this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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But watching youtube for your decompression doesn't get you to a well rested state. It can do the opposite. So you aren't making any progress toward actually getting free time.
Better decompression. Turn off all networking. Read something for 5 minutes and go for a walk. Successful decompression in 10 minutes, not 10 hours.
Whether intentional or not, or just progressive improvement on algorithms, youtube thrives by providing a need, and then providing it poorly so you keep your watch time going forever. This is a fun feature of machine learning. Non-willfull conspiracies. A system can do something malicious to get ahead that is equivalent to a highly calculated malicious action, while no one, including the model itself or the algorithms that trained it, or the people who trained it, understands what it's doing.
Escapism is often called "Decompression" or "Fun"
Decompression depends on how much stress is accumulated. Sometimes 10 hours of mindless youtube is exactly the thing I need after some of the weeks.
It depends. I'm a huge nerd and my YouTube browsing habits are relating to educational videos and long form essays. My news sources on YouTube are also less sensationalist.
On algorithm, I kinda minimise its bs by turning off my watch history. I bookmark my YouTube page to my watch later playlist, so I could chip away at my nearly twenty years of backlog of videos to watch.
Yeah, YouTube is still great if you reject the algorithm and continuous feed junk. I've got my subscriptions categorized in a set order and just run through them every so often.