YouTube's educational value can be unmatched, but it doesn't follow that 99% of time spent on YouTube is educational or even useful.

I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.

Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.

IMO if youtube was an actual paid service, I would also expect a lot of the advertiser driven demonitization actions to go away when your in paid mode, but it isn't so I still miss out on a lot of potentially interesting topics or things that could be talked about, but are not, due to the chilling effects of the demonitization & deboosting police.

> it isn't

It is though. Videos with "limited ads" (as it's technically called in YouTube Studio) applied to them still get paid out of Premium views.

Creators avoid making their videos tagged as such because it significantly reduces their reach and promotion by the algorithm. So it doesn't matter if you still get paid by premium views, the chilling effect still exists.

I don't know what I would replace YouTube with, because YouTube is free so I have never needed to consider alternatives.

But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.

Can you elaborate on your learning journey? How did you separate out the worthless content from quality education programs? Very few Unis post lectures anymore, so it’s all hit or miss for me.

I have completely disabled the history feature, so when I navigate to the homepage there's no "recommended" content. I rely on search exclusively to find what I need. Also I don't have the YouTube app installed, if I need it I just use the browser. This helps minimising the distractions a lot.

As for content, it depends what you're looking for. For me, I'm mostly into maths and physics and there are so many channels and lecture series that were immensely helpful. For example, I recently went through this playlist on Lie Groups [0].

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN_4R2IuNuuRgJb00X2J53Iq9...

What did you learn thanks to it?

How to open my computer

I did learn how to diagnose car problems and how to fix them. these were relatively minor tasks - replace the spark plugs and replace light bulbs. Also Subaru Forester has a problem if the battery gets disconnected too long-I found out about that and what to do about it on YouTube. I also learned how to cook some foods.

That being said, lately YT has way too many ads for my liking; thus I am using Reddit more and more for these things.