I’m really curious where else everyone here hangs out on the internet besides Lemmy.
I myself am frequently on discord with my wife and friends playing games. I’ve also found myself in and around smaller blogs spaces like Kev Quirk and related people. Reddit used to be a place for me to hang out but I never found a community that I felt connected to. I don’t know if YouTube would be considered a place to hang out, but I frequently spend way more time there than I should. IRC used to be a great place for me.
So, where are your favorite places?
I’m like 90% YouTube, 2% Lemmy and 8% just googling random stuff. Celebrity facts, historical events, programming problems, stuff I want to buy. YouTube is king though. Kinda hate that I waste so much time on it.
What do y’all do on YouTube? I have a couple of subscriptions, but after I watch those, YouTube only recommends garbage to me…
That is why, you need to ‘tune up’ the algorithm 😂
Many of us have been using YT a lot since its conception, that is why the big devil knows us even better than ourselves… Most of the time.
I have almost 600 subscriptions. I’ve been on YouTube since the beginning, pretty much.
Educational stuff mostly. I will learn about mostly anything even it’s not applicable in my life or a topic of fancy.
I avoid every bit of pop culture and drama that fills the site but I will watch a three hour video on the varieties of algae.
That sounds right up my alley. Do you have any good educators you could plug?
You watched some learning materials—programming problems, historical events, etc. That’s educative. At least you learned something.
Also, time you enjoy is not wasted.
The problem with YouTube is that is so easy to just default to letting it feed your brain. Frequently it’s not even enjoyable, it’s just straight distraction from anything meaningful. On the flip side, YouTube can be the absolute best place to learn anything.
True, a typical example is YouTube Shorts. I hate that 15-second trend.
I literally had to disable YouTube shorts. My life improved significantly when I just didn’t have shorts thrown in my face constantly.
How do you do that?
I used this video as a guide and it worked: https://youtu.be/WtFBrB4XqBc?si=635fN0fa7jN77evj
This disables the YouTube shorts suggestions, which is how I would get sucked into watching shorts all the time. You can still go to shorts if you want, but I guarantee you will mostly forget about them with the suggestions disabled. Shows how little value they really give.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/WtFBrB4XqBc?si=635fN0fa7jN77evj
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot!