Can you live without YouTube ?
Today in a Privacy community a post about YouTube. No word about privacy but all about which software or settings are needed to watch videos and the money needed to host videos. It made me wonder whether some of you can lead a meaningful life without YouTube. Or will a cold turkey bring the worst out of you ?
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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.
Many of those information are also available in other places. When I need to fix something, I'm usually able to find what I need on the web (manuals, blog posts, etc) before resorting to searching youtube videos on how to do it. Some truly niche stuff are only available on youtube though (e.g. some dude filming himself doing his niche job), but I can count on one hand the instances I needed one of those.
The video makes it so much faster and easier to understand. Plus the top comments usually have supplemental information that helps. If you didn't use YouTube then you would still use another Google entity to find it.
The thing is I don't use google anymore to search these days now that other search engines noticeably produce better results.
Which search engines produce better results than Google?
I'm not comment-OP, but when I use a VPN, google insists on making me do captchas before letting me search. So I just started using duckduckgo because it's usually "good enough."
Sure, by some metrics google is probably still better, but I'd rather not waste my time training their AIs.
Someone actually did a comparison recently. Pretty interesting if you got the time to read it: https://danluu.com/seo-spam/ . tldr: google and bing bad.
There is also a recent study by researchers on Leipzig University that confirm google is getting worse : https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf
with the death of forums and the rest of the internet, for most things, not anymore.
With AI absolutely exploding... It's very easy to ask for step by step directions to accomplish things. AI clearly still needs to mature... But... The times I've asked it for some basic, step by step directions, it's been effective.
While I don't disagree videos make a lot of things easier (I for sure am a visual learning, no question), the step by step instructions for things I've gotten have been good, and very easy to follow.