Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I spend less time on YouTube

pawelurbanek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 220 posts

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#62

Post by krallja »

scrollaway wrote: post #44
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…

Some of my highly recommended uncommon subscriptions:

Cathode Ray Dude (really obscure 90s tech nostalgia)

Techmoan (obscure old tech nostalgia)

Jeremy Fielding (engineering)

Hand Tool Rescue (antique restoration)

Machine Thinking (history of technology/industry, especially pre-1900)

Usagi Electric (vacuum tubes, minicomputers, etc.)

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#63

Post by wingerlang »

KineticLensman wrote: post #54
wingerlang wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 If and only if the steps are performed in the correct order without any fluffs. In one particularly bad example that I saw someone was showing how to use an updated feature in Photoshop. The sequence went something like * the instructor showed the old way of doing things *…

There are very badly written articles as well though.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#64

Post by mill »

A really convenient workaround is the extension called Unhook. It's very neat and lets you to control many aspects of your Youtube experience. Available both for Chrome/Firefox:

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

2)https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#66

Post by 4mitkumar »

pawurb wrote: post #3
tomkat0789 wrote: post #2

Just implemented this! Thanks for posting! For those who don't click, he suggests some uBlock Origin filters to remove the suggestion lists from YouTube. For example, currently I'm watching a video and all I see is THE VIDEO - no list of suggestions off to the side. I guess we can say YouTube's suggestions are "too good"! I might just apply this to my work computer. I'll probably keep them around for my casual viewin…

Glad to hear you find it useful!

Can confirm this approach works, based on my experience over just year or so. Have not blocked the landing page recommendations but I'm never logged in. And so they default videos are so outside of my taste, it's easy to ignore.

Still, sometimes i actively go on actively binging one video after another (from Veritassium, for example). But that's on me :)

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#68

Post by [deleted] »

Demcox wrote: post #30

YouTube started as such a great way to explore niche interests but has, as the author describes well, turned into a large hooking mechanism and I hate it for that. Used to spend a lot of good quality time watching videos on there and interacting with like minded people but now YT is blocked on my network.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN