Wish You could Watch YouTube Like This?
You can! Now that we're getting into the firefox groove, it's time to clean up YouTube a bit.
Now I know that some of you may be saying: "Micah, isn't YouTube already good enough, why would you want to make it any better?" Well, we'll get into the details of it, but basically I see that YouTube can be a temptation for men who would not like to look at Internet Pornography. It may not always have nudity per say, but it's bad enough and it's a hook that can drag you into worse stuff. I know that for me, I just want to watch YouTube without all the distractions and I was thinking some other people might be interested in that too, so here is my post.
*If you don't need an explanation of how YouTube trips up men and just want clean YouTube, jump down to the How section.
Oldschool Napster was to Music as YouTube is to Video
Most people love YouTube. It's very useful and awesome that you can get videos about almost anything instantly. It reminds me of the good old days of Napster when music ran wild (how else you could find the theme song for Astroboy? Don't laugh, it had a screaming eighties guitar solo in it). Along with being able to find all the world's videos, people probably also like a lot of YouTube's features over other video site offerings. Features like commenting, video commenting, featured videos, everybody's favorite videos, related videos, what everybody else is watching, friends, making your own channel, etc, help organize all this wonderfulness and make it fun. A lot of these features are what we nerds like to call "Web 2.0 stuff". That is to say the evolution of static text and pictures to a more flashy, usable, social networky web. YouTube works much the same way as Wikipedia in that we harness the power of people to make great websites. Here we are all helping to collect, sort and bubble up to the top our favorite videos from all over the world. I wouldn't normally have a problem with any of these features, but there is one problem sticking out like a sore thumb.
Men are lustful
The problem with YouTube as I see it is that in an effort to create web 2.0 goodness, we have underestimated how lustful men are. All of the tools used to promote good videos to the top and bring relevant videos to you and I have also done an amazing job of exporting all kinds of filth on YouTube. In fact, I can hardly think of a time I have visited the site that I have not seen scantily clad women or worse. Let's have a look at how YouTube's features can trip us up:
What Everyone Else is Watching and "Promoted" Videos
When you first visit the YouTube homepage you are greeted with two things; What everyone is watching right now and "Promoted" Videos. Ok.... so let's say that one guy decides he is going to watch a video of a scantily clad woman. Now let's say that there are oh, a couple million viewers on YouTube and roughly half of them are men. Have you ever noticed how the "what everybody else is watching" bar rotates like a rotisserie chicken at Sobeys? Well now thousands of men are staring at the rotisserie video bar and guess what pops up? Right, that rot video that the other guy is watching! And the more guys that watch that video, the more chance that video has of being in the rotisserie bar. It's practically an exponential equation! So that's not cool.
Secondly, let's say that there are a bunch of guys that don't care that they are lustful and actually give some of these videos 5 stars.... Now these videos are popping up in the Promoted videos. You think I'm crazy? I'm not. Top 100 video lists are consistently plastered with seductive videos. Maybe YouTube takes them down eventually, but they can't and don't do it fast enough.
But let's just say that you skipped the homepage because you did a search for the video in google and came in that way. Now you have three problems! One, you have wacko video comments and you have no idea what is going to greet you there. Two, you have "Related Videos" that are sometimes related, but sometimes just have some scantily clad woman *shoulder shrug*. And finally, you still have the "promoted" videos again.
The HowThere are two easy steps to avoiding distractions in YouTube:
First, do not visit the youtube homepage!!! Instead, go to google and type in "youtube".
This will give you a search box within google that you can type your search into and will get your search results right on the google homepage! Sweet.
Secondly, before you click on any of those search results, make sure you have "Better YouTube". This is a great firefox add-on that gives you the ability to watch youtube videos in Theater Mode. No crazy video comments, no "related" videos and no "promoted" videos. Just plain old video. Here's how to get it (if you have firefox):
- Visit the Better YouTube add-on site by clicking here- Click the "Add to Firefox" button
- Restart Firefox
- Go to Tools>Add-ons and click the Better YouTube Options button
- Check the YouTube Theater checkbox so that it is selected and Click OK- Done! Now you can check out this awesome man playing drums on the keyboard!
That's all for now, I hope you enjoyed this post. Until next time...... Safe and Happy YouTubing!
