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Been considering cutting down on YouTube
I find myself scrolling through YT hoping to see something to play in the background, occasionally checking things like TechLinked or MichaelMJD with occasional PointCrow and Dougdoug. But really just wasting time doing nothing, just scrolling.
So I want to cut it off but I want to fill in that time with something else.
Anyone else has tried to cut off YT(Or at least minimize) YT from their life? I’m probably using YT the wrong way.
I would like some RSS feeds or podcast to make me go on YT less. Or thoughts/opinions/experiences from other people that used to have YT on almost all the time but minimized the time on YT.
I'd highly recommend changing your bookmark to the subscriptions page instead of home. Once I made that change my relationship to YT was significantly altered.
Home is an "all you can eat" selection forcing you to look longer/dig deeper for the good stuff. While the subscriptions page is still technically an endless scroll, there's a far higher "chance of success" and the amount of searching is measurable. For example, I know I need to stop looking if I get down to videos that are a couple weeks old. I also aggressively hide videos on my subscriptions page that I know I'm not going to watch, so that makes it effectively a queue of videos I want to watch at some point.
Granted, I'm subscribed to a ton of channels and discovering new creators isn't my top priority. I do sometimes go back to home as a backup option or when I get curious.
I'm not sure if this recommendation is, strictly speaking, a way to reduce your watch time. But it definitely reduced scroll time for me. YMMV.
I went a little further than you with an auto redirecter that moves me from youtube to the subscriptions but similarly found it a much healthier way of interacting with the site.
I recommend deleting and turning off you watch history: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/95725
This removes all recommendations from the Home view. It’s blank with a message that your watch history is turned off.
This is how I use YouTube.com and it’s less tempting to follow the algorithm. I just go straight to my subscriptions and watch things I’ve already decided I’m interested in.
YouTube will no longer remember which videos you watched and where you stopped in any videos you may want to return to later.
If you don't want to go this far, as I have scripts for youtube that hide videos I've already seen since youtube wants to keep suggesting them, you can simply make sure you curate your history and what you watch.
Anything I watched and didn't like is removed from my history and if the channel is not for me I hit the don't recommend channel button so I never see it again. I've seen a lot of complaints about the suggestions people get and I see none of them. I don't get political videos, I don't get "reactions", I don't get any of the click-baity crap because I don't watch click-baity crap, political videos, reactions, and all are blocked. If the algorithm tries to sneak one in, it's a single click to never see it again.
That said, I've been doing this for years now and it is probably easier to start fresh than to try to go through and curate your history at this point; so might be better to delete all history and start this method.
It's waaay les tempting.
Not YT but I cut out reddit by deleting my bookmark for it. I replaced it primarily with jigsaw puzzles! Secondarily with Tildes, a few new Discord servers, audiobooks (but I already read a lot), really it was mostly jigsaw puzzles & deleting my bookmark for it
Eventually I started going back to reddit a bit BUT now I ONLY go to /r/fantasy, my bookmark goes directly to that subreddit and if I go somewhere else it's directly to whichever sub, I never browse my feed anymore, and I still do a ton of jigsaw puzzles
good luck!!
When you say you replaced it with jigsaw puzzles, do you mean you replaced it with a physical puzzle that you get up and walk to whenever you have the urge to waste time, or do you have a jigsaw puzzle website you use? I'd love to try it if it's digital, but a physical puzzle simple won't replace the habit for me, unfortunately.
I often try to redirect my reddit habit with a particular subreddit that I am focused on, but after about a month I tend to lose the focus and joy that I had with the subject, so it doesn't give me the same pleasure that I got from the home screen, and I eventually cave. My latest was /r/running as I was running a couch to 5K program. The moment I finished the plan, I've unfortunately lost focus with it.
well, it's a website through which I get physical puzzles - https://www.woodenjigsawpuzzles.com/ - you pay a subscription fee and they mail you somewhere between two and six puzzles at a time (in boxes of two each) depending on how fast you solve. I solve pretty fast (i.e. I return each box within about 1-2 days of receiving it) so I have a CONSTANT supply of puzzles, and returning them is a bit gamified, because if I start returning them slower, I'll suffer the horrible fate of...having fewer jigsaw puzzles to do lmao
the puzzles are SUPER high quality wooden ones and they're generally low piece count but very difficult given their size - I've done some under-100-piece puzzles that have taken me several hours to solve, and I've found some absolute gems here.
I also listen to audiobooks while puzzling, cos puzzles are a purely visual activity, so this multitasking works for me, puzzles occupy my visual processing and audiobooks occupy my aural processing, and they don't interfere with each other.
