YouTube, the jewel of the internet | Hacker News Reader

YouTube, the jewel of the internet

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473 pointsgumby466 comments

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good.

There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by content mills and "grindset" individuals. But at some point basically everybody started optimizing their titles and thumbnails and some of the stuff the algorithm was suggesting was actually good even though it looked "too flashy."

Same here. I pretty much only watch car channels and some meme compilations and that's exactly what YouTube shows me, nothing else.

I do have some admiration for the algorithm - but I also wish that refreshing the home page would show me some more of the many thousands of videos that I'd likely find interesting, rather than the same 20 just in a different order.

I think I'd be anxious then that if I saw two videos that I really wanted to watch I'd have to one in a background tabs, rather than just trust that the other one will almost certainly be recommended again.

That is not what I want. There should be an explicit button to refresh the recommendations. What I hate is a recommendation page that displayed what I liked but made them disappear just because I temporarily navigated away.

I'm glad that the home page is semi-stable because I'll often click on a video and then go back and want to queue up another that looked interesting but if it were gone it might be hard to find again. (Yes there are strategies to work around this but I don't always use them).

They do have the "New to You" category on the home page now which you might find useful.

The should have a page with "recently shown on home page" like the history page for actually shown videos.

i had this happen to me. ive lost videos I wanted to see when i clicked one instead of another.

That's what watch later is for though.

I keep getting recommended the same damn set to videos which I've passed over a hundred times. Not sure why the "algorithm" is getting so much love, it's got some attributes that are pretty clearly crap.

I use watch later for completing videos, but these are just I think may be interesting from the homepage, like seeing the title and background pic. I sometimes open multiple tabs for them.

One of things I found the coolest, was when I am watching a video, and if the video mentions for example some event that happened a while ago or a person being referenced, I would immediately search for that, and I would see it already recommended on the search bar.

Maybe lots of others have also done the same, and it recorded that as a meaningful suggestion. Or maybe it's standard ML techniques, or the new Transformer models diffused across Googles products I'm not sure but was noticing this even around 3 years ago.

I wish though it would surface videos in my watch later in the recommendations page. As it is "watch later" is where videos go to get forgotten about.

Mine does? I often see videos from my watch later on the homepage. If you hover on them they say, "from your watch later list". It does only seem to be recently added ones though.

also being new to TikTok, I didn't realize scrolling up at first would refresh the queue of videos. And I would lose the vid being watched which was a bit terrifying to lose an interesting video.

It's discoverable at least and I can look past it given tiktok does a bunch of other stuff so much better than it's competitors. What's a lot less forgivable is how undiscoverable your actual watch history is in case you do want to go back to that one vid. Litterally have to search for * or the like.

It's very well hidden, but if you scroll to the end of the filter tags there's a button to show "New For You", which shows a screen full of new recommendations each time you refresh. Sometimes I'll roll the dice a few times with that page and find really interesting stuff.

This is great. Thanks for the tip. I'm a YouTuber and didn't even know about this.

i cannot echo this sentiment strongly enough

how the algo can be so good, and so bad, at the same time boggles my mind

the repetition just feels so unnecessary in many cases -- I know there's so much more content out there that is not a huge leap from what I watch regularly but the recommendation engine makes it broadly inaccessible

one related symptom of this - i think - is when you watch one or two videos on one new thing and then get drowned in videos about that thing at the expense of everything else

If you get swamped like this it's a good idea to switch to your Subscriptions list instead and watch some of the things you want to remind it you like.

Watching one „wrong“ video can mess everything up for a couple of weeks though, which always gives me some level of anxiety :D

I open Incognito mode when I'm about to watch a video like that.

I discovered the other day that incognito mode removes the Premium privileges, which makes 0 sense to me.

I want to watch one video without it contributing to my history, and now I'm subjected to ads again. No thanks.

It doesn't remove anything; you're not logged in, which is the point of opening in an incognito window in the first place.

Watch your one-off video with mpv+yt-dlp.

You can usually go into your history and remove it to fix it.

true, I have to say "Not interested" a couple times

I think I've said Not interested in channel hundreds of times. Creators get one shot with me, and if I think your thumbnail is clickbaity, or you do anything to annoy me...your channel is out. My youtube recommendations are pretty good. I subscribe to a decent-sized set of pretty great creators -- ones that follow my personal rules without even knowing what they are...

There are many decent youtubers who have clickbaity thumbnails. Unfortunately it probably makes such a large money difference that they compromise. E.g. LinusTechTips.

