I paid like $2 to rent a movie about three years ago and didn't watched it entirely and boy it still hurts.

Let's imagine if there was a free bakery though. But being free they were always struggling and sometimes the bread was a bit late. Then BigBakeryCo moves into town and also provides free bread as long as you also take one of their magazines and promise to read it. Not most people will go to BigBakeryCo because their funds from selling magazine space means they can provide a more professional service. Now there is almost no one going to the original free bakery so the owner decides to close shop. Suddenly your only option for free bread is BigBakeryCo. Now BigBakeryCo complains that people are throwing their magazines into the trash without reading them and people like you call out those people for taking advantage of poor BigBakeryCo.

The truth is that Youtube is a parasite. They don't create free content, they have inserted themselves between regular people creating free videos and you and are demanding that you pay them for access to what would have existed without them.

YouTube's educational value can be unmatched, but it doesn't follow that 99% of time spent on YouTube is educational or even useful.

I'd bet the ratio of time I have spent legit learning something useful vs just using it as distraction/entertainment ("educational" channels are often just entertainment for nerds like us)/background, it has to be something like 1000 to 1. I wouldn't need to replace the 999 at all. I guess I would read books a bit more, probably get a lot more done on personal projects, go out a bit more etc.

Not clear at all my life would be worse off except in that pinch where I need to know how to disassemble & fix the thing, right now.

IMO if youtube was an actual paid service, I would also expect a lot of the advertiser driven demonitization actions to go away when your in paid mode, but it isn't so I still miss out on a lot of potentially interesting topics or things that could be talked about, but are not, due to the chilling effects of the demonitization & deboosting police.

I don't know what I would replace YouTube with, because YouTube is free so I have never needed to consider alternatives.

But for the most part - probably nothing. For everything else, it'd just be either some other free option, or like going back to the internet of the early 2000s, which would be good and bad in its own ways.

Can you elaborate on your learning journey? How did you separate out the worthless content from quality education programs? Very few Unis post lectures anymore, so it’s all hit or miss for me.

What did you learn thanks to it?