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Comment by eggbrain | Hacker News Reader

Everyone says they are packing up. But most of the people I’ve seen complain either are still on the site they complain about, or left briefly just to realize that other sites aren’t any better and came back.

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I’ve left everything (Facebook, Instagram, I’ve even deleted the YouTube app from my phone, etc.) apart from HN. I occasionally look at Twitter, but only when someone sends me a link.

So there are some counterexamples.

Me too, except for YouTube. I'm still hopelessly addicted to YouTube, but I'm working on it. I also ditched my smartphone eight months ago and going strong, zero desire to return to it.

Seriously, fuck all this shit. Some people love to say that love of the old web is just nostalgia and they are free to think what they want.

What really helped me to go through the YouTube backlog quickly was a user-script sending closed captions to an LLM to summarize, with some custom instructions of what I want. Occasionally I will ask a follow-up question. Now, I can read the summary of an hour-long video in 3 minutes and close it. I only watch or listen to videos that I really want to hear in full.

I'm in pretty much the exact same place as you - although I need my smartphone for work.

If you need help with YouTube, like I do, here are some extremely helpful uBlock Origin scripts to hide Shorts: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

As another option, I use the Redirector browser add-on to automatically take me from /shorts/{videoid} to /watch?v=$1. Its amazing how manipulative the shorts interface is because if you're not in it, the temptation is SO massively reduced. Shows how much money they obviously spent on psych profiling for shorts to get that first click. We are just meat puppets to them.

Ref: https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector

Oh man, THANK YOU! I only know for sure shorts leak through when searching and so far so good. Ya, thanks again!

YouTube sure is doing its part to make YouTube less and less appealing.

It really is!

My plan is to sell my laptop so that I only have a desktop and can't just watch willy-nilly wherever I am in my apartment. But it's a tough trigger to pull.

I’ve learned a huge amount from YouTube and am very thankful for its existence. It’s the absolute insistence on showing me idiotic ‘shorts’ that made me leave. I didn’t want to.

Ya, that's the problem... I've learned so much from it... I'm torn.

At least stay away from the shorts.

Just don’t do drugs.

It’s hard though when Google tries to tempt you to do drugs every three seconds.

I do my best to hide shorts via CSS plugins and UnTrap but they seem to weasel their way through in search results.

Non sequitur. "Everyone is" is nonsense, "most aren't" is correct. Individuals who are: irrelevant, as that was already implied.

P.S. The response misses the point, going for personal rudeness instead of reasoning.

I’m just providing another data point; no need to get your knickers in a twist.

I haven't been on twitter for about 5 years, facebook for about 10, my instagram account lasted 2 weeks before I got tired of it. These sites are pretty easy to leave.

Whatsapp is harder, because people I actually care to talk to use it. I would rather not give facebook a dime of my money.

I just deleted WhatsApp and told everyone I'm on Signal and if they didn't want it they can call me. But it's not like my "network" is very big or anything, so I guess harder for some people than others.

I've left a few sites.

I think the basic premise under there is still valid. Lots of online sites/communities/etc turn into rugpulls. Success leads to management change, then depersonalization, then monetization.

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