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How I spend less time on YouTube

pawelurbanek.com

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Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#41

Post by sabjut »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #20

The best way I’ve found to spend less time on YouTube is realizing that the vast majority of content is pure garbage and just stay the hell away from it. These days I only visit it when I need something specific (a tutorial on how to do a particular thing, a video the kid wants to watch, etc). And of course uBlock origin is enabled to spare me from the “unskippable ads that are longer than the video itself” experienc…

While I agree that "the vast majority of content is pure garbage", I have to make an argument that a non-negligible portion of the site delivers high-quality educational videos with excellent research. The curiosity-seeking part of my brain is subject to being very easy to get hooked on this.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#43

Post by FearlessNebula »

scoutt wrote: post #31

> Am I the only one who launches YouTube just to watch a single tutorial and ends up devouring dozens of fine-tuned recommendations? I'm hitting 40 next week, and seeing others asking for recommendations of videos on "programming a microcontroller" (or programming related) is something I can't understand. One day I sat and watched some of the videos they were recommending, and in most of them there were a person talk…

Once I got a job as a software dev I quickly started preferring text based tutorials and docs. As a student I would always hunt down the “best” tutorial video for a given topic.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#44

Post by scrollaway »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #20

The best way I’ve found to spend less time on YouTube is realizing that the vast majority of content is pure garbage and just stay the hell away from it. These days I only visit it when I need something specific (a tutorial on how to do a particular thing, a video the kid wants to watch, etc). And of course uBlock origin is enabled to spare me from the “unskippable ads that are longer than the video itself” experienc…

YouTube has some of the best, highest quality free content available on the internet today.

Stay away from the crap, remove it from your recommendations, subscribe to some good channels. It’s that simple.

Don’t if that’s not your thing but you’re missing out. If you change your mind here are a few exceptional channels to get you started, they should cater well to a HN style audience:

Technology Connections (misc tech)

Wendover Productions (Logistics)

DefunctLand (Documentaries on old defunct stuff)

Not Just Bikes (Cycling, public transport, urban design, walkability)

Practical Engineering (civil engineering)

3Blue1Brown (Math)

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#45

Post by bena »

scrollaway wrote: post #34
scoutt wrote: post #31

> Am I the only one who launches YouTube just to watch a single tutorial and ends up devouring dozens of fine-tuned recommendations? I'm hitting 40 next week, and seeing others asking for recommendations of videos on "programming a microcontroller" (or programming related) is something I can't understand. One day I sat and watched some of the videos they were recommending, and in most of them there were a person talk…

People learn in different ways.

This has been shown to be not true many times over.

Different subjects need to be taught in different ways, but there are optimal ways to present information that works for everyone.

No one is a "visual learner", there are topics that are best presented in a visual format.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#46

Post by toppy »

moooo99 wrote: post #4

Personally I can really recommend the „Unhook YouTube“ extension. It’s really customizable and allows you to remove autoplay, recommendations and even the homepage. It’s really easy to configure and really did help me reducing my time spend on YouTube without breaking the entire website.

URLs for the spoken extensions:

https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/youtube-recommen...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#47

Post by wingerlang »

fer wrote: post #40
scrollaway wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People learn in different ways.

Video is great for many things, but step by step instructions/tutorials ain't one of them.

I disagree. It is great because you can actually see where the steps are performed. It's sometimes faster than reading a bullet point than finding out where on the screen it is.

And I did NOT grow up on videos, I just think they're neat.

Of course, there are times when I dislike them too. It's not always black and white.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#48

Post by nirav72 »

ballenf wrote: post #17

What I really want is all my subscriptions to get auto-downloaded into Plex. And for Plex to have better library management tools from the player, so I can delete after watching or move to a category. Then show me all the algorithmic stuff when I'm on the website so I can find better stuff to subscribe to.

I've been using TubeArchivist for grabbing newly posted videos in my subscriptions. It will grab the meta info and thumbnails as well. Has a built in video player, so you can watch the videos directly within the web app.

https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist

Another one I've used before is Tubesync- although it doesn't have a built-in player. But it has the ability to integrate with Plex.

https://github.com/meeb/tubesync

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#49

Post by endisneigh »

bena wrote: post #45
scrollaway wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People learn in different ways.

This has been shown to be not true many times over. Different subjects need to be taught in different ways, but there are optimal ways to present information that works for everyone. No one is a "visual learner", there are topics that are best presented in a visual format.

Where’s this list of the so called optimal ways to present information that works for everyone?

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#50

Post by bittercynic »

slig wrote: post #39
scoutt wrote: post #31

> Am I the only one who launches YouTube just to watch a single tutorial and ends up devouring dozens of fine-tuned recommendations? I'm hitting 40 next week, and seeing others asking for recommendations of videos on "programming a microcontroller" (or programming related) is something I can't understand. One day I sat and watched some of the videos they were recommending, and in most of them there were a person talk…

Have you seen Ben Eater's videos?

I love his videos, but not because they efficiently present tutorial content. He's an amazing teacher because he demonstrates an attitude/approach to learning that would be difficult to convey through text.
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