I’ve been nuking my online presence on big tech platforms, and among the biggest data sources are my Google accounts, including the one I used for watching YouTube.
Using a service they provide for exporting data, I was able to download a list of every video I’ve ever watched since mid-2020. How many of them were there?
Fifty-four thousand.
I have watched more than 54,000 videos since mid-2020.
I knew that I was chronically online and became complacent due to my disabilities, but seeing it laid bare like this suddenly made it feel much more real.
I am awake an average of 15 hours a day. That’s 5,475 hours per year. It’s not unreasonable to assume that I spend around 15 minutes on each video on average, especially given that I often read comments. So that’s about 13,500 hours for all of the videos.
That means that, since 2020 alone, more than two entire years’ worth of my waking hours have been consumed by YouTube.
Two full years of my life, gone. From just YouTube. And the worst part? I hardly remember any of it. Out of all of those videos, I remember maybe 10 or 20 of them off the top of my head. The remaining 99.9% of them were just noise. Void. Nothingness.
How many novel experiences could I have had during that time? How many thought-provoking books could I have read? How many interesting people could I have met? I don’t want to know.
I’ve always felt like there was something wrong about it being 2025 already. It feels like it should be much earlier in the decade. But I think I finally know why: I have created very few memories in the past five years, because most of my time was spent staring at monotonous and forgettable Internet content. That’s why time has gone by so quickly.
Instead of trying new things, engaging with enriching material, and meeting new friends, I allowed my time to be siphoned off by an attention-hungry algorithm that doesn’t care about the incalculable damage it’s doing to millions of lives. I am not the first one to have these regrets, and I certainly won’t be the last.
Never again.
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I want to point out that this isn’t new to YouTube. I’ve seen this rant before about someone realizing just how much time they spent watching TV. The difference is that, at least for me, YouTube is a multitask a lot of the time, whereas the people talking about TV in the past were only doing that.
I mostly find and listen to music I would otherwise never have been exposed to.
or tutorials on things I’m actually learning.
it’s easy to fall down a brain rot rabbit hole if you’re using it for entertainment instead of education.
The remaining 99.9% of them were just noise.
any recommendations? j/k I know what you mean.
How much of this was music and podcasts?
Yeah like, if it’s all just fortnite streams, valid that that’s a waste of time.
If it’s music, educational stuff, and tutorials, then that’s valid. I learned how to do heaps of things on YT that I would have struggled to learn otherwise.and they are productive, useful, enriching things.
I’d argue that those Fortnite streams are not necessarily a waste of time. OP could have watched Fortnite streams while doing the dishes or left it running while reading something else. OP could have left an automatic playlist running overnight because he dozed off. Playing devil’s advocate here obviously but I’m compelled to do it when someone makes a case with obvious gaps in context.
The trick with YouTube is what they show you is based on the videos you’ve watched in the past year. So you have to delete stuff from your watched videos history, and curate it down to what you want to be influenced by.
I actively delete everything from my watched list but art videos, lots happier.
I have found that the trick with YouTube that works for me is to use Freetube instead. No algorithm pushing a stream of trash in front of me. I have subscriptions, arranged into categories, and if I want to find something outside of those subscription, the search function works just fine.
friends don’t understand how I discover things on youtube, the algorithm is absurdly good these days, if you’re getting trash it’s because you’re watching trash.
I would put money on my new favourite thing being on my front page right now.
Well, the reason I switched to Freetube was initially because I didn’t want to play the “advertising wack-a-mole” game anymore. Not having an algorithm in the mix was a fringe benefit that I found I enjoyed.
I’m a newpipe and freetube fan for sure but firefox and ublock have held strong for over a decade now, I often forget youtube even has ads until someone mentions them.
I intentionally don’t use a YouTube account when I don’t have to and have cookies cleared at exit, so staying logged in is just not something I want. Freetube and newpipe is what I want of an accountless experience that still offers a custom feed and Playlist saves.
I switched to NewPipe ever since the very first alpha version was released. I’ve discovered so many more niche channels that I would have never discovered had I still been using my Google account.
Without the account, the algorithm recommends me videos exclusively based on the current video I’m watching, which is exactly what I want the algo to do.
I am currently subscribed to over 1500 people on NewPipe now, for reference, with the vast majority being smaller creators. I discover new channels on a fairly regular basis.
My subs are also completely local and sortable into different groups. Google has been known to unsubscribe people from channels without their consent or knowledge, and this prevents that from happening.
Having no ads and Sponsorblock (via polymorphicshade’s fork called Tubular or another fork called PipePipe) is also a nice bonus.
Best thing to do is turn on history for a couple days then put it back on pause. Mine is always paused except every 90 days or so for the algorithm to refresh what I’m into in “now”
I like to let it use my subscriptions as the base source for recommendation
One of the reasons I went cold turkey on video games is because TF2 would tell you how much time you spent playing each character
God damn dude
Prolly ain’t even that rare and people who have obligations are still putting the little time they have into the phone time.
Prolly more so because that all you got energy for.
