On Youtube

Looking through Kagi Small Web, I got to read on théoo's experience with ditching Youtube, and I want to share my own experience of going away from YouTube

Unlike them, I haven't completely stopped myself from watching videos - I see that as too drastic. You can't just get away from it after it's been your main time killer. But I did recognize the "danger" of recommendations. My thinking of that coincided with me considering what else should I install on my home server, so I found TubeArchivist - a service that automatically downloads videos

But for that to work you have to first put some feeds into it - playlists or channels, and with how good recommendations are (and that's why they are dangerous), I haven't actually subscribed to the channels I tend to watch, so there was no easy way to make a feed of my own. I've mediated that by exporting my watch history from Google Takeout and using a script that would filter for channels which videos I've watched at least twice during the last few years. That led me to a pretty representative feed, and I didn't have to add or remove many channels on my own (one notable example is removing IGN - I don't want to watch it, but I've watched a fair few of game trailers; and GDQ - not interested in all the games shown, and it takes way too much space)

Default settings of TA are actually pretty okay, but I did disable download of streams and shorts by settings the page size to 0, and set the video page size to 5 - I don't have the space to download that much of backlog

I am pretty proud of the download format I've come up with, here it is in the entirety:

bestvideo[height<=?1000][format_note!*=?AI-upscaled]+bestaudio[format_note!*=?AI-upscaled][format_note*=?original]/bestvideo[height<=?1000][format_note!*=?AI-upscaled]+bestaudio[format_note!*=?AI-upscaled]/best[height<=?1000][format_note!*=?AI-upscaled]

It downloads at most 720p, not upscaled, not voiced over

But to be level with you, it's still a lot of videos to sink into, still enough to fill up the free time most of the days. For that I don't have a solution. Maybe gradually remove channels that matter less, until you can run out of videos for a day or two

Another thing I was suggested is to ask yourself, "am I watching videos because I don't have energy for anything else, or I just didn't realize I could be doing something else?" It's always nice to be mindful, but for this method you do need to come up with something to do (though you have to do it anyway if you were going to not spend time on videos)

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