I am a YouTube Addict
Over the years of using YouTube I have collected around 300 channels that I have subscribed to. It started off innocent enough. I found some cool channels making fun or useful videos that I was eager to watch and happily subscribed. I would be excited to see their videos in my subscription feed and I would watch almost every video that they would put out. As I subscribed to more and more channels I would watch less of their videos. It started to lose its charm. Each channel and the videos they would make became less special. It was just another video in the endless subscription feed. I've now gotten to the point where I feel I have become a slave to feed. Each day it gets harder to keep up and I find myself wasting entire days, just trying to stay caught up. I've had enough of this. It ends now.
I am unsubscribing to everything. Similar to Marie Kondo's KonMari decluttering method, I am going through each channel I have subscribed to, and if it doesn't "spark joy", I am going to unsubscribe. If the channel isn't something that I actively watch almost every video when it comes out, it's gone. I have no time for this waste of my life. Any channels that have useful information, or that I would like to be able to find back for the purpose of watching when I'm having a bad day, will be saved in a list on this page. I hope to have only a small handful of channels that I truly love in my subscription feed, and a library of useful channels here.
It Worked!
I completed this project about a week ago and it's already having its intended effect. My subscription feed is much shorter and far less cluttered. I've been watching almost every video that is published to it. I no longer just scroll through it, looking for a video to watch. I open it up, see one or maybe even a few videos, and I just start watching them. I'm excited to open it to see what videos there are. I used to dread it. It was a chore to find a video to be excited about. I would spend my whole day trying to get caught up, watching videos I didn't even care about. I would distract myself while watching them because if I gave them my full attention I would be bored. My day would start with watching YouTube with breakfast. It would spoil both the videos I would watch, and the food I would eat. Now I get to fully enjoy my delicious oatmeal, without being distracted be a mediocre video. I get to my morning routine quicker. Sitting on my butt to watch near endless YouTube videos is more appealing than working my butt of with cardio and weightlifting. Now that I'm not a slave to the feed, I have less to distract me from getting off my butt and doing the things that actually matter to me. I tend to save the videos for later in the evening when I'm relaxing and winding down for the day. There are things I would rather be doing during this time, like reading or working on a monotonous sewing project, but this is already far better than where I was at. I'll continue to make progress in this area in the future. I have already proved that this strategy works, and now I can improve on it.
Algorithms Are Death
While I have been spending far, far less time on my subscriptions feed, another, more sinister problem has plagued me: The Algorithm. I hardly noticed it before, because I was so focused on my subscriptions, but on every video I would watch, next to it was an endless list of algorithmically chosen videos fighting for my attention. Countless thumbnails purpose built to grab, and waste my attention. With the pressure from my subscription feed gone I started clicking on these videos and going down an endless trap of algorithmic content. I was in even less control of my experience than before. This was incredibly distressing and I needed to do something about it. I tried to resist the urge to click, but I unfortunately have a very addictive personality, which is how I got in this mess in the first place. So, I tried some browser extensions till I found Unhook , which very simply removes the algorithmic feeds and leaves everything else untouched. So far, it's working like a charm and I'm spending a lot less time on YouTube again.
Lessons From the Boycott
Boycotts, huh? At this rate I think I'll end up boycotting everything tech related and live as a hermit. I wouldn't mind to be honest. It seems like everything tech and internet related is awful. My life is probably better off without a lot of this big-tech stuff anyway.
I have quit Youtube. Cold-turkey. I'm done.
Truth be told, it wasn't that hard. There were only two channels I watched anymore. One had an upload schedule so constant, I was no longer able to keep up without anxiety. The other posted infrequently enough, and about a game I already play enough to be content without. This feels like ending a chapter. A chapter that was far too drawn out. An ending desperately needed. Good fucking riddance.