Deleted YouTube again

For a little while I have been using YouTube way more, and even paid for the Lite subscription model, simply to test it out.

Honestly, it hasn’t been too bad, and I actually really, really enjoy a lot of the videos I’ve gotten through the algorithm.

But of course, YouTube Shorts have caught up with me and continue to be a very annoying problem, wasting seconds, minutes and hours of my time at every moment.

The algorithm does show some interesting things, or funny content I enjoy, but things go downhill pretty quickly with the usual AI-generated slop videos and recycled content.

A few of the saving graces I’ve seen is shorts made from genuinely awesome videos that came out like 5 years ago, so I think it’s an interesting way to bring life to evergreen videos about science and the like.

With Outer Wilds playthroughs and essays running rampat, my feed slowly phased into more space and astronomy themed topics, which has been pretty fun to get into until I realize half the videos are way too long for what they have to say and use genAI graphics for everything.

So whatever, I just deleted YouTube and cancelled my subscription now. I will continue to use it via Fennec Browser and Newpipe, though maybe a full YouTube detox would be a good idea to try.

Yesterday alone I wasted almost 6 hours on the platform, and I think like 4 of them were just Shorts. Even now I just had to have a video on the background while writing this, what is going on?

You know what, I will try it, I will limit my YouTube time to one hour a day for the rest of the month. It’s possible I’ll fail completely, but hey, at least you will know if that happens and you are free to bully me for it. The weeknotes next Monday will also be the last ones where I share YouTube links this month, as I also feel like a part of me watches more videos because I have a need to find stuff worth sharing here. The less excuses I have the better!

Alright, let’s do this.

This is day 30 of #100DaysToOffload