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Title: YouTube
Date: March 21, 2026
Listening To: Asia DREAM Radio - J-Pop Powerplay

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  Someone I follow on the web[^0] posted a journal entry
talking about how they were in a bad mood, and ended up
losing their cool and fighting with someone in the YouTube
comments section again. and realized that it wasn't doing
them any good. As a result, they deleted their channel and
uninstalled the app, mentioning that a friend told them
that it's just as addicting as social media. And yes, it
is.

  YouTube is much like TikTok or Instagram. It's a form of
social media, masked as a video site. Google made it that
way when they kept failing at making anything else in the
social media spaces, because they knew they could get away
with it while blaming users for encouraging the creation
of their dark patterns and other problematic changes. It's
something they know they can use to make money.

  I personally use RSS feeds to follow the channels I want
to follow, download new videos to watch with yt-dlp, and
either delete it after I'm done, or archive it if it's a
useful video like a tutorial. I haven't deleted my channel
(yet), but I've learned to not give in to the algorithm or
dark patterns used there. No comments, no problems, no real
worries.

  My RSS feeds only really have a few TechTubers, musician
channels, some gaming channels, some Tokusastu stuff, and
mostly vloggers that have caught my interest. Those feeds
aren't even a 1-to-1 match to my subscriptions on the site,
as I stopped subscribing to new channels unless I *really*
feel the need to. There's no point when I'm using RSS,
after all.

  Yeah, I do sometimes search for certain topics, but I add
videos to a playlist that I then pipe into yt-dlp to grab.
It keeps me from going down rabbit holes and losing hours
at a time that I could be doing something else.

  I'm lucky I've regained some of my self-control, I guess.
It means I'm healing after dropping social media in general
for so long, and that's a good sign. Just need to keep it
going.

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[^0]: I don't have permission to share their name, so I'll
      respect their privacy.