Technology

Found this post at a great time where I'm slowly having a falling out with youtube and trying to use less of it. Not necessarily because "youtube is evil" but I'm starting to appreciate the beauty and minimalism of just written articles and blog posts. I enjoy going through them at my own pace and I don't need to look at a guy for him to read what could have been a blog post to me or watch those stock clips while he reads it. This is especially true for code content. Obviously I'm talking about a small subset of all videos on youtube (tech/news content ish).

I was actually a long term subscriber to youtube premium but I cancelled maybe a month ago. I was hesitant for a long time because I thought the value I got from it was so great that it was worth paying, especially since youtube splits the premium revenue 40/60 or 50/50 with creators. On top of that I also had youtube music. It felt wrong to do all these mental gymnastics and go the adblock route because of the creators. The author in the post touches on this point.

But as I started getting into Lemmy and reading blog posts more and more (also started reading a book), I understood that a lot of that perceived value was because that's the only thing I used and knew. There's a whole world out there and since then I've slowly started minimizing my time on it. Again, not because it's bad but just because I feel for a lot of content there are other things out there. It's a choice. Learning to enjoy reading a light book vs watching Youtube before bed, for example.

I do think there's some dishonesty and delusion going on in a lot of people's minds when it comes to adblockers. They use adblock and think they're somehow doing the right thing and they're so righteous about it, yet they continue watching Youtube and never donate to any creators. I have a few friends like that.

Since I don't spend that much time on it anymore, honestly I just watch the ads. Not as big of a deal as I once thought, and they make me want to spend even less time on the platform. I used to also use it for white noise or background music. Now I just use mynoise.net -great platform, would recommend.

Just a random stream of thoughts on my youtube experience.