My battle with wasting time on YouTube

It’s surprisingly easy for me to waste hours on YouTube watching something i am not that interested in.
The root cause is probably me not having anything to do, or me not wanting to do the things i planned to do.

But i think it’s still good to reduce my time on Youtube.

I don’t think there is value in outright blocking YouTube, as some genuinely useful/mind-changing stuff is on there (for example anything that Technology Connections made or anything that Todepond made)

There is value in reducing the time you spend on youtube, so you focus on the cool stuff.

So, i did some things:

1. I use some random uBlock thing to disable infinite scrolling
2. I use a script that blocks YouTube every odd day
3. I do 10 push-ups for every YouTube video i watch (maybe won’t work for everyone, but this really got me thinking about what i was going to watch)
4. I prefer to not spend as much time in the recommendations feed, instead using the subscriptions feed
   • i hate being algorithmically recommended stuff, instead of deciding for myself, they even got away with making YouTube’s search feature unusable
5. I use an extension to block out some bad elements of YouTube
   • Whatever extension you use, it should be free software and somewhat popular, you can also use uBlock for this i think
6. I speed up videos often
   • I can somewhat easily handle 2x speed and i don’t think there is much use in going beyond that, i often put videos on less speed than that

This worked for me, for some months.

But now i am slightly back to where i was, i don’t follow my own 2nd rule (bypassing it) and my 3rd rule.
My YouTube usage definitely isn’t as horrible as before, but it has definitely increased a little bit.

Maybe if i post about this publicly, i will help people and will start actually following the rules i set for myself.

Also fun fact: Did you know neovim had spellchecking? Try :set spell. You can use z=1 to correct things

I will still follow grammar rules inconsistently, because things like capitalising the first letter of a sentence, or capitalising “i” are useless.
But i like using Neovim’s spellchecking, i love it, i love how they made using a text editor fun. I want my software to be like neovim.

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