6 ms·
Men are ditching TV for YouTube as AI usage and social media fatigue grow
- gradus_ad 7mo agoYouTube Premium is the best $10 I spend per month. Nowhere else can I consistently find the sort of niche content that interests me.
- dominotw 7mo agoi judge ppl who dont have youtube premium as a not curious ppl :D
- dfansteel 7mo agoThere are problems with YouTube and the library is free. https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp01dz010t34x https://dataspace.princeton.edu/handle/88435/dsp01dz010t34x
- nkrisc 7mo agoIs there anything you can watch on premium that can’t watch on YouTube for free?
- loco5niner 7mo agoI think not, mostly just removes ads, and a few other features
- dominotw 7mo agoits more about what you dont want to watch
- lotsofpulp 7mo agoI judge people who watch that much youtube as susceptible to disinformation.
- flohofwoe 7mo agois there a difference between youtube premium and youtube-with-adblocking?
- eru 7mo agoIf you don't watch on mobile, is there anything that YouTube Premiums gives you that an ad-blocker doesn't?
- twobitshifter 7mo agoYouTube music, higher quality video, and the ‘jump ahead’ feature to skip portions of a video that others usually skip.
- Melonai 7mo agoAlso, though not a benefit to you in particular, apparently any creator you watch with Premium gets a way bigger payout for your view. Only heard about this anecdotally but it seems to track.
- butlike 7mo agoYou can do this manually on the free plan. Mouse over the playhead and you'll see a graph. You can click the highest point in the graph which is where most people clicked through to.
- worldsayshi 7mo agoI find YT to be very sloppy nowadays. Not so much AI content as content that is over-optimized for clicks and revenue. 80% filler and maybe 20% substance. I should probably de-algoify my YT experience.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoYT is huge, and there is plenty of good stuff. You just need to subscribe to good channels that are not so easy to find. And block the clickbait channels when they appear.
- worldsayshi 7mo agoI wish we could collectively move over to some decentralized alternative. Even if we make sure to disable the bad parts, relying on these few actors that have such revenue optimized and enshitification-prone business models does not sit right. Although decentralization by itself does probably not protect from this trap in the long run.
- johnnyanmac 7mo agoNothing is really stopping us the consumer. But given that YouTube seems to be the only one in its "medium" (compared to Twitch and TikTok being different formats) that pays creators, it's hard to ask all of them to impact their potential livelihoods. Nebula as a premium service seems to be the best in terms of paying creators and keeping non-perverse incentives. But Nebula is for very specific kinds of content.
- dzhiurgis 7mo agoAsk Mode is pretty great. Wish they’d just summarise all the video titles for me so I could avoid bait.
- aghuang 7mo agoI judge ppl who are brainwashed enough to pay for youtube premium and watch videos based on their thumbnails.
- malnourish 7mo agoThat's your right; I consider myself a very curious person but I never watch YouTube (I have watched less than 10 minutes in 2026). I prefer to read news and information. What little exposure to YouTube personalities and editing styles I've had annoys me to no end.
- eudamoniac 7mo agoVideo is a terrible learning format for most information. I actually judge people who learn primarily through video as having very low information parsing throughput.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo agoI prefer newpipe for $0/mo
- philipphutterer 7mo agoI prefer Tubular with Sponsorblock
- kmarc 7mo agoDo you know how it compares to LibreTube[1]? For the SponsorBlock integration; it works well for me, but I kinda miss the newpipe interface. [1]: https://github.com/libre-tube/LibreTube https://github.com/libre-tube/LibreTube
- philipphutterer 7mo agoI've never tried LibreTube. I am used to the new pipe interface and had all my subscriptions managed their so the move to Tubular was easy.
- thousand_nights 7mo agonowhere near comparable experience if you want to seamlessly use your YT account across a TV + phone + computer i'd rather pay the $10 than pay with my time by being an ad-block whack-a-mole diagnostician
- ovi256 7mo ago> ad-block whack-a-mole diagnostician that is being done as open source community efforts now: NewPipe for mobile, SmartTube for smart TVs etc. All you have to do is update them once in a while
- cbdevidal 7mo agoFor those of us who are too cheap to pay the subscription: On my iPhone I almost never see YTube ads. I don’t use the YTube app and instead I install Chrome and watch YT that way. I lose notifications—which is perfect for me, since I don’t want many notifications on my phone anyway. This might also work in Safari but I haven’t tested it.
- scrollop 7mo agoMore channels are fighting for attention though, so finding more channels are "creating buzz" or "news" based on mediocre information ie. taking things out of context and making unwarranted conclusions or blowing things out of proportions for clickbait titles. "This changes everything!!" Getting youtube fatigue.
