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   Gabe Kangas (gabek@social.gabekangas.com)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 05:00:01 JST Gabe Kangas
   It's been three weeks now since I've blocked YouTube on my home network. As much as I hate YouTube, I'd find myself watching stupid videos on it because of the algorithm for much longer than I anticipated.
   
   So I was just done with the wasted time, and I was done with it making me feel like it was taking that control away from me. So I blocked it at the PiHole layer.
   
   Here are some things I've discovered in the past three weeks.
   
   - The most obvious is like cutting off anything cold turkey if you realize how much of a habit it is. I'll just open it on my AppleTV and put something random on just to let it play. And I kept opening it even after I blocked it without thinking, only to be greeted to a "you're offline" message.
   
   - There are not an insignificant number of things I would learn about for the first time from a YouTube video being surfaced to me because the algorithm is so tuned into me. I didn't even know my favorite band released a new song until somebody told me directly. Without those CNN clips, or music news or whatever I went blind because I didn't replace it with anything else. I didn't know I had to. I didn't realize I was doing that.
   
   - You don't notice how many web pages are littered with YouTube embeds until you block them all and they show up as errors instead.
   
   - I get sent a ton of YouTube links from people. So for each one, individually, I'll disable my PiHole for a couple of minutes. Long enough to watch that single video because somebody sent it.
   
   I realize what I really want is to be able to only watch a small group of accounts, treating YouTube like a video podcast. When a new video goes live I can download it and watch it. No recommendations, no "other videos by this creator", nothing. Just one video at a time, allowing me to watch 5 videos a week or something that I care about. I'm going to look around to see if there's a system already built around this. Otherwise I might write some small shell scripts with youtube-dl or something. Though I don't know if there's API access to a user's video list.
   
   Any recommendations?
   • ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
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     wuhan.bat™ (jae@darkdork.dev)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 05:02:49 JST wuhan.bat™

     in reply to

     • m0xEE
     @m0xEE @gabek i've maybe 30 movies that really "hook" me as it were. i'm usually coding, reading, making/mixing music, or streaming owncast
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
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     m0xEE (m0xee@nosh0b10.m0xee.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 05:02:51 JST m0xEE

     in reply to

     • wuhan.bat™
     @jae@darkdork.dev @gabek@social.gabekangas.com
     Yeah, I see a lot of people getting addicted to it. For me this inability to focus on videos became a blessing in disguise, watching movies used to wear me out and is still painful at times — but YouTube appearing is when this "feature" of mine started to shine 😂
     
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     wuhan.bat™ (jae@darkdork.dev)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 05:02:52 JST wuhan.bat™

     in reply to

     • m0xEE
     @m0xEE @gabek
     
     i don't have any local friends, but for me it was more i was not allowing myself to focus so i blocked it. yt for me is more about finding media that i'm missing (i.e a rare clip that's not on archive) or perhaps discovering different music that may not be elsewhere. it's really a slippery slope of consumption that can be tricky to stop
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
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     m0xEE (m0xee@nosh0b10.m0xee.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 05:02:54 JST m0xEE

     in reply to

     • wuhan.bat™
     @jae@darkdork.dev @gabek@social.gabekangas.com
     I had YouTube blocked on my home network in the 2000s — because every time we got together with friends to have a few beers at some point was starting to roll downhill as they've been starting to put YouTube videos on 😩 Like come on guys ,I invited you over to talk, not do this!
     Hated this shit! So I got it blocked. Nowadays I don't block it because now no one ever suggests this 😁
     Me? I never really got into it — video is probably not my medium, I don't get "addicted" watching it, I think it might even be the opposite for me, e.g. I can listen to music and read at the same time, but video requires attention of all your senses at once and for me it requires certain effort.
     That is probably why YT's algorithm doesn't work on me either — I know that even if the topic sounds interesting I'd probably never finish watching the video, same with links to YouTube people send me — in most cases I simply ignore them.
     I do like watching something lightweight and humorous (especially when recuperating from hangover 😏) — but these are usually videos from the same authors and I have them locally — downloaded with yt-dlp with all the metadata, sorted and accompanied with playlists.
     i know it's likely cumbersome, but when people send me links i toss it through an outbound proxy i have on a vps upstream that doesn't block yt
     I'd suggest running tinyproxy right on the router — so that it circumvents pi-hole, and using it as a proxy to download videos with yt-dlp. Were I interested in particular channels, I'd probably make a script that watches these channels' RSS feels and if something new pops up, downloads it with yt-dlp via tinyproxy.
     
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     wuhan.bat™ (jae@darkdork.dev)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 05:02:55 JST wuhan.bat™

     in reply to

     @gabek

     first of all, congrats on the experiment.

     It's been three weeks now since I've blocked YouTube on my home network. As much as I hate YouTube, I'd find myself watching stupid videos on it because of the algorithm for much longer than I anticipated.

     perfect reason to drain the mental cluster (so to speak)

     • I get sent a ton of YouTube links from people. So for each one, individually, I'll disable my PiHole for a couple of minutes. Long enough to watch that single video because somebody sent it.

     i know it's likely cumbersome, but when people send me links i toss it through an outbound proxy i have on a vps upstream that doesn't block yt

     I realize what I really want is to be able to only watch a small group of accounts, treating YouTube like a video podcast. When a new video goes live I can download it and watch it. No recommendations, no "other videos by this creator", nothing. Just one video at a time, allowing me to watch 5 videos a week or something that I care about. I'm going to look around to see if there's a system already built around this. Otherwise I might write some small shell scripts with youtube-dl or something. Though I don't know if there's API access to a user's video list.

     probably many options for this. any channel or creator i'm interested in, i get the rss feed, a daemon pulls it every n(x) to check for updates. if there's an update, it drops the link to a sub-process to yt-dlp and of course pipes through the previous mentioned outbound proxy so i don't have to disable network-based ad/site blocking.

     let me know if you want to ping-pong on this, happy to spike something out whether shell, go, etc

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     wuhan.bat™ (jae@darkdork.dev)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 05:21:39 JST wuhan.bat™

     in reply to

     • m0xEE
     @m0xEE @gabek
     
     >I'm not reading as much as I used to, but I listen to lots of music and I got back into playing bass, now I do it more or less regularly and I'm really happy about it 😁
     
     whatever soothes your inner self is good. i tried my hand at the bass but it never spoke to me. been drumming (corps, noise, blackmetal) for decades. i really enjoy it.
     
     > And yes, toning one on content consumption, especially when it comes to politics, and social media overall can really do wonders to one's wellbeing!
     
     can confirm this. my brain feels "lighter" when there's way less input
     ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: likes this.
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     m0xEE (m0xee@nosh0b10.m0xee.net)'s status on Saturday, 19-Jul-2025 05:21:41 JST m0xEE

     in reply to

     • wuhan.bat™
     @jae@darkdork.dev @gabek@social.gabekangas.com
     I'm not reading as much as I used to, but I listen to lots of music and I got back into playing bass, now I do it more or less regularly and I'm really happy about it 😁
     
     And yes, toning one on content consumption, especially when it comes to politics, and social media overall can really do wonders to one's wellbeing!