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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
