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.
I feel like I have a very different experience of YouTube than most people on here. UBlock on desktop and Revanced on mobile means no ads / sponsored bits, which is absolutely essential. But I also don’t have a problem with the dreaded ‘algorithm’.
I don’t know if it’s the kinds of videos I watch (nothing political, or popular) or just not being in the US, but I don’t get recommended AI slop or crazy propaganda. I just looked through the Home feed the app, looks like half of it is channels I’ve subscribed to and most of the rest is channels I’ve watched recently but haven’t subscribed to. There’s a couple of videos from channels I don’t reconognise, so they could be weird slop but that’s not the vibe I’m getting at all, and if I clicked and they were I’d just tag it “Don’t Recommend this Channel”.
Disapproving of YouTube because it’s an evil hegemon makes sense. Supporting alternatives is great (I pay for nebula, even though I end up mostly watching the creators’ videos on YouTube). But I’m always curious about why other people seem to have such a terrible experience of the algorithm.
The algorithm recommends things it thinks you’ll like or have watched before. So if its recommending AI slop, it’s because you’re watching AI slop already. People just refuse to take the time to “train” your algorithm (and this isn’t just YouTube, it’s all algorithmic based platforms). You like / dislike stuff, hide things, give feedback, etc, and eventually you only really see the stuff you actually want to see. Sure some things slip through but 🤷♀️ I use YouTube and will continue to only bc the people I watch don’t post anywhere else, unfortunately.
i do something similar with the adblocking and it think its the 3rd biggest reason why i haven’t yet completely degoogled myself since youtube is a nice experience without that enshitification.
i also use firefox’s containerization feature and that along with only viewing my subscriptions list seems to help with the algorithmic recommendation creep of fluff & propaganda.