I see LinusTechTips recommended so often and I just don't get it. Everything I've seen from him has been clickbait, or surface level looks at technology, it never has any more depth than a technology enthusiast magazine. I guess that's fine if you're a technology enthusiast, but I find it weird how he gets so much air time even in a community like this which is populated by actual professionals.

Most people here are 'technology enthusiasts', are they not? I for one am a software engineer and definitely not a hardware professional. I might not be able to even build a PC on my own.

>I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great.

I agree with the minor caveat that I'd like a "broaden" button and a "change theme" menu.

My search algorithm presents me with content that I find quite enjoyable, but I'd like to be exposed to a little more stuff that's outside of my bubble.

It knows what I like based on what I've watched, but it doesn't know me and therefore can't infer stuff I don't know but would enjoy if I was exposed to it.

On the top of the home page they have a category control that lets you look for different genres of stuff from your algorithm plus a "new to you" category. I think that's supposed to be what you're after. I hardly ever use it because I forget it's there or don't need it to steer the algorithm my way.

I always see that when visiting the YouTube site but it's very inconsistent in the Android app.

Yup, I'm the same. I've totally given up on navigating anything except my home page, I'm actually astonished at how good it is.

The newest videos from my favorite channels are always listed first, and then it's a smattering of older popular ones from the topics and channels I watch the most, and a handful of things "adjacent" to those that are sometimes not for me but sometimes become my new favorite rabbit hole, so I'm very thankful they're there. (For me it's a lot of educational content like architecture tours and urban engineering and how-it's-made, plus content from certain comedians and sketch comedy groups.)

I know there's supposed to be a bunch of clickbait garbage on YouTube but I just wouldn't know, because I literally never see it.

(Plus there are new tabs at the top that actually list the topics it's learned I like, so if I want to see 20 architecture videos instead of just 2, it's a single tap to filter. It's remarkably clever.)

> I know there's supposed to be a bunch of clickbait garbage on YouTube but I just wouldn't know, because I literally never see it.

Just sort by view count for any common english word and filter out the music videos.

Well, even including music videos there appear to be several dozen or hundred accounts dedicated to reposting the exact same Indian music videos, film trailers, clips, etc...

Not even small variations of the same content, the exact same video.

Some of the accounts look like plausible media distributors/producers in India but quite a large fraction seem to be bots or individuals spamming.

Why is anything with India content so... spammy? Endless cheap reposts with low res text and memes (or the India flag) pasted on top. Page after page of what I can only call video garbage. I have the feeling it is a cultural difference I am ignorant of.

Perhaps there is a way to game the youtube algorithm such that they still pay out on what seems like obvious spam.

But considering there are literally thousands of such videos with millions of views each, this could not possibly have escaped the attention of youtube engineers.

Though maybe there is a fix in the pipeline?

probably lower quality recording and playback devices on average, plus a big incentive to make money off the videos.

How are you coming across this content? I'm in India and when I see Indian content recommended it's generally one of: a. Movie clips and songs b. Religious stuff like prayer songs c. Local channels that mostly do comedy (kinda like CollegeHumor used to) d. Nerdy channels like solving math puzzles or doing Geoguessr

I can't really visualize what you're describing, though a sibling reply says there's "literally thousands of such videos with millions of views each" so there must be a lot of these out there. Do you get these recommended to you, or how are you searching them up?

I have had the YT algorithm "hunt me" for a weeks, keep recommending some what looks like a dumb-ass video, only when I finally cave in and watch it, I get it, I needed to see it. The thumbnail and the title didn't did it the opposite of justice. I even tried using the yt api to see if I could scrape the recommendations but they aren't in there. You would have to scrape the browser while logged in.

You need the extension "Clickbait Remover" - it just grabs a random frame from the video and sets it as the thumbnail, will change your youtube life:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...

Here's the Firefox version of the Clickbait Remover extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

This looks great. It's surprising how much mental energy is spent fighting these initial triggers like icons/clickbait.

Thank you for your recommendation. I'm tired in the world of marketing when everyone is trying to invest in click bait instead of making good contents.

I'd like this, but it doesn't work when using uBlock Origin. It does change case of video titles, though, so it's working: just not able to alter the thumbnails anymore. Would be great but I'm not disabling uBlock Origin for it…

working for me on firefox with uBlock Origin, maybe it's some other extension (or some custom rule)?

