Consider doing this right now

I’ve developed the nasty habit of opening my computer only to immediately go to Youtube and proceed to waste a few minutes of my day browsing my recommended feed–maybe not even watching anything, and then doing this multiple times every day. Google has done an amazing job fine-tuning their algorithm to keep you spending time on their website, and likely at your expense. I know there are plenty of worthwhile videos, but probably not enough.

So, if you happen to be in the same camp as me and wish for a change, I suggest doing the following–Turn off your recommendations. You can do this by navigating to the “Your data in Youtube” submenu and then turning off both watch history and search history. This obviously cripples these exact features. But it doesn’t explicitly say that currently this will also disable the recommendation feed that shows up by default (subscription feed still works). I find this to be a much less intrusive solution than blocking the website or somehow quitting cold turkey. This instead follows the principle of not going to the store just to look around for something to buy, but to show up with a goal of buying something specific. You will be using Youtube to watch the videos you actually wanted, not the ones that some enigmatic algorithm thinks you will click on. I hope something like this can be done for other social platforms, but I didn’t spend much time on them anyway.

Of course, all of this only applies if you wish to use the Internet to acquire information rather than for entertainment. In this case, I have a couple of metrics by which to judge whether a video is truly going to teach you something.

1. Video length. This one I have no reservations about. For the most part, the longer the better. I would say that 30-60 minutes is the sweet spot at which you can fully immerse yourself in the subject matter but also hope to remember the vast majority of important information.
2. Production value. The higher quality the video, the more distractions there are from the actual content. Unfortunately, this throws a lot of good informational channels under the bus. I just prefer talking heads; this is also just the natural way people were meant to get information. Think about podcasts or just straight up college lectures, which work best at least for my goal of learning which concerns understanding ideas rather than learning large amounts of facts.

Obviously, you still need to pay attention to absorb the information.