One evening way back in 1999, after a a long day at work, I made supper and slumped on the couch in front of the TV. I got up again after maybe ninety minutes, during which I had watched utter twaddle. What made it worse utter twaddle was comparing it to Homicide: Life On The Street, which was showing at the time. TV could make interesting, surprising shows, but it mostly didn't. British TV especially was just plain lazy. So I unlugged the aerial and canceled my TV license. From whenever that day was, I have not watched broadcast TV in my home - and when I caught sight of it elsewhere, it didn't look as it it had improved.
(You can have a TV and watch DVD/Blu-Ray, or tape if you have that, and you can watch streaming services (MUBI, Curzon... are there any others?) without a license. What you can't watch is "terrestrial TV at-the-time-of-broadcast" and anything on the BBC iPlayer. That's what I do.)
It makes watching TV more deliberate - nobody just played the first movie off the MUBI menu (though that sounds like an interesting experiment). For a long time that worked well.
Then You Tube came along. Most things on the Internet are a migrated version something we had already. Music streaming is just the radio without ads. Movie and TV streaming is just movies and TV delivered another way. Wikipedia is the Encyclopaedia Brittanica without the books. You Tube is both TV and the magazine rack at the newsagent.
And just like TV and magazines, there are some good channels on You Tube. Veristatium. The B1M. Jago Hazzard and Geoff Marshall. Sabine Hossenfelder. Darko Audio. Justin Taylor. Maths lectures (real ones not recreational math), and some music channels: where else am I going to see SRV duetting with Albert King? There is music on You Tube that is priceless.
There are channels that catch my attention for a while and then don't. Many of those people would, in the pre-Internet age, have been journalists, columnists, commentators and contributors, and we would have read their work in one magazine or another. Others would have been TV production companies - the larger channels have the same staff and roles.
But I'm having that same moment as I had with TV. You Tube is being swamped by AI channels. The same (e.g.) lecture by Feynman on this and that channel , or channels telling me what England was like in the 1960's and 70's (and since I was there, I can spot the mistakes, some of which are not small: one about why we were so slim in the 1960's ignored how much everyone smoked). After a while, I can tell just from the channel name and subject. (If I can do it it at my age, I'm pretty sure their billion-dollar AI can be trained to do the same. They just don't want to.)
I am almost at the point where the effort required to filter the slop is greater than the enjoyment of watching something interesting. The difference between TV in 1999 and You Tube is that TV in 1999 had no redeeming features. It really was pap, from the news to the cooking programmes, and that hasn't stopped it from reaching ever lower depths of tosh. But You Tube does have some channels I find interesting and occasionally eye-opening.
I watch it while preparing and eating lunch or supper, and that feels okay. What doesn't feel okay is scrolling through it for something distracting because I can't focus on reading a novel, watching a movie, practicing guitar, or something else. It gives me a sense of what is going on out there (which is a whole other subject) and that's a feeling I want. Hence the scrolling - looking for the next bulletin from the real world. So I'm going to give myself a break on doing that.
Also, I watch it in the Brave Browser, so I don't get ads. None. I have had people thank me for suggesting Brave. In the UK it has less than 1% market share, which remained unchanged through 2024 and 2025, so I guess Alphabet just ignore it. If I had to watch ads, I would drop You Tube that afternoon (I'm a shameless free-loader) and wonder if it really was worth £12.99 / month. With AI slop, it isn't. With a slop filter, it would be.
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