I've been nuking my online presence on big tech platforms, and among the biggest data sources are my Google accounts, including the one I used for watching YouTube.
Using a service they provide for exporting data, I was able to download a list of every video I've ever watched since mid-2020. How many of them were there?
Fifty-four thousand.
I have watched more than 54,000 videos since mid-2020.
I knew that I was chronically online and became complacent due to my disabilities, but seeing it laid bare like this suddenly made it feel much more real.
I am awake an average of 15 hours a day. That's 5,475 hours per year. It's not unreasonable to assume that I spend around 15 minutes on each video on average, especially given that I often read comments. So that's about 13,500 hours for all of the videos.
That means that, since 2020 alone, more than two entire years' worth of my waking hours have been consumed by YouTube.
Two full years of my life, gone. From just YouTube. And the worst part? I hardly remember any of it. Out of all of those videos, I remember maybe 10 or 20 of them off the top of my head. The remaining 99.9% of them were just noise. Void. Nothingness.
How many novel experiences could I have had during that time? How many thought-provoking books could I have read? How many interesting people could I have met? I don't want to know.
I've always felt like there was something wrong about it being 2025 already. It feels like it should be much earlier in the decade. But I think I finally know why: I have created very few memories in the past five years, because most of my time was spent staring at monotonous and forgettable Internet content. That's why time has gone by so quickly.
Instead of trying new things, engaging with enriching material, and meeting new friends, I allowed my time to be siphoned off by an attention-hungry algorithm that doesn't care about the incalculable damage it's doing to millions of lives. I am not the first one to have these regrets, and I certainly won't be the last.
Never again.
I have found that the trick with YouTube that works for me is to use Freetube instead. No algorithm pushing a stream of trash in front of me. I have subscriptions, arranged into categories, and if I want to find something outside of those subscription, the search function works just fine.
friends don't understand how I discover things on youtube, the algorithm is absurdly good these days, if you're getting trash it's because you're watching trash.
I would put money on my new favourite thing being on my front page right now.
Well, the reason I switched to Freetube was initially because I didn't want to play the "advertising wack-a-mole" game anymore. Not having an algorithm in the mix was a fringe benefit that I found I enjoyed.
I'm a newpipe and freetube fan for sure but firefox and ublock have held strong for over a decade now, I often forget youtube even has ads until someone mentions them.
I intentionally don't use a YouTube account when I don't have to and have cookies cleared at exit, so staying logged in is just not something I want. Freetube and newpipe is what I want of an accountless experience that still offers a custom feed and Playlist saves.
I switched to NewPipe ever since the very first alpha version was released. I've discovered so many more niche channels that I would have never discovered had I still been using my Google account.
Without the account, the algorithm recommends me videos exclusively based on the current video I'm watching, which is exactly what I want the algo to do.
I am currently subscribed to over 1500 people on NewPipe now, for reference, with the vast majority being smaller creators. I discover new channels on a fairly regular basis.
My subs are also completely local and sortable into different groups. Google has been known to unsubscribe people from channels without their consent or knowledge, and this prevents that from happening.
Having no ads and Sponsorblock (via polymorphicshade's fork called Tubular or another fork called PipePipe) is also a nice bonus.