hartlco
hartlco

I deleted the Youtube.app from all my devices. Too often I was just watching randomly recommended videos and not the videos I’m really interested in. I added all my subscriptions to my RSS reader and now download the videos I want to see directly with a Siri Shortcut.

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ChrisJWilson
ChrisJWilson

@hartlco I was thinking yesterday about "how behind I am with my YouTube videos" and then I wondered…does it really matter? A lot of them don't really make a difference in my life. curating a list of useful and interesting channels would certainly be better.

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hartlco
hartlco

@ChrisJWilson Yes, my subscription list now just includes channels of which I don’t want to miss a video. Youtube always tried to show me non-sense clickbait instead of the videos I really want to see.

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In reply to
hartlco
hartlco

@PeacheyMcKeitch Yes nonsense clickbait perfectly describes my recent Youtube experience. It was just too easy to fall for it 😁

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jbytes
jbytes

@hartlco @chrisjwilson For whatever reason, YouTube was never something that clicked for me. I have a bunch of friends who've spent hours on it, but for me unless someone links to a specific video, or I'm looking for instructions on something and it is only on YouTube, I never actively go there to browse content. I almost never look at the recommended videos either, I watch the one video I intended to and close it. 🤷‍♂️

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ronguest
ronguest

@joshsullivan There are a couple of useful technical channels I subscribe to so I open the app a few times a week. What drives me away from YouTube is #1 it won’t play video PIP on iOS and #2 if I watch a video I don’t subscribe to YouTube decides it should inundate my recommendations with 1,000 more of those drowning out anything I might actually be interested in.

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hartlco
hartlco

@PeacheyMcKeitch Hosting your own video still can be expensive, especially if you are famous and provide good quality. I believe that’s still a reason for YouTubes dominance. :(

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fcy
fcy

@hartlco I manage to ignore the recommendations (without it being too much work), go straight to my subscriptions and only watch what I want. But the recommendations still bother me, specially when I see others using it

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nickvance
nickvance

@hartlco Nice! I'd be interested in hearing more about the shortcut if you can share.

You might also check out ToWatchList, a service/app I built to help with the watch later problem. There's even a downloader script that can automatically download videos added to the list to your Mac/NAS/etc.

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