My social media apps are not opened often.
I don’t use my social media accounts a lot.
Limited social media use is programmed in my being.
Such healthy habits are internalized by me.
No need to be consciously careful with my time on Facebook or Twitter.
They are simply not interesting enough for me to spend a lot of time on them.
One platform though, where I do have to be careful is YouTube.
There is so much content on YouTube and it knows exactly what you want to watch or hear.
No, I don’t watch movies of people bathing in Nutella, but I do watch a lot of educational videos.
There are so many of them, so it’s easy to keep watching..and watching…and watching…
A few years ago I wouldn’t mind, but now I understand that producing and consuming have to be harmonized.
I can’t constantly consume all the time, that will defeat the purpose of watching educational content!
What’s harder is when you use YouTube to play music.
YouTube knows and predicts what you will like next, because through algorithms it knows that people who listen to e.g. Michael Bublé, also listen to John Mayer.
So when you listen to Michael Bublé…Youtube knows exactly what to recommend next.
Let’s take YouTube’s homepage….one look and you see a myriad of videos that you will probably want to see…
Luckily there is a plugin that enables you to make the YouTube homepage distraction-free (DFTube).
Or what about using YouTube incognito? You won’t see any videos you have watched before or are similar to those videos.
So yes, YouTube is my only challenge sometimes when it comes to consciously consuming content.
This probably applies to many of us.
YouTube has amazing content, but since you can literally find anything you want to see and listen to…it is one of the hardest social media platforms to disconnect from.