Russ Roberts (host of Econtalk podcast) says: take the teacher, not the class, meaning (at least in economics) you'll get more value from a great teacher of a boring topic than from a poor teacher of an exciting topic.

I feel that describes my YouTube preferences: I'd prefer to see amazingly intelligent/engaging content on any topic than just average content on topics I'm ostensibly very interested in.

I can vouch for that idea. I dreaded taking statistics in college, because I'm just not a mathy person. But the teacher was fantastic. I actually enjoyed the class - which was 100% due to his passion for the subject, and deep interest in teaching it to the next generation.

I still remember, all these years later, how my CC statistics teacher “taught” us that airplanes don’t indeed fly by the Bernoulli principle producing lift but because the wind hits the underside of the wings and pushes it up into the air.

Totally random I know.

I can't tell why you're putting "taught" in quotes...? Your teacher was correct. Or you mean because it was outside their official subject matter?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explai...

A good follow up by NASA https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/ber...

"So both “Bernoulli” and “Newton” are correct. Integrating the effects of either the pressure or the velocity determines the aerodynamic force on an object."

I had that experience with the Robert Sapolsky lectures on Human Behavioral Biology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLtdr2qSB8H...

My take away is that everyone is probably interested in everything, only we let the messenger kill the message. By let, we seem to have a messed up pathology where we think they are the same, so much so that it is a huge cognitive flaw, easily used for sabotage.

Ah, that explains why teachers dislike students who are disinterested. Its not merely a disregard for the subject at hand, it tells them they're not the great teacher they'd like to believe they are. The best teachers I had, also had great humor. Great humor helps a lot.

btw I think there is a browser extension that replaces default thumbnail with a random image from the video

I am hooked as well.

(But, please, stop with the YouTube Shorts, I'm just not that into you.)

I'd double my premium subscription fee to remove this feature from the Android app.

ReVanced has that capability.

Watch YouTube through Firefox on Android. You can install an effective adblocker too.

You can use ReVanced and choose every "patch". For example only remove shorts and keep ads etc. That way the creator still get your premium compensation

On the website I just click the X next to that section and it disappears for a month.

Yes it is then honored on the AppleTV app too.

Unfortunately they still clog up the Subscriptions feed.

Strange. On the website, they disappear from everywhere. Your subscriptions feed, suggestions, etc. You just don't see them at all.

Random tip, can take short id and put it into ?watch form to view/add to playlist

I would love an option in the settings to disable youtube shorts. I don't want them.

If you use uBlock Origin, you can hide any element on any site. If not you could also write an extension. I remember someone saying they wrote one and called it "Eat My Shorts" (lol). Perhaps you could search for that.

its easy if you use the right extension, i demonstrate it here https://www.mattpengelly.com/posts/taming-youtube-2023

There's an unofficial filter list for uBlock Origin to hide shorts videos/links

https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

It works very nicely without adding additional browser plugins.

At least on the Desktop you can YT Shorts Block extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...

Not only on desktop. I was entirely addicted to shorts and hated that and my little monkey brain would at some point just click on them despite knowing it was entirely stupid. So I did not only block shorts on chrome but also on safari and safari iOS. You can do this by installing AdGuard and setting custom blocking filters so on the youtube website the shorts navigation button disappears and for subscriptions and suggestions I just set it up so it will show a black page. I couldn't get it stop playing audio but at least I am not seeing anything so I became unhooked. This only works in the browser of course so I uninstalled the YouTube app and I can only open YouTube in safari. I _really_ wish YouTube would just natively allow disabling shorts alltogether in their app and on their website.

I don't exactly know where this Shorts trend came from (I guess Tiktok?) but it really destroys the generation / has bad impact. My attention span is encouraged to shrink to only 15 seconds.

And "our" generation has already had its attention span reduced, not even on purpose but from e.g. having access to fast internet & multiple tabs. I can't read a book on programming back to back (I don't think I ever could btw), it's good enough for me to google it to find a solution for the one problem I'm trying to solve at this time.

But I do miss out on in-depth knowledge of a library or language that way. But there is no value in gaining said in-depth knowledge when the stack & libraries I work with changes every couple of months or years.

In the 8 bit days there were programming books meant to be read back to back. I loved them as a kid - though I'm not sure that I learned much from that exercse. Even K&R "the C programming language" (first edition, the second edition wasn't as readable from what I remember, though that might be just because it was too repetitive for someone who had read the first edition) could be read that way.

