Yeah, I know, I’m only like 10 years late, but I finally “get” YouTube. I was always kinda mad at them for becoming kazillionaires by hosting a bunch of pirated stuff back in the day. I guess the ends justify the means. Regardless of the provenance, what it is these days is pretty incredible.

I remember one of my friends a few years ago saying they pretty much only watched YouTube and no other streaming services. That seemed super weird to me. They mentioned liking stuff like MKBHD and whatnot, which I, as a gearhead, understood in theory, but it never really hooked me.

I think what finally made things click was getting into the whole personal knowledge management and productivity stuff scene. That’s when I realized there were a bunch of people out there posting some relatively high-quality videos about the stuff I was most interested in at the time. Tutorials, reviews, recordings of presentations, etc. on the most niche shit, all easily available.

Then, when I got into onewheeling, I couldn’t stop watching videos of people riding trails. What most people would likely find super boring and tedious was completely enrapturing to me. 30 minute raw footage of a dude riding a trail in Canada without any background music or anything? Hell yes. It inspired me to start my own channel of pretty much the same stuff.

So yeah, I get it now. YouTube is my default place to chill and just watch some stuff. Now that I think about it, that’s probably the secret – it’s the easiest place to just find something that’s probably only like 8 minutes long to watch without much commitment, and it’s easy to just queue things up and skip around. At this point, I’m much more attracted to bite size “casual” stuff than big investments. Much like with video games, I’d much rather be able to play Tony Hawk for 20 minutes than have to invest 100 hours into some interactive epic movie type of thing. And YouTube is pretty much that for videos.

Some cool channels I like:

And, of course, The Algorithm feeds me a bunch of related stuff and a bunch of political current events and whatnot. I’ll admit to watching to many of the political things, but that’s life.

Oh yeah: I happily pay for YouTube Premium because it’s essentially useless without it. Yes, some of you just use ad blockers or whatever, but I’m not interested in a game of cat and mouse with Google. It’s worth it.