YouTube is so Evil

Waah waaah YouTube is so evil!!! They do all this evil stuff like removing my dislikes and they play many ads!!! I’m crying why do they keep doing fucking me over and I keep coming back?

Do you know what alternative is to YouTube that many don’t seem to consider?

Not using it! Yes! It’s this easy — just stop going to their website — or if your brain is infected by smartphonosis just uninstall the app (if it’s even possible on your shitty phone without fucking with ADB or rooting it) or stop opening it.

Oh but I need it for my— shut the fuck up. You don’t. You don’t need to keep coming back to a thing you don’t like using or you feel the negatives of using it outweigh the benefits. If you do feel you HAVE TO keep coming back to it despite disliking it, this is a sign of addiction. It’s literally what addiction means.

The only acceptable use of YouTube is if it’s the only source of information about a thing you want/have to learn, but even this is often stupid as YouTube awards clickable, engaging, flashy and dumbed-down content for the masses, not well researched, solid, in-depth information. Anything entry-level you will find with a single Google web search that will point you to many sources you wouldn’t have ever found on YouTube. Most of “education” videos on YouTube are just reading you papers/articles they found via some simple web search and you only get presented the absolute basics about a certain topic. It’s obvious why it is like this — get more in-depth and less people will be interested or skilled enough to watch the video. It won’t get as many views, won’t get pushed to people’s feeds by the algorithm and won’t get the video’s producer MONEY.

B-but my aunt sends me videos of cute cats there… — Then either watch it on some alternative frontend like invidious or FreeTube I don’t care. At least this way you don’t go there without a purpose and you don’t expect any kind of a standard. Watch the video and you’re done. Or just don’t watch it.

If you need reasons to quit here are some:

• Being owned by Google
• Deleting annotations whilst removing ages of internet culture
• Removing dislikes making you unable to tell the legitimacy of a video
• Inflating the size of thumbnails to the point that they actually show you 2 thumbnails at a time (I’m not kidding) on a full HD screen instead of 15 as it was in 2017
• Dumbing down search results to only a few slightly related to your query, then showing you “shorts” and completely unrelated videos, usually the ones you’ve seen already. You get 10x better results by using Google to search for YouTube videos
• Dumbing down video recommendations, same case as above
• Hiding the length of ads played, now the progress bar only shows you when you’ll be able to skip the currently running ad, not when it ends. Previously the progress bar was showing you the ad’s length and a separate counter was present in the “skip ad” button
• Removing the ability to search by upload date making the algorithm choose what you watch
• Deleting colored subtitles from various videos* see response
• Hiding every comment that could be interpreted as even slightly negative (or containing a link) under every video without the uploader’s knowledge, making the comment section an overly positive and love filled place. Comments such “are you dyslexic?” will always get removed. This makes conversations impossible. At the same time they let countless bots run around freely and promote scam porn websites. For years.
• Artificially wasting your time when ads are blocked - especially on Firefox
• Constantly changing the UI for no reason other than maximizing profits and keeping the designers’ and devs’ jobs. Fucking up the player so clicking in the corners (fastest accessible places on your monitor) to either play or put a video on fullscreen is impossible
• “Not interested” and “Don’t recommend channel” disrespecting you
• Removing community subtitles making videos inaccessible for many

I will keep adding to this list as I want to keep a personal record of these