These days that isn't a good use of paper books. There is rarely any reason to start with any one construct, and if you are not a novice programmer you know there must be something that does what you need and don't want the book to assume you understand the syntax of the while loop when you look up the do-while loop.

It comes from YouTube wanting to compete with TikTok, yes. And it's become so ridiculously common on YouTube because the platform pushes the hell out of shorts compared to normal videos; as a creator, I can get 10/100/1000 times more views from a short than a normal video covering the same topic. So a lot of creators ended up jumping on the shorts train as a gold rush.

Of course, it's probably not great in the long term since shorts viewers and longform content viewers are not the same and your CTR can be destroyed thanks to shorts subs not watching your longer videos, but the easy views and subs are still enticing nonetheless.

hey ive got a short guide for removing shorts and other addictive stuff. Check it out https://www.mattpengelly.com/posts/taming-youtube-2023

Agreed, pretty annoying when I’m trying to upload a unlisted screen cast or something under one minute to send to a specific person, and then, when I send it to him, they don’t have the ability to seek or easily restart the video.

I know it’s possible to change the URL manually, but I’ve seen it not work, depending on the type of client that views the video - YouTube should allow the viewer to switch off shorts even for a specific video

I always laugh when I see a chess tournament recap video with the most clickbait title and thumbnail ever. Like, did they add explosions? And then it’s just a normal video, and very enjoyable. So, no harm, no foul.

Also a gothamchess viewer I see :) Levy's indeed always making a sport of it to have the most clickbaity titles and thumbnails, but the chess content is really really top notch. (especially for low ELO players like myself)

And of course he directly addressed it mere hours after my post. Haha

https://youtu.be/nTocrbqGCWs

I assume there has to be some degree of survivor bias here. You get good content, which is good, but there might be great content that is never shown. But I do agree that “the algorithm” often finds content that, at least, I’m interested in seeing which I would probably not have found otherwise.

Is this because we have a tech background and some understanding of how the algorithm works? I like to think I have curated my results to a degree by exercising this knowledge. ie: I noticed all of my news results were leaning starboard and things started to sound like an echo chamber. So I started seeking news content from the port side as well. Now I receive a mixture of both. I know my grandfather is not able to grasp this concept and I have seen his landing page.. I still have nightmares about what he is being fed in his echo chamber.

Yeah, I really have no complaints. Of all “we feed you content” thingies online, YouTube has been the most adequate.

The only complaint I have is what human behaviour forces even the intelligent creators to do: have a title card with an excited looking person.

this is how low we've sunk, you don't even say that youtube is adequate, you say it's the most adequate

Just to add my anecdata to the mix, I'm waist deep in logging-in to gmail and workplace apps, etc, but to compensate have abandoned android for iPhone, and I never use google search, and while I watch plenty on youtube, it's never required me to log in so I've never logged in, I don't even have any idea how much it "integrates" with other google logins or not at all. Am I missing out on something, is there some benefit to logging in?

My main complaint about youtube is that it used to be fun and quirky and have lots of "raw" content, and now everything is overproduced, festooned with graphics and clickbait. So many channels I would like to blacklist but nothing like that is possible. Technologically it works well, and I know there's content out there that I'll like, but unless I have a link to it or know exactly what to search for, it's very hard to find things. If there are channels I like and watch regularly, I sure don't need the algorithm showing them to me, but any sort of "maybe you'd like this too" seems totally broken, or at least completely lowest common denominator.

YouTube has been showing me a ton of channels with low Hundreds of views recently, and they’re very to my taste. Ymmv but they’re doing well at exactly what you’re complaining about in my experience

Yeah I've noticed that YouTube almost always recommends me one or two videos with less than 100 views now. Must be a relatively recent change. The videos are often pretty relevant and pretty good, which is a bit depressing. Seeing people put a lot of work into videos that nobody watches (by YouTube standards) is sad. Though that is the reality of most channels. Maybe this change will help them.

I have a conjecture, they're using you as a barometer to see how you react to it compared to people with similar profiles I've seen a couple that go on to get decent viewcounts, but I don't care enough to keep tabs on anything in particular

Then again, I do have 10 hour a day watch time average, my data is vast, but highly skewed

I very carefully picked “most adequate.” I definitely think it could be a lot better. It’s the least bad. It’s usually fine.

It is definitely worth logging in. For each recommended video you will then have the option of selecting 'not interested' or 'don't recommend this channel'.

I would say it makes all the difference.

I feel like i used to rely on reddit to surface all the