Youtube is bad
I blocked most social media apps and some distracting websites. Out of which the dominant time consumers are YouTube, Discord, and Reddit.
I took a while for me to realize how much of my online consumption is dependent on these 2 sites. The thing is, there is quite a lot of useful info. But the other side is that, there is 100x more useless info on these sites.
Nowadays, no one can really be online without opening YouTube at-least once a day. As more and more people put their content on these sites, the dependency will grow exponentially. Without tutorials and how-to guides on YouTube, our life would be extremely difficult and on the flip-side, we become extremely dependent on them for our everyday needs.
- Want to feel good, play music on YouTube
- Want to feel happy, watch funny videos on YouTube
- Want to vent, comment on Reddit
- Want to ask for help, create a Reddit post
- And on and on....
We still need to do these things even without these massive platforms. Over the years, I moved to discord and found good communities and actually have much better experience there, but still, I dislike that as well, for privacy reasons.
But what is the right way? How to be mindful? I don't know the answer to that question yet.
A viable alternative to YouTube is invidious, a YouTube front end. I copy and paste YouTube links into the invidious search and watch from here. These are the list of invidious instances.
https://docs.invidious.io/instances/
There are also terminal YouTube players, but I did not like them very much.