Comment by AStonesThrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AStonesThrow | Hacker News Reader

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When I was young, I voraciously consumed media just like today. I watched TV, listened to radio, purchased vinyl and CDs like there was no tomorrow.

Over a few decades starting in 2000, I stopped purchasing music entirely. I also stopped listening to the radio, and in 2015 I got rid of my last TV. (Sometimes when you're in public, you can't avoid these.) And things seemed alright.

But I have come full circle and developed a complete addiction to YouTube that satiates all these desires in one service. Why own music when I can stream anything on demand? Why own a TV or disc player when all movies I want to see are likewise available?

So I pay for Premium. I could live without YouTube, but I would flounder in abject boredom. My music entertainment would be severely limited, like what was available in PD or Creative Commons, and that's rather grim. If YouTube were completely unavailable to me, in terms of any music or video, I would indeed struggle to fill those gaps, because it really fills out my days.

Thankfully, with Premium I am not nagged by ads and the UI generally cooperates. The ads were really wearing me down, because the more you use it, the more you're subjected to. Unfortunately, YouTube as a platform is not oriented to "watching what I want when I want it" but to discovering new content and suggesting "stuff I might like", so I still do fight to stay on the rails of what I truly enjoy.

Android, on the other hand, has become a holy terror. Every time I try to do something with my life, whether it's banking or finance or health care or shopping, Android is getting in my way and hindering my sanity. I cannot accomplish a simple thing without Android distracting me, frustrating me, and making me forget what I was trying to do. How many times have I unlocked my phone, fiddled, and then locked it again, only to discover that I didn't get anything done? That typically didn't happen with Microsoft or Windows, because indeed MS... was... primarily a B2B provider, and home users enjoyed similar deference to let us be productive without getting in our face. Unfortunately, that is all converging on Consumerist Advertising Hell.

>Why own music when I can stream anything on demand?

Because you're not streaming music. They are streaming music. You've got this need for music now, only they can satisfy it (or so it would seem), and sooner or later they will decide to stream it differently or not at all because to do so satisfies their needs. At that point, it is very unlikely that it will satisfy yours.

You're a consumer entirely dependent on a corporation. Broaden your horizons a little, maybe get a library card and read a book.

Huh, I am not sure if you are earnestly sincere or not, but I just got done saying that I consume way too much media, and here you're suggesting that I open up access to way more of it.

Honestly, YouTube's catalog is so extensive that I don't need to go outside of it. I don't enjoy reading any books or magazines, frankly. YouTube does interfere with one book in particular, and that's the Bible. Which I have plenty of access too, but my "quality time" suffers because I'm engrossed in other things.

I am no stranger to the library. But when I visited last year and looked through the catalog, I sort of wanted to throw up a little. Because the selection at my nearby municipal library, and the main branch of the Phoenix system, they suck a lot. I mean it's horrible.

My local library curates a lot of extremist liberal material. On their shelves are the gayest authors, and the harshest critics of conservatism, and a lot of Indigeneous/Latino. In other words, coalitions of people who hate my way of life and wish to destroy it by any means necessary. I would rather not read their playbooks, whether or not they are succeeding in their mission. A dearth of material aligned with my worldview. Plenty of pagan books, self-help and pop-psychology, and lots of outdated tech or legal info, but nothing I would really be induced to check out.

Likewise for the Phoenix main library. It's huge, cavernous, should be chock-full of information, but I was able to find a couple of bio books on US Presidents that sort of held my interest for 20 minutes. Mostly this library is oriented toward retired people seeking hobbies, and people looking for jobs, and the sort of practical stuff for the urban poor and their children.

I was interested in deep topic research on Ireland, or Pennsylvania, and various related historical topics, and I found that any local library just can't afford shelf-space on regions far away like that. I could study local Arizona history for sure; in fact there's a special room for that, but I only share 26 years' worth of that history.

The catalogs of Libby and Overdrive were massive and overwhelming, but again, the caliber of content was underwhelming. The video streaming platform was, again, pushing lots of far-left stuff before my eyes; I just didn't want to watch it. YouTube has lots of mainstream blockbuster films. I'm good with pay-per-view of something that is well-made.

No, I really have no objections to YouTube or the way it's sucked me in. It's the friendliest and most bearable Google property of all. Sadly it's the same Google where I try to get daily stuff done. A library card won't help me do banking or pay my bills. My smartphone is getting in the way now. We're enslaved to these things and I don't anticipate it getting better.

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