I’m really curious where else everyone here hangs out on the internet besides Lemmy.
I myself am frequently on discord with my wife and friends playing games. I’ve also found myself in and around smaller blogs spaces like Kev Quirk and related people. Reddit used to be a place for me to hang out but I never found a community that I felt connected to. I don’t know if YouTube would be considered a place to hang out, but I frequently spend way more time there than I should. IRC used to be a great place for me.
I'm like 90% YouTube, 2% Lemmy and 8% just googling random stuff. Celebrity facts, historical events, programming problems, stuff I want to buy. YouTube is king though. Kinda hate that I waste so much time on it.
The problem with YouTube is that is so easy to just default to letting it feed your brain. Frequently it's not even enjoyable, it's just straight distraction from anything meaningful. On the flip side, YouTube can be the absolute best place to learn anything.
This disables the YouTube shorts suggestions, which is how I would get sucked into watching shorts all the time. You can still go to shorts if you want, but I guarantee you will mostly forget about them with the suggestions disabled. Shows how little value they really give.