It's the only platform with content in every niche.

Netflix, on the other hand, has maybe three niches: documentaries, high production reality TV, high production fiction movies/shows. And that's after scrolling for 20min debating which one you want to watch lest it be a dud after you invested 30min of your time.

On Youtube, I consume everything from debates to conversations to the news to police body cam footage (guilty pleasure) to gaming reviews to "upcoming RPG games 2025" to Let's Plays to Starcraft 2 tournaments to video versions of podcasts to interviews with an expert about cardiovascular disease to old seasons of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares to scary story montages for falling asleep. And that's just from me scrolling my homepage while writing this. And I can consume most of that while running around the park with my phone in my pocket.

There's just no contest when it comes to which service I'd cancel first vs last.

YouTube has tons of content that isn't borderline brain damage (it has tons of that too though, no doubt).

Other streaming services guide all their content into a wide-audience general-public-friendly funnel. You are not going to find hour long specials on Fourier transforms or technical analyses on the Hubble tension. YouTube also has tons of low-production quality, high informational quality content that doesn't exist anywhere else.

I can't speak for everyone but I found Sarada Herke's series on Graph Theory to be incredibly illuminating and I haven't really found anything of the same quality elsewhere. Combine that with the fact that YT has the Strange Loop video archive, the Perl Conference, MIT OpenCourseWare, talks by Guy Steele, Gerald Sussman, Dan Friedman, Damian Conway, Rich Hickey, and so on, and so forth... even if we only look at educational material and ignore entertainment it's a vast treasure trove. Sure: some, if not most, of that stuff can be found elsewhere but there is value in having all of it available from a single source.

I lived without a TV for a couple of years, around Katrina time -- I experienced that disaster only through radio broadcasts.

Later, I had a Blu-ray player and a combo monitor-TV where I watched OTA broadcasts after the Digital Transition. About 9 years ago, the TV broke, and was deemed unrepairable.

I chose not to replace any TV and I decided I was way better off without Jay Leno in my ear every night, and trash like Degrassi in my eyes every week. For a while, I was. I didn't play discs anymore, either, so my consumption of video content went down, and I was really immersed in interactive computer stuff.

Gradually I found myself to be a YouTube addict, and I've gone all-in with it. Over the years, the stuff they've added has made it a one-stop shop where I never miss TV programming.

At this point, YT has free films (just watch ads or pay Premium), it has on-demand streaming for rent or purchase, just about any major film you can name. They have TV-style packages offered. They are a gateway to other streaming services like Paramount+. There are even silly little minigames now. Mostly, though, I love music videos, and I curate dozens upon dozens of playlists for my tastes and moods. (Beware: user playlists are a legacy feature, and seem to get more inconvenient over time.)

YT has worked hard to become a hub for all things streaming, even as Netflix and competitors splintered into every studio's balkanized app. For someone like me, it's really a relief to just be loyal in one service, and not go chasing content over a dozen paid services or something. Being a low-income cheapskate, I mostly put up with a deluge of ads, because that's how folks get paid these days.

Nothing too complex to it, I just follow several hundred channels, many of which I watch almost every video from because I like the topic, the person/people, etc. It's much like someone who might be attached to their Netflix sub because they love all the shows on there - that's how I am with YouTube. Not everyone is into it and that's fine. I'm not into Netflix.

I, and probably everyone else on my family plan, watch more YouTube than anything else. That isn't saying much for me because I very rarely watch TV shows or movies. I haven't watched Netflix in ages, I just keep it for the family members who do. My kids use mainly YouTube and Crunchyroll, sometimes Disney+.