Asklemmy

Nope. Just this week YouTube helped me fix a squeaky dryer for $18. Repair guy wanted $100 to come out, estimated a $300 repair. The amount I saved there has paid for premium for a year and I use it for everything. Fixed my washer, ran 220v for my new stove, countless baking recipes, woodworking tips. It's not like Netflix where you only get entertainment from it, there is actual good info.

No, i'll die. What a question

The majority of the online entertainment for me is YouTube, so I probably couldn't just quit it. I bailed on reddit to come here, but reddit was only 2-3 hours a day, YouTube is like 10+ hours a day for me.

At least 60% of my internet time is YouTube. I rely on it for entertainment, news, education, discovering music, technical help, ETC...

Could I live a meaningful life without it? Probably, people have been living meaningful lives before the invention of the computer in general... But I wouldn't give it up because there is an immense amount of incredible content there that genuinely makes my life better.

YouTube is my streaming app. They have me by the throat. I could give up every other video app before I gave up YouTube. I wish it weren't true, but it is. YouTube just has the best content.

Honestly I think I would find that one difficult. It essentially replaced conventional TV for me in the last 10-15 years. I use a privacy-respecting front-end so I'm never at youtube.com itself but if they killed it off I would find it difficult to adapt.

lack of content from other competitors

Yes/no.

I lived without YouTube / a Google account for years.

But I still use YouTube through a privacy respecting frontend:
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/frontends/#youtube

I usually go for:

• On desktop: Invidious or Piped
• On Android: Tubular or NewPipe

YouTube has one use for me - the occasional video on how to do something technical

How people watch hour after hour of other people's inane ramblings I will never know. You must have have an incredibly low bar for what you consider entertainment 😂

As of today no. But I'm going by steps :

• I've stop using it without a front-end.
• I look for other source of content from my favorite youtubers (podcast host somewhere else, web site, social media, blog especially for cooks)
• I search for content on other plateform before it (but it is far for being systematic right now

My goal is not to go full private or open-source but just less dependent on YouTube. Onfortunately so many youtubers are solely there.

Anyway, I believe that the day big for-profit intrusive company will stop leading the video hosting business, the format will get noticeably less popular as it is extremely ressource intentive. It will mostly replace by podcast and illustrated articles.

I spend most of my free time watching YouTube. At times I wish it would go away. Even though they are a lot of valuable videos, there are also far more videos that I'm not interested in. I also don't view YouTube with ads. I refuse. I'll up YouTube before I watch ads.

I feel as though I missed the heyday of youtube, and only really started using it within the last few years, so perhaps my perspective is a bit skewed, but I don't really get the point of a lot of content on there. A lot of the content I consume could easily be replicated elsewhere, or in a different format. A good deal of tech content I consume would be improved, in my view, if it were just a website with an associated discussion forum for clarifying or expanding upon any points people don't fully get. Plenty of food channels would be better if they were just a cookbook, because they waste so much time on stuff nobody cares about in order to hit a magic length for the algorithm. Most of the long form stuff I come across could just be podcasts without losing anything of value for me.

I'm entirely willing to say this may well be my "old man yells at clouds" moment, but I just don't get the majority of youtube content. The appeal of things like Lets Plays (outside of seeing exactly how to beat a spot you're stuck on) and Vtubers is completely alien to me. I do enjoy travel content, but I find a lot of the stuff uploaded by independent youtube creators to be pretty exploitative and don't enjoy watching it. I don't think BBC or Arte or the like willl disappear with youtube. I doubt I'll miss it very much when it eventually gets killed and Google launches a worse video site one of these days.

Of course anyone can live without YouTube, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of enjoyable content that I would miss without it.

I'm all in if something like Peertube gets adopted more fully, but given the sheer amount of space YouTube takes up it seems unlikely to be at the stage it is currently with a provider like Google.

For my own usage: I could substitute background noise with music (either through another provider like Spotify or locally hosting the music and streaming it with Jellyfin), and then more long form content could be done with other providers (Netflix, Disney+, or renting from Google lol) or again using DVD's or locally hosted videos, but it would certainly be a challenge and I'd miss a lot of the content.

Blows my mind with the responses on here. I use YouTube maybe once a month, if something interesting pops up? Or for a music video or a science related subject. Reading is just so much more pleasant than trying to go through all the spam, trash, ads, and bad videos. I don't know how you all stand youtube personally.

Of course you can, billions of people do it allready, it'll be annoying at first, but then you'll adapt.

I watch hours of YT every day, but if it stopped working/existing my life wouldn't end, just as it didn't when I left Reddit, I'll find other things to do and services to use.

I barely watch YouTube as it is. Sometimes I have to watch a tutorial or review that I can't find information on elsewhere, but literally every time I wish it was a blog post instead.

I quit YouTube along with reddit last summer. I don't use alternate interfaces. I haven't found a replacement for most of the niche content I liked to watch there -- and yes, that sucks.

I've mostly been watching offline content (like DVDs and things I downloaded years ago) when I want video entertainment, and doing other stuff with my free time.

You might think that'd mean more time playing games given my interests, but I've found I'm a lot less enthusiastic about playing through games if I can't watch an LP or two of it afterwards. So, I'm actually playing (and also buying) less of those than I used to too.