- bonoboTP 7mo agoI heavily use the "Not interested" and the "Do not recommend this channel" options a lot and don't click on clickbait, and use the DeArrow extension, and this way my front page looks quite good.
- wrxd 7mo agoAt this point you’re doing almost as much work as if you handpicked a few channels and put them in your RSS reader. Algorithms are sold as “curation is hard, the algorithm does it for you” but getting the algorithm to do a good job is actually a lot of work
- bonoboTP 7mo agoNo, I often get nice recommendations from the long tail, like interesting academic talks or tinkerer channels, videos sometimes with only a few hundred views or even fewer.
- nandomrumber 7mo agoThat’s not an argument against the comment you responded to. If I just took any random 20 creators I’m subscribed to on YouTube, the premium membership fee, which includes YT Music, is more valuable than any of the other streaming services. The only other streaming service I’ve been a paying member even longer than YouTube is di.fm I also occasionally pay for a few months or bassdrive.com and or soma.fm For movies / series, I’m back to sharing.
- jaapz 7mo agoDisabled recommendations. Disabled comments (firefox plugin). Use subscriptions page as the homepage (firefox plugin). Only subscribe to channels that interest me (and aren't annoying like that).
- jasondigitized 7mo agoFully agree. There is so much good content and being ad-free is just a really great experience.
- moffkalast 7mo agouBlock origin + SponsorBlock has a much better price to performance ratio imo.
- saint_yossarian 7mo agoI'd pay that, but it's about $22 in my country...
- joshstrange 7mo agoYouTube Premium is the best ~~$11.99~~ ~~$13.00~~ $15.17 I spend per month... I actually don't care that much about YouTube content and it's not a place I go and hang out, but I'll pay just about anything to avoid seeing ads. Yes, I know ad blockers exist, but getting them to work on laptop, phone, Apple TV directly, Apple TV via casting, etc is not easy or even possible in some cases. If I had to guess I watch ~1hr of YouTube a week, if I watch more than that I'm watching longer-form content, but mostly it's because everyone hosts their videos there so the 3-7min here and there add up to ~1hr (tutorials, product launch, help/documentation video, etc). As much as it pains me to fork over $15+/mo for that, I hate being interrupted by ads more.
- Markoff 7mo agoFirefox + uBlock Origin on smartphone and desktop = no ads (though I personally prefer Vivaldi on desktop, but for simplicity just recommend Firefox) SmartTube on Android TV has no ads and skip sponsors so all you need to remember are two apps FF (+uBO) and SmartTune on TV, you install it once and don't care anymore, comparably difficult with payment for YT
- _DeadFred_ 7mo agoI paid for Youtube Premium. I was still shown ads on embedded youtube videos, and it was changed so that the ads pop up so quick I can click initially and go to the youtube site (where I won't be shown the ads) before the ad starts. I switched to an ad blocker because that was so adversarial on youtube's part in order bypass the 'feature' I paid for.
- 01jonny01 6mo agoWhich sites were you viewing the embeds on?
- burnt-resistor 7mo ago$30 USD/mo for YouTube Premium Family ): They totally made the free experience miserable as shit like airlines do for coach class.
- ssl232 7mo agoNext in Ofcom’s authoritarian sights: YouTube.
- rimbo789 7mo agoOnly 20 years too late. They should have been involved from the start
- INTPenis 7mo agoLong long time ago buddy, I ditched TV 15+ years ago, can't even remember exactly when. I only buy large monitors and mount them on my wall. At first I only watched selfhosted media, but last 8 years it's been more and more Youtube. I'm not too happy about it, would like to wean myself off it. I'm speaking from my own perspective here but scripted media is something I only watch socially, if my partner wants to watch with me. And I end up on my computer trying to type softly next to them. All scripted media just seems so predictable now, I'm like Stan in that one South Park episode lol. It also seems manipulative. I can see how a lot of shows just milk the story for more episodes until they can't milk it anymore. It doesn't seem genuine anymore, maybe it never was? Ratings have always existed, in my lifetime. But the point is that the only newly produced content I watch is just regular people. One example is Antiques Roadshow, it's boring, maybe even "slow" TV, but it's real people. I much prefer watching real people than characters. Something that really bugs me now is live action characters, I'd actually prefer cartoon characters. Because everything is so unreal and over the top, it might as well be a cartoon.
- 0dayman 7mo agoyoutube is good when there's adblockers
- MrBuddyCasino 7mo agoOfcom emitting anti-social media statements shouldn't surprise anyone at this point. There is an ongoing EU-wide war against uncensored communication channels in the form of chat control, age verification, and anti anonymity. All to Protect The Children, of course.
