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Independence in the digital world

We are live in the digital age, and we are use smartphone, computer, TV and other gadgets to simplify personal life, but sometimes we are losing control.

YouTube

Last years I cannot enjoy watching YouTube, and I find less and less interesting and useful content. YouTube has evolved from some fun place into a large commercial platform. Videos become a way more serious, and less funny.

But the same time, it's become more addictive, to just wasting time watching some videos to just fill background.

I find some simple hack, that really could help you without any kind of pain. You just need to create a text document, where you store links to channels, videos, playlists you like and their names.

After, you should disable comments and recommendations. Invidious can do this with a few settings.

You should see nothing, but video and it's description. Don't worry, if you have a text document with your favorite channels and videos, you lose nothing, but have much more time for yourself.

Websites

Since this is the age of web applications and social media, people only use a few websites for their purposes. But if you would like to read some websites offline, it's a great idea to have a local copy of favorite websites and read them without Internet.

You could use wget, or browser built-in webpage downloader.

This could take much disk space, but you can store websites in a text document, like we are done with YouTube.

Explicit content

The Internet is full of adult and disgusting things. But explicit (nsfl) content follows humanity through its history, so there is nothing special about this. Times change, and now we have websites specializing in this.

During the teenage years, it is really hard to resist own body temptations, and can cause traumas like PTSD, but if you want to see less nsfw content, enable "safe search" in search engines.

Further reading

Written: 2023