Especially with the Premium algorithm, it's just so good at finding super niche stuff that's pretty interesting. Been watching some Netflix shaming levels of documentaries made by super passionate people.

I kind of hate the privacy nightmare but it actually delivers really well for me.

I used to watch A LOT of youtube. Since I started educating myself about google and corpo stuff I lost most interest I had. Now I only watch gameranx and gamers nexus from time to time.

I started watching (and hosting peertube) some time ago and slowly add new channels to my list. Its getting better. Linux and tech stuff kind of works on there imo. Everything else needs more love.

We‘re at a particularly rough time imo since peeps are trying to switch but many hurdles work against them. Federated social media in general is still WIP, funding is a huge issue, accessibility is an issue and a healthy testing workflow (asking users for consent of automated bug reports, making them actually useful, shielding devs from too much user critique, etc.)

As someone with both accessibility needs and experience in customer relations I often see wasted potential because too few peeps with a samdwich skillset (between user and dev) are actually in the foss scene, particularly in small projects.

I really hope foss will endure these growing-pains.

I barely use YouTube in the first place

Yes. I blocked it a year ago, and it's been such an improvement.

Absolutely. Almost never use it anyway.

I use it for everything and often background noise.

I could survive without it but I would miss it. Not so much YouTube but a service like it.

I guess yes. I use it from time to time via NewPipe to look up some bike repair stuff but I guess I could easily find that somewhere else in the web. But I think this could be a generation thing, I know many people only a few years younger who absolutely depend on random internet people explaining the news to them in video format or stuff like that.

If YouTube died tomorrow I'd be sad to lose a lot of my regular content, especially edutainment like Steve Mould, Veritasium, and Tom Scott.

But I'd probably just replace that portion of my time with some other form of content consumption, like streaming more shows or more reading.

I've been paying for Nebula account for a while now. It's got high quality stuff and it's owned by creators making the content.

There's also peertube and other fedi variants.

Works great for me, I don't feel like I need YouTube or I'm missing out on important stuff.

NewPipe/Piped to watch occasional video linked from an article.

I wouldn't really miss it all that much. I've always treated YouTube as a fun novelty where I can watch people's homemade videos, but it's almost all polished commercial grade content now, with some exceptions.

Those software and settings that make it tolerable, such as Tubular and using uBO/Sponsorblock/Firefox, are extremely easy to find and use. But I wouldn't miss it all that much if it became unusable.

The problem with YouTube is there isn't an alternative.

Anytime I think it's morphed to a state where people will leave for the next great thing, they don't.

The content is there, and alternatives don't have that backing them so it's too inconvenient to move on. Once people have that pain point, they go back.

Honestly it depends. A lot of my online time in the last ~5 years has strayed away from YouTube. Most of my time is just spent playing musicbee while browsing anidb/ MAL/ MFC, searching for rares / chatting on soulseek, or watching anime / movies. But YouTube does come undeniably handy for those times where you want something you can't find anywhere else online, like people going solo into hard-to-access countries to record their journeys, or tutorials that explain things in much more detail than text could due to visual demonstration, or more in-depth reviews of products where the video makes it a lot easier to feel the size / scale of the product I'm looking at.

Could I do it? Sure. But it would definitely be hard for a long time, as I track down various blogs / self hosted websites with what I liked to use YouTube for. But honestly that kind of internet might be better. Or if a smaller platform would gain more traction so YouTube wasn't the only option. I think that would be ideal.

I used to watch a lot of YouTube stuff (like probably a good ten hours a week) for years. Since covid lock down (4 years ago!) I have barely watched anything on it. I still add videos to my watch later play list but I know I'll never watch them all as I've got hundreds of videos there...

It would be tough in the beginning but sure. I’ve watched everything interesting anyw… oh what’s that? Another rabbit hole!

I have been living without YouTube for years. That includes alternative front ends too.

Although I must admit, i have a Netflix subscription which I use very actively.

Yes, I can live without youtube I survived the 1980s and 1990s - I'm not saying my life is or was "meaningful" though - that'll be discernable if the maggots enjoy their dinner whenever the time comes.

I also think there were at least a few generations of humans before that, some of whom may think they led at least slightly meaningful lives.

I don't think youtube makes anyone's life more or less "meaningful", it's just a way to pass the time - but that's just my opinion on carbon-shuffling in general. If you accept peoples own objectives instead of mine, then youtube might help them learn stuff - but even then I'd look to measure the content of their consequent actions, much more than learning in abstract. They've still got to put their new knowledge together with skills , practice and the real world circumstances to before anyting "meaningful" happens - and that's due as much to their hard work as much as to their teacher.

But I do prefer to watch a few people's videos on there as entertainment, only a few of them post on that p2p thing "lbry" or whatever so i dont use that. I will continue to watch youtube videos given the choice, and not having somethign better to do, until those people move their videos to somewhere else.

I've recently been finding out that freetube client removes much of the front end unpleasantness.

I don't get the appeal of YouTube. I use it for maybe the odd music video or something, but often you'll just get someone's annoying commentary instead of the actual thing.

I live without it and it's great! Try it.

The only thing I use it for is Dreaming Spanish, and it's months since I've watched any of that content, so I'll say yeah, I think I'll be ok in a world without Youtube