- lonelyasacloud 7mo ago> Ofcom emitting anti-social media statements shouldn't surprise anyone at this point. Where was there anything in that story that was ant-social media?
- raincole 7mo agoOfcom is a disgrace to humanity. I guess this is an early signal that they plan to control how people use YouTube.
- eru 7mo agoUK voters get what they vote for.
- 4ndrewl 7mo agoI think your disgrace-level calibration needs adjusting given everything else that's going on rn buddy.
- lonelyasacloud 7mo agoSo Ofcom publishes a factual report with the positively dull actual title of "Passive social media use, AI companionship, and online side hustles: UK adults’ media and online lives revealed" A report that makes zero comment on controlling how people use YouTube or any other social media. And yet somehow they are "a disgrace to humanity" Really?
- beejiu 7mo agoBecause you can't get doomlooped into right-wing podcasts and "citizen journalism" on the TV. Sample quotes from men in the study: "Who tells me what's right and what's wrong... is it true or is it not true? Some of the things on YouTube are independent. I find I would listen to them more, because they're on the ground. They're telling you the story. " "If you see something on social media, whether you believe it or not, you can go to the comments and see everyone's points… If most people agree with it, you know you should be at least somewhat agreeing with it. " "It seems to everyone that it's an agenda, like the government's behind an agenda… it's like a brainwashing tool for the government. An illegal immigrant killed someone in the street the other day, stabbed them to death… And it's all over Facebook, all over YouTube. And the news hasn’t even said anything about it" Only one man mentioned using YouTube for entertainment.
- ChrisRR 7mo agoThose quotes read like the quotes you'd read from someone's facebook after they've committed an atrocity
- duskdozer 7mo agoSigh. Those comments are truly something.
- twobitshifter 7mo ago> Because you can't get doomlooped into right-wing podcasts and "citizen journalism" on the TV. FoxNews, NewsMax, AM Radio are already good enough for that. I’ve also noticed that most of the guests on TV News are now YouTubers, so even if you are watching TV, you are going to see them. Citizen journalism can be a bad thing, like the Nick Shirley example, but the alternative seems to be that only news Larry Ellison or some other billionaire approves will get on TV, that seems like a far worse scenario to me. For the Iran war, on YouTube, you can see Canadian journalists sailing in the strait of Hormuz and interviews with real Iranians. You cannot see this on CBS.
- beejiu 7mo agoI can only speak from a UK perspective, but all broadcast media here is regulated. So the things you might see in the US just can't happen and don't happen here. Everything has to be editorially balanced. Online media doesn't fall under the same regulations.
- TheRoque 7mo agoYoutube is also pretty boring though. I mean, there are ton of interesting content and quality content too, but the stuff that gets recommended, the "hype stuff" is full of false information, clickbait, tweaked reality to conform some narrative...
- jasondigitized 7mo agoThis is the only downside. You really need to curate good content.
- krapp 7mo agoI don't know about everyone else's experience but I find Youtube to be pretty good at finding interesting content, especially for music. Curation is necessary but it does work.
- magicalhippo 7mo agoWorks fine for me recommending interesting educational and edutainment content. I'm quite aggressively removing videos I don't like from my watch history, or flag "don't recommend" channels I know won't be for me. If I'm not careful it'll recommend crap for a while.
- slumberlust 7mo agoInteresting. One of my many many complaints with YTMusic is that it does discovery very poorly. It fills any radio/discovery queue with one or two new songs followed by all the songs already on my playlists. Other big complaints include no ability to prevent it from substantially using my cell data despite telling it to do everything over wifi. I've taken to just removing network permissions from the app unless I want to add something.
- krapp 7mo agoI'm not using Youtube Music, just regular free Youtube with an ad blocker.
- Lucasoato 7mo agoThe thing is very simple: when watching TV I need to adjust my schedule to the shows I'd like to watch. With youtube (or any streaming platform), I can see them whenever I want, the platform adapts to my schedule. Of course there are some exceptions, for example when I want to watch my national football team, I'd like to watch it live. Luckily, that won't be a problem anymore this year (Italy).
- hnlmorg 7mo agoI don’t think the schedule argument is a strong one these days. DVRs have been around for decades now, and built into satellite and cable services too. In fact, some TVs even have DVR functionality built in. What annoys me is when streaming services release shows on a weekly basis. Which makes them just as inconvenient to watch as traditional broadcasting.
- red-iron-pine 7mo agoyou could just, like, watch it the next day do you need to binge all of the episodes at once?
- hnlmorg 7mo agoBut my point was that you cannot watch it the next day. You have to wait until the following week. And why shouldn’t people binge all the episodes at once? If that’s how they want to watch a series then who are we to say it’s wrong? Let’s also not forget that the entire point of this tangent was people wanting to watch shows on their own schedule.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo agoYou used to be able to set your VCR to record the show at a certain time (and skip the ads by fast-forwarding). DVRs exist too. We have lost a lot of freedom.
