Man even Cinemax didn’t have hard core porn and beheadings. The shit that those two apps show you should never be seen by anyone.

omg that is sssooooo exaggerated like 1000% take that back pls

I'm surprised it's that low, it's certainly looking more than that here. It's not getting any better with parents using phones to shut their little ones up, toddlers are growing up with them around the dinner table.

I've spent over 2,000 hours on YouTube this year alone and am in the target demographic of this study. I watch a lot of videos in the background while I work, commute, or just chill, to keep myself stimulated.

Although not all of the content I watch is necessarily educational, a grand majority of it is. Whenever there's a science video in my feed, I'll probably click it. I'm subscribed to Veritasum, TED, Vox, No Boilerplate, etc.

They are using YT shorts. The next video auto populates with something the algorithm thinks you'll watch for 15 seconds and it's usually correct. Its like a slot machine. Quick and easy entertainment that people can lose hours in

you're just not subscribed to enough channels. I probably spend 4h+ a day on average, mostly watching channels I'm subscribed to, and I don't usually watch everything. Ah, and no shorts, that's garbage.

Video is expensive so competition is harder to kick up unless it does something very different.

I think it makes sense. Visual media just work well and universally so for all humans I’d say. All the other limited platforms are stuck with some indelible fashion like a haircut from a certain era and so always show their age eventually.

On top of this I think there’s an argument that YouTube have been uniquely successful in their attempt to take a middle path between profitability and facilitating creators, the result of which is that you get a performant and easy to use service (with a pile of ads) that connects with what feels like a huge range of real people talking about real interests.

Instagram is for 20-40s, Facebook is 30s+, TikTok is 20s and under.

I mean of course YouTube is popular. User-generated videos have always been popular (even pre-internet, like home videos on TV etc), but it's never been the case that storage and bandwidth was cheap enough to not operate a website with videos at a loss.

The only ones being able to operate such a site are entities that have lots of spare cash. Otherwise, if the site gets too popular, it'll have to shut down or become unusable because of having to limit access behind paywalls or similar, hugely stifling its popularity and likely killing it.

Google created a very good service with YouTube that no one else could compete with because no one had so much money to "burn". They kept this up for years to a point where it didn't really make sense for neither creators nor viewers to want to go anywhere else.

And now there is a lot of good content on YouTube. The content is good because creators can actually live off the YouTube payments, thus being able to spend a lot of time on the videos. It will thus stay popular, because creators will not start risking their livelihoods on any other platform.