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YouTube Addiction

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Re: YouTube Addiction

#81

Post by sillysaurusx »

knaik94 wrote: post #71
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is some crazy shit. Only you can decide if a behavior is addictive. People can suggest it but it's only an opinion. They dont live your experience. Having said that, your watch patterns are shocking to me.

Disordered behavior and addiction is dependent on the specific action having a meaningfully detrimental impact on one's life. Addiction is not a subjective thing, this is why I don't like when people use that word the way the author did. It's a clinically defined thing. I appreciate that it lets me live my life with less struggles. I am far from an outlier in any way. I would recommend looking up average watch time s…

Just wanted to say, I appreciate your measured responses throughout the thread. It’s sometimes a bit hard to be normal but with everyone calling you abnormal (or in this case, crazy) and it’s always nice to see someone who truly doesn’t care.

Radio is a great analogy for this. Compared to entire families coming come and sitting down in front of the national TV, I’d take social media any day.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#82

Post by JimtheCoder »

lettergram wrote: post #12

I've seen this happen to A LOT of people, particularly with TikTok. What's worse is the algorithms are effectively there to (a) keep you watching and (b) manipulate you (in some cases - i.e. increase addictive tenancies, change mood (see facebook studies on this), etc) That said, I have seen this cycle both spiral (as in this case) and be broken before. I've also helped a cousin who had this issue. IMO and this is go…

So basically, get a life? I agree.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#83

Post by clintfred »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #17

This is going to sound sad but I'm aiming to hopefully have a YouTube addiction. I had a severe reddit addiction for many years which wasted the best years of my life, that I recently replaced with a TikTok addiction (reddit banned me anyway). Now I'm trying to step up and wean myself onto longer form video content instead. That's how deep I've gotten myself into this... self-induced ADHD spiral. I can barely even pl…

It's not sad. You have identified a problem in your life! That's awesome. No one has a life with no problems, so you're like the rest of us humans. Now you can decide how you are going to change your behavior. You might consider talking to a friend or maybe a counselor to help you identify changes and unhelpful thinking patterns.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#84

Post by lairv »

theshrike79 wrote: post #73
lairv wrote: post #70

I don't know why the author spends half of the article justifying how can youtube addiction be a thing, it seems to me that social media addiction is now an established thing, which a large proportion of people are subject to If you own an Android phone there is a "Digital well being" settings which allows you to block applications after a certain amount of time spent every day, it also work for time spent on certain…

I've set myself Screen Time on iOS for this exact reason. Yes, it takes discipline to stop, but it's still a good thing that the OS notifies "You've spent a hour on social media already".

Great to know that iOS has the same kind of thing, I was honestly surprised when I discovered it on android, it seems to go against the "engagement maximization" trend and all, I guess it shows that it's a serious enough topic

Re: YouTube Addiction

#85

Post by sebastianvoelkl »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #47
sebastianvoelkl wrote: post #33

I think the YouTube suggestions got worse over time. In 1-2 weeks I will launch www.EduTube.app a platform to discover hand picked educational YouTube videos for those who are interested in it

Will your platform be "making suggestions" after users watch any hand-picked content? How do you plan to monetize this?

Not making any suggestions. A couple of categories are free to watch and for a 20$ one time payment You can have access to everything

Re: YouTube Addiction

#86

Post by YoutubeAdct56 »

Hi, I have this problem. I started using YouTube soon after it launched, in mid-2006. I still use the account that I created at that time.

I am subscribed to over 900 channels, and as I scroll through them I can remember fondly watching each one of them. Some of them haven’t produced content for many years.

According to the watch statistics in the YouTube app, in the last 7 days I have watched for over 43 hours. I would say this is a typical weekly watch time for me, with some weeks going up to 70 hours, if there is time off of work.

I have a full time software engineering job (at a fairly high level), and I don’t think that many of my coworkers would guess that I have this problem.

Most of these hours are spent actively watching the content, although I do cook, clean, and work out while watching YouTube as well.

I really want to reduce or elimiate the time I spend on YouTube. I have tried most of the tricks mentioned here: changing my phone to black-and-white mode, using alternative apps with no recommendations, deleting the apps, setting the time limit setting on my devices. Somehow, I always find myself in a habit of “getting around my own system”, to the point that it’s almost laughable how I’ve built up muscle memory for it.

I seriously feel as though I have a problem. Spending 40-70 hours a week on something that you don’t want to be doing is pretty severe. It is certainly affecting my health and other aspects of my life.

A true local, in person, twelve step program for this type of thing is something that I have been seeking for years.

Re: YouTube Addiction

#88

Post by [deleted] »

gunshai wrote: post #37
TexanFeller wrote: post #29

I'm the type to become addicted and I had a big problem with spending vastly too much time on YT. A few months ago I cleared my search and watch history and subscriptions to start fresh. Now I only allow myself to watch videos about math, science, or playing instruments I'm interested in learning to play. If I ever see a politically leaning recommendation I tell YT to never show it to me again. If I slip up and watch…

I wish there was a way to transpose someone else's "YouTube diet" so to speak. this probably exists through tag matching ect. but it would be nice.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube Addiction

#89

Post by Phemist »

mythhouse wrote: post #62
Phemist wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some time ago, a nice fellow HN user @boriselec wrote a browser plugin for, in the end, my personal use (as barely anyone uses it), that redirects all video links to their /embed variant. /embed links are meant to be embedded in other pages and do not show any UI clutter. As it happens, they also work perfectly well if (re-)directly opened! Comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23148026 Extension here: h…

> This add-on is not actively monitored for security by Mozilla. Make sure you trust it before installing.

Yeah.. but luckily the add-on is simple enough that a source-code inspection is feasible (which I did). There's nothing weird going on in the add-on, but please do your own due diligence :)
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