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

Can I? Yes, I grew up before YouTube and got to see both the growth of the public internet and YouTube. So, I know how to get along without it.
Would I want to? Not really. YouTube is like many things which have come about in human history, it's got it's good parts and it's bad parts. But, on the balance, I think the good outweighs the bad. The important bit is finding that balance where you get more good out of it than bad.

One of the great and terrible things about YouTube is the low barrier to entry. It's very easy for someone with a passion in a niche area to start posting videos. This means that we can get hundreds of hours of videos showing people removing hornet nests. Or, any other random thing I would have never seen in a world of serial TV. You can also get videos showing you how to do almost anything. Granted, those videos can be outright wrong, dangerous or just really bad. But, you may also be able to discover and start a hobby you would have never known about. YouTube has democratized video sharing in a way which didn't exist before it. And I suspect that, were YouTube to disappear tomorrow, something would pop up in it's place to replace it. People want easy video sharing. People want to be able to find copious amounts of weird and strange things. Sure, if you dig too far into the darker corners, you are going to find something you find objectionable. But, that's always a problem with large groups of people, there's always a few rotten apples which need removing.

So overall, I'm pretty positive on YouTube. Yup, it has problems and those need to be worked on. However, I'm far happier to have a place where video sharing is highly democratized, which has problems with that ease of sharing being abused; than I would be without it. The free flow of information necessarily means that objectionable things will be able to flow as well. That sucks, but it's much better than the alternative.

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.

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.

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.

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

lack of content from other competitors

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.

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 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 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.

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 😂

I used to use Reddit every day. I just replaced Reddit time with Lemmy and YouTube.

If YouTube goes down… I’ll live. It’s not a life support thing like income or housing so I’ll just find other things to fill the hole.

Will it suck? Sure. Will I live? Yep. I’d prefer they put out a reasonably affordable subscription instead of just nuking themselves with ads and more enshittification, but it’s not like life itself depends on YouTube.

Their current subscription is too pricey. At least last I looked.

They can get some of my money if they put out a sufficiently lower priced option. I paid for Reddit premium and used none of the features I just liked the site before Steve Huffman decided to be super extra shitty. I’d do the same for YouTube.

Live? Yes. Remain sane? That’s to be determined.

Really though, I watch it for entertainment purposes 95% of the time. If YouTube were to seize to exist, I’d probably find an alternative or stick to streaming services like Twitch.

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.

If I had to give up YouTube I'd move to Nebula. It's been growing and is steadily getting better.

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.

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 can. But I wouldn't.

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.

Yeah. It would suck, but I'll make it.

I guess I know where the good stuff is in the trash heap? I've been a user of Youtube since before Google bought it, and...I think the algorithm just has so much data on me that I don't see a lot of the swill newcomers will. I do believe the platform is enshittifying from several different directions though, particularly from Alphabet.

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.

I use YouTube for instructions on how to do things. I can listen to podcasts anywhere.

I only really use Youtube to watch like a couple specific channels and sometimes to look up music. I could easily fill that space with something else.

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.

Why would you want to live without the biggest video platform? I learn so so so much there. Wish there was berry decentralized options as the current ones are all very thin on content.

Why would leaving YouTube bring out the worst in anyone? Is this what the OP fears of the self? I don’t get it. The entire Internet has many issues and one could hair avoid entirely and live just fine, but the trade offs are just not worth it even with the privacy concerns.

I don’t use YouTube at all.

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.

I did for years before it existed. Did for years after it came around.

It's a great thing to have the video guides and lessons that are available there, but the rest is just entertainment, and there's always entertainment somewhere that isn't full of shit.

And those useful things, well, humanity made do with written directions for decades before video became a realistic option back in the eighties with VHS. TV "lessons" before that amounted to being only cooking shows, and a handful of PBS awesomeness that wasn't really aimed at practical, modern things.

I will absolutely miss instructionals for specific devices being that easy to find, but as long as places like ifixit exist, I can do just fine.

So I think the answer for me is no, but I definitely think I use it very differently than most people who watch YouTube. I don’t watch new things on YT, I don’t follower any YouTubers, it’s basically a repository for MST3K for me, old music videos, and then I will pull movie clips/scans of old films from it for my academic work. I don’t know who the baby gronk rizz king is or whatever, but I’ve found a lot of stuff on YouTube that I probably would not have found elsewhere (other than sometimes Internet Archive)

It would be a lot easier to not look things up with YouTube if search engine results weren't destroyed by quora and Reddit posts

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

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.

I lived 30 years without it, I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to do without it. It's fun, but not necessary.

Absolutely. Almost never use it anyway.

I haven't personally used YouTube as often as before, since nowadays many creators just try to be clickbaity (and yes, I do use the DeArrow extension). I watch YouTube on the TV with my family, though

YouTube is perfect for me for music videos and educational stuff. Medium format stuff. Too long for TikTok, too short for TV.

When I inevitably move away from Google, YouTube will be the last thing that remains. I use it a lot, and there is absolutely no sufficient replacement.

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.

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.