Youtube is pushing Tik Tok style "shorts" pretty hard. If you ever accidently click on one, the UI makes it very hard to find your way back, and easy just to sit and watch a bunch of 15-second clips.
Even the long-form content is a minefield. The line between educational, informative long-form content (Clickspring, Tech Ingredients, Ox Tools, Matthias Wendel, Alan Millyard, etc) and "lifestyle entertainment" (Matt Armstrong, Cleetus McFarland, Matt's Offroad Recovery, etc) is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), and you might not notice you've crossed it until too late.
Don't even get me started on the videos that contain a vital piece of information that could be written in one paragraph, but spread it over 10 minutes. A lot like the online recipe site disasters.
I find YouTube to be a much better experience when logged in. There is targeting in both cases, but it tends to be better aligned with what I want when I am logged in.
And I second the extension, I use "Youtube-shorts block" which also exists for Chrome. On the topic of YouTube specific extensions, I also recommend SponsorBlock.
At least for me, I find Youtube too addictive if it offers me an endless list of vidoes tailored to me. The repulsiveness of the default suggestions means I'm not immediately sucked in.
I’m not sure where TOT sits. He’s not particularly ‘how to do it’ like mrpete222 or maybe Presso, but he’s not trivial dumb stuff either. He’s entertaining and I think YT would be worse without him.
I’m finding ave harder to watch as time goes by. He’s got some conspiracy stuff going on and while he’s clearly intelligent & educated I wonder if he all that much smarter than most of us or if he’s just bluffing sometimes. He’d be fun to be friends with and hang out with for sure but I think a lot of people consider him some sort of know everything genius. He seems to play up to his audience more and more.
I learned a good deal from his earlier work, but you're not wrong about what he's up to these days. He's always been a drunk uncle, but there's a good side and a bad side to those, and since early in the pandemic he hasn't been spending all that much time on the good side.
Even the long-form content is a minefield. The line between educational, informative long-form content (Clickspring, Tech Ingredients, Ox Tools, Matthias Wendel, Alan Millyard, etc) and "lifestyle entertainment" (Matt Armstrong, Cleetus McFarland, Matt's Offroad Recovery, etc) is surprisingly fine (AvE, Tavarish, Rainman Ray, etc), and you might not notice you've crossed it until too late.
Don't even get me started on the videos that contain a vital piece of information that could be written in one paragraph, but spread it over 10 minutes. A lot like the online recipe site disasters.