in favor of quickly skimming over the words.
I feel the algorithm promoting long videos has ruined the quality with now more videos trying to fit that minimum length.