I don’t say this to downplay your experience, but as a more positive way to look at it. Maybe you couldn’t have come to this realization without having gone through this. Maybe you didn’t waste your time, and you didn’t miss out on anything, because you were doing what seemed right at the time and now you’ve learned from it. You wouldn’t have this new clarity without having gone through the darkness.
That’s what I was thinking, too. Spending so much time on the Internet and observing the consequences ultimately radicalized me against it in a way that more casual usage probably wouldn’t have.
The chances of someone as weird as me coming along and convincing me to quit doomscrolling was probably pretty low, lol. So maybe this was exactly what I needed to do!
Bet my number is high as fuck too, but I’m almost never actually WATCHING the content, so it’s not time specifically wasted by YouTube thank god
Now do the math for porn
I never sign in, so I can’t get the statistics
I also don’t like the grip YouTube has on me. I found it really hard to break because sometimes there are legitimate reasons to be watching videos on YouTube, such as for home repairs. Still, most of my time there is wasted.
I’ve tried installing Leechblock and that has helped for a lot of other sites.
Although, since YouTube is special (tutorials), Leechblock gets too much in the way and I end up disabling it.
Instead, I found Unhook is a better fit. It doesn’t block the website like Leechblock. It just removes the addictive parts of the websites, like feeds and recommendations.
(Also works on Firefox mobile!)
This has been great because I can still watch YouTube for repairs, tutorials, etc for as long as necessary, but I don’t get pulled into a rabbit hole with all the addictive crap.
5,500 hours in Team Fortress 2 and over 6k in Guild wars 2. I do not regret any of it. Had lots of fun and even met my wife in gw2.
You only lose time when you do things you do not enjoy.
Realizing you are not really enjoying something is a whole other discussion ofc.
5300 hours in tf2 and counting for me. Recreation isn’t necessarily wasted time.
Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time!
Also, not every waking second has to be productive. That’s some real capitalistic brainwashing.
100%.
All of our time should be “us” time. If you enjoy watching YT videos, great. You can learn a lot, you can laugh a lot, or you can just relax. All of this is fine.
Work steals much more of our life and pays us in fuckin pennies. And exploitation.
To be fair, OP didn’t say he wanted to work more.
How many novel experiences could I have had during that time? How many thought-provoking books could I have read? How many interesting people could I have met?
YouTube stole his time that he wanted to use for more fulfilling activities for him.
If YouTube is fulfilling for you, that’s ok. However, OP wanted to do other fun things.
First: how much of that was “second screen viewing”? I and countless others tend to just put a youtube on the side monitor while working or doing other activities
But the most important thing: This is no different than watching TV back in the day. Basically any millennial has memories of just turning on the TV after school/work and watching Seinfeld or Friends reruns (replace that with the tv show of your country). That is really no different than turning on youtube and seeing that The Algorithm thinks you should watch a Brooklyn 99 compilation. And that is no different than popping in to do a few void relics in Warframe or a couple ranked matches in call of duty or whatever.
And… that is no different than spending 20 hours or whatever to read the latest Sanderson doorstopper (I read on my kindle and I genuinely don’t want to know how long that book was because I stayed up until 4 am during the final mad dash stretch…).
Which gets to what the “content creators” have already realized. It isn’t a competition over what show you are going to watch or what game you are going to play. It is what you are going to do that night with all media being equal.
So it is very good to be aware of how you have been spending your free time (even if I think you are misinterpreting data). But it is also important to understand what you are actually replacing it with. I have old clan buddies from my UT days who talked about how they stopped watching TV… but they watch youtube instead. Or who had a mid-life crisis and are working toward being just as good at frigging Apex Legends as they (thought they) were at UT and so forth. Hell, one buddy basically goes on a long hike every single night after work. And while he is definitely the healthiest among us… The reality is that that is still just “comfort entertainment”.
Personally? I’ve spent the past few years being more mindful of what I do in my spare time. That isn’t to say I stopped watching comfort youtube or even rewatching Seinfeld. But I make it a point to set aside time to learn new skills. AND… probably more importantly… I set aside time to expand my experiences. CRPGs are fricking LONG and even the best studios (Owlcat and Obsidian) have pacing issues. But I also know that I will get a whole lot more out of the thought provoking moments from 40 hours of Pillars versus 40 hours of even Dwarf Fortress. Same with books. I love Sanderson and suspect I may have found even more entertainment from trying to analyze author’s intent more than the plot of Wind and Truth (and I LOVED the plot of Wind and Truth). But it is still a comfort read. Whereas even something like Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass is a much less entertaining book but is also one that stretches my brain far more.
I am interested in how to get this data cause I want to see how bad I have been.
For anybody struggling with YouTube in particular: Deactivating the YouTube watch history dumbens (?) down the algorithm for that account.
It makes breaking away and out of the YouTube cycle easier.
I don’t know if this hasan effectin YouTube shorts though, that still feels like addictive af, so I stay away from them.
Video suggestions still fit the user but are less perfect and clicking the next video feels less like crack-cocaine.
Goto: settings-history& something else-you might have to login now-the history toggle should be the first site that pops up
PS: my phone died while composing this comment and I thought I gotta find the post after restarting to send the comment because maybe it helps someone
