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How I spend less time on YouTube

pawelurbanek.com

91–100 of 220 posts

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#91
post #72

What helped me was moving channels from YouTube subscriptions to RSS feeds. Thus I stopped opening YouTube homepage and play videos straight from RSS client. RSS URLs are " rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

this is an excellent tip for someone who doesn't want to sign up to youtube/google just to be able to follow a channel.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#92
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 *…

The easiest form of media to create is unedited video. The hardest is edited video

It’s funny that unedited, poorly rehearsed “presenting style” has in a way taken on a life of its own. Speaking to a director off-camera, quick jump cuts of multiple takes, drawing attention to flubbing of lines, are all sort of techniques used in YouTube videos to show “authenticity” to the viewer (ie, I’m just a regular person making these videos).

I was listening to a podcast recently and noticed they left in some banter before an interview started. The banter added nothing to the discussion since they weren’t even talking about the topic yet. Its sole purpose was to make the chat feel informal and, in my opinion, “more real”.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#93
post #58
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…

text is for learning, video is for entertainment, the problem is that people are confused about what they are doing

Yet I've found video lectures and documentaries enlightening as well as a method to teach me something I did not know.

I'd also think that fiction novels are more entertaining than 'educational'.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#94
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sorry if I was unclear. There is no singular optimal way of teaching. But for every subject, there is an optimal way to teach it. And usually that optimal way is a combination of visuals, auditory, reading, etc.

Way too often, someone achieves understanding when information happens to be presented in an optimal way for that information and they instead believe that the way was optimized for them rather than for the information.

Then they get stuck on "I need to watch videos to truly understand it".

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#95
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.

I also love Clickbait Remover (1) to get rid of the customized thumbnail and instead show a random snapshot from the middle of the vid. These days the thumbnails are all noise and no signal anyway.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#96
Are there any tools that will download either the metadata or even the entire video from my YT subscriptions, and that just runs natively on my Linux system (i.e. no Docker/container stuff) ? Something I could look at that isn't YT but would show me the latest (if any) stuff from channel's I've expressed interest in?

I've seen tubearchivist and tubesync, mentioned below, and these just don't operate with the sort of technology I'm comfortable with.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#97
I "subscribe" to any channel I think is decent, supposedly it helps their numbers, but I rarely use the YouTube interface to figure out what to watch next. My real subscription list is my RSS reader and I'm highly selective about what goes in there. When I do watch something on the site, I habitually put it in theater mode right away, which hides the suggestions. I'm sure lots of people would set theater mode as the default if it were an option. I'm sure it's not on purpose.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#98

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…

I find that uBlock Origin (or Brave) isn't enough for YouTube.

If you use Piped [0] you can only watch the updates from channels you are subscribed to without ads, intro, sponsors/promo etc.

[0] https://piped.kavin.rocks

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#99
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's a generational thing. We, in our late thirties, didn't have so much video content, we studied from books, learned from written content. Younger generations adapted to use videos as a learning aid, sometimes as the main learning platform. We won't ever be able to understand how they work. Their brain just adapted to this kind of learning medium. For me video talking about code is slow, unsearchable, uns…

I have just added video tutorials to all my R workshops and have had a _huge_ boost in satisfaction among students (mostly < 30). I can't understand it — the videos are slow, inexpertly produced and have nothing that is not in the text. The students love it though and there is no way I'll be able to run the sister course next semester without also adding videos.

Easier to multi-task maybe? Its really easy to do other things while listening to a video and then jumping into the parts that sound interesting as compared to reading where its necessarily a very active experience.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#100
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…

I think for me it depends. Video's are better if I'm completely out of my depth or its a big project or its something thats new to me. Text can skim over small but important details, videos usually don't (obviously they can edited out, but thats an active process of removing it, rather than a passive process of just not adding it). But if its something I know a decent amount about, I'll always go with text.

Where it gets a bit more interesting is that middle ground. Usually I prefer text in theory, but a lot of the articles written about it are filled with as much fluff as videos, but then you also have cookie popups, ads, location and notification requests, ect... which can make videos sometimes faster, sometimes slower.

I'm in my mid 20's so I don't know if its a generational thing, I might be just an outlier but I couldn't say for sure.

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