(if you or anyone else happen to join, tell them you were referred by "River from Discord" and we'll both get a free extra month no matter how long a subscription you sign up for!!)
I used to watch it for hours every day. It got to a point I was using an extension to set it at 3x speed just so I could watch more stuff. One thing that helped was this Unhook extension that removes recommendations and redirect you to the "Subscriptions" page instead of home. Later I ended up subscribing to channels through my RSS reader NewsBlur so that means even fewer distractions.
Now, the difficult part is that you have to figure out why you do it and fix that. Otherwise you'll find a workaround or replace YouTube with TikTok, something like that. Are you too tired or depressed and just need some cheap dopamine with the least effort? Are you bored? FOMO?
For me, I used to be super anxious and that drained all my energy. Therapy helped a lot with that. A big part of it was FOMO as well, until I realised I'm not a robot and will have to be fine knowing I'll miss some stuff. Most of it is useless anyways, right? Nowadays I check latest videos from a few channels I like once or twice a week and that's enough for me.
Good luck my friend, I know it's not easy!
you can also use yt-dlp and pull URLs from a text file (your subs) -- then you only get the highest quality rips of the videos you want to watch without any other bullshit.
Like a lot of folks, my YT use ballooned during the pandemic, and this year I've started to do something about it too. I unfollowed a bunch of car channels that were just putting out videos that were too long or had dropped in quality - I miss Puddin and sometimes PBG and Junkyard Digs, but they all diluted their brands and I don't have time for that shit any more. I've stopped watching gamers (the ultimate time waste) except some shorter content from Ryu Kahr, thabeast and Lil kirbs.
Kinda seems like YT quality is slipping across the board, but maybe that's just what happens when a media format gets settled into its groove. Stagnation.
Instead I've been focusing on my new job, reading a lot (finally finishing A Song of Ice and Fire), tackling some long-languishing home improvement projects, and watching movies. It feels so much better to do any of these things, rather than zapping the hours consuming non-enriching, disposable YT videos.
Good luck!
Great work on cutting down, that's awesome!
On the comment about YT quality getting worse, I actually have noticed the opposite in the types of videos I watch. I have been watching woodworking and building content since the 2008 days, and the quality of these new videos/creators is just so crazy. Such talented people. I also watch a lot of other types of genres that have just gone up in quality. I feel like I have ignored or have never been on the attention grabbing side of YouTube.
Not going to lie, I watch a LOT of YouTube. I need background noise to work and my job is not exactly mentally fulfilling. But while I put plenty of hours into the app, not many of them is spent scrolling.
Like other people point out, Home pages are a trap to keep you scrolling. System calculates what it thinks you want to see, serve it up on the conveyor belt and eventually you're left scraping the bottom of the dopamine barrel as you get desensitized. I find that it works to go into with an intention of what you want to watch and keep changing topics.
Personally, while I enjoy the occasional gaming or pop culture channel with 10-15min snippets, I gravitate to longer form content; mostly made by artists, Subject Matter Experts or Educators. For example, I'm currently watching a 50min analysis of the Oceangate incident by a professional shipwreck diver with an interest in nautical history. It differentiates itself from other analysis of the event by detailing the requirements for people to survive deep sea environments and the companies intended path to facilitating deep sea mining.
I know the meme of Zoomer-pilled-ADHD-brainrot not having time for anything longer than 16 seconds. Plenty of comments on longer videos complain about presenters going off topic and not getting to the point. But there's a difference between spending an hour on one topic and scrolling for an hour and ping ponging between comedy, true crime, dance video, race riots, meme animation, politics, old tv show, international war and cat videos.
I think more people should try longer videos because interested people are interesting to listen to. No one is making detailed 45min guide for growing potatoes to go viral but they clearly want people to learn that skill. And there are hundreds of people like that itching to show the world what they are passionate about. The best part is that you don't have to be passionate about a topic appreciate someone putting on a good presentation and maybe you stumble across a new passion.
I was working on a project to better catalog/tag YouTube channels in the STEM space but got swamped with life stuff. But here's the list of channels I identified if you want to give it a shot and dig yourself out of the hole the algorithm put you in.
I don't have a YT addiction, but maybe this is useful: since I never wanted a Youtube account I use an RSS-reader to query the channels I'm interested in (I use a Firefox add-on called feedbro, but it should work with other readers too).
With this I don't have to be logged in and subscribe to channels, I only have minimal interaction with the site, I can regularly delete all YT cookies and reset the algorithm to its defaults, and still see all the content I'm interested in. Works fine for me.
I guess this could also be automated with yt-dlp to directly download the videos in question, so people wouldn't need to visit Youtube at all.