Lately, I’ve wanted to reduce the time that I spend on a computer and staring at screens all day. Usually one of the first things that someone will try to quit is social media.
I am no different. I had all the social media accounts going all the way back to MySpace when it first came out. In fact that was all I had around the 2008/09 time frame. I remember actually signing up for Facebook when I was in Iraq since that is where everyone told me people were moving to. Next came Twitter and eventually the avalanche of all the other social media that came and went.
Today, I’ve deleted and restarted accounts multiple times. Sometimes I lost the credentials. Sometimes I lost access to email. But as it stands now. I really only have Facebook, which I hardly ever log on to, Twitter/X, and the dumpster fire that is LinkedIn. When I retire fully in a few more years I will shut the rest of the accounts down. And maybe even sooner.
When that time comes and I do retire I will create a new email and start migrating the accounts I want to keep to that new email. This is probably a good thing to do in general ever so often anyways to get rid of all the junk and spam that your email has been sold to. Kind of like scraping mud off your boot before you go into your house. But when I retire and post of couple of times on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn that I am retiring from work and the internet. If they want to stay in contact they can let me know and send me an email or I can send them one. Whoever wants to stay in contact I’ll keep in contact with.
So back to my failed attempts at leaving YouTube. First I installed the extension called ‘Unhook’. It actually works really well. Almost too well. But there are a ton of different settings you can toggle and adjust to where at it’s most restricted you can only see videos of the channels you are subscribed to. No video descriptions, no comments, etc.
That all works really well and has worked. My problem is that I haven’t installed it on all of the browsers that I use. I use three browsers. Brave, Chrome, and Edge. I dropped Firefox about a year ago after they started getting too woke and started shoving AI down everyone’s throats like Microsoft likes to do. Because I only installed that extension on my main browser I now often watch videos on the other browses because I can see them.
I’ll start off by just wanting to watch one video and before you know it an hour to two has gone by that I could have use to do a lot more of the things I want to do. Like catching up on the books I am trying to read. Learning to play an instrument. Whatever. Just not spend more time than I already do on the computer. So I’ll be installing that extension on the other browsers as well. The one problem that may pop up is that I also have a YouTube channel where I post videos weekly. So I may just have to use more than one profile on the Chrome browser where I usually do this work. One profile for my channel and one for regular use. I’ll let you know how things go.