Hey Lemmy fam,
After years of wading through endless crap—click‑bait thumbnails, algorithmic rabbit holes, and non‑stop ads—I finally stopped using YouTube. Below are the main reasons I walked away and a handful of privacy‑friendly alternatives that let you keep the content you love without the garbage.
YouTube’s recommendation engine throws endless crap at you, turning a 5‑minute tutorial into a 2‑hour binge you never signed up for.
What I do instead:
- Lemmy – I follow specific communities (
r/technology,c/firefox,c/degoogle ``) and browse chronologically or by “Hot”. No hidden agenda, just the posts I chose. - RSS feeds – Subscribe to the channels I actually care about via an RSS reader (Feedly, Newsboat, or Lemmy’s built‑in RSS). New videos appear as they’re posted, no surprise junk.
Every view, pause, and hover is logged and sold to advertisers. Even with an ad‑blocker, YouTube still harvests data through its API calls and cookies.
What I do instead:
- PeerTube – Decentralized, ad‑free video hosting. Each instance runs its own moderation and privacy policies. You can even self‑host a node if you want full control.
Fair, English is not my native language so I understand being worried about bad spelling but I think there’s more charm to it than anything AI can generate
I limit myself to the old reliable spell checking included on Firefox
English is my native language and I rely a lot on spell check.
Same here. Why do bologna and pony rhyme, but though and through don’t? And yacht has a ch and so on and so forth.
I before e, except after c, or when it says “ay” like in neighbours and weigh. Weird.
Try reading the poem “The Chaos” by Gerard Nolst Trenité
I’m sending this to my English teacher