- bryanhogan 7mo ago[dead]
- seydor 7mo agoYoutube charges $10 per month and doesn't produce a single video. It's an amazing money maker for them and the only media subscription i pay for (to avoid ads on TVs). They should quit it with the Shorts though, nobody likes those
- halflings 7mo ago> Youtube charges $10 per month and doesn't produce a single video It is different from Netflix (that pays upfront for production costs), but there's of course a revenue share + the bulk of the revenue for creators is actually from sponsorships (which YT doesn't take a share of).
- 0x80h 7mo agoThey get paid to display ads, and they get paid to hide ads. What a fantastic business model. I'm also in the same bucket, happy to pay my subscription.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jaapz 7mo agoI used to be vehemently opposed to shorts, but with recommendations disabled it is tolerable, because only shorts from people I subscribe to are in there. The only reason I really watch shorts is because Vsauce started using them a lot, and his content is definitely worth a watch every time in any format.
- MagicMoonlight 7mo agoAnd they steal all the content for AI training. You couldn't buy their archive for all the money in the world.
- butlike 7mo agoIt didn't used to be like this though, and it feels bad to feel like a rat in a cage with YT. It's an un-winnable situation, choosing between excessive ads and paying the racketeer to be safe from the racket. It just really exemplifies their de-facto monopoly on internet video, and it makes me feel bad.
- jackdoe 7mo agoI will pay anything to watch styropyro!
- falcor84 7mo agoThese seem to be the main relevant insights from the "Adults' Media Lives" report [0] (and they are backed with some good quotes from the participants): > Participants claimed to be streaming more and viewing less linear TV. This is part of a medium-term trend we have seen over recent years. Participants also reported more of their viewing as being on their own, with less shared/communal viewing overall.Many participants claimed to be viewing more YouTube, in particular, in the past year. For some men, YouTube is now their main (or only) form of viewing. - p 20. > Whilst in previous years YouTube was predominantly being used to access specialist content around users' personal interests, it now also seems to serve a broader range of viewing needs. These include “background” viewing (sometimes as a replacement for daytime TV) and videos about random, eclectic, interesting topics – serendipitous content discoveries traditionally associated with linear TV channels. - p 21. [0] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/media-literacy-research/adults/adults-media-use-and-attitudes-2026/adults-media-lives-2026-report.pdf https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/rese...
- chrsw 7mo agoThere's a lot of AI slop on YouTube unfortunately. But with YT Premium (or adblockers) I can't think of a better platform currently for finding distraction free content focused on your interests.
- prplxd_nihilist 7mo ago> Men are ditching TV for YouTube this, and > as AI usage and social media fatigue grow this are not congruent, you are shown way more AI slop in YT than TV, where it is growing - but still no match. If anything, AI fatigue must be making people spend less time on the web. The write-up in the article itself is contradicting this title. Bad title.
- red-iron-pine 7mo agothe slop has been in regular TV for decades. and even if it's not algorithmically generated in a direct sense it is clearly subject matter made and selected by algorithm.
- TYPE_FASTER 7mo agoI have access to more content at the touch of a button than ever before. I struggle to find content I actually want to watch. It's really weird. I can't tell if it's me, or the content, or a combination. I think part of it is our attention span, or lack thereof.
- kalleboo 7mo ago57 Channels And Nothin' On
- SirFatty 7mo ago"UK adults’ media and online lives revealed" Adults are the focus here, not men.
- dzhiurgis 7mo agoI kinda start to feel a but opposite. I’m 20 years off TV this year. But youtube is full of misinformation and garbage while TV is somewhat vetted form of information.
- ModernMech 7mo agoI noticed this about my Dad, he's 66. Growing up he was always in front of the TV watching whatever show was on. Today he's never there, now he's always in front of his iPad watching YouTube, watching videos of tractors excavating things.
- tim333 7mo agoThere's something quite therapeutic about that stuff. I spend a while watching Cutting Edge Engineering fixing bits off bulldozers and the like.
- ModernMech 7mo agoI really like the ones where they take old rusted things and restore them.
- chaoticmass 7mo agoI consume a probably unhealthy amount of YouTube and have for years now. I’ve had Premium since the beginning (still only paying $7.99 a month). At least there’s studies that show directed consumption that I do when I manually search and find stuff to watch is less harmful than the idle scrolling for shorts that you get on TikTok and YouTube shorts.
- err4nt 7mo agoSeen everything on Youtube, I've ditched Youtube for Spotify/listening to music now (and I don't use AI for much besides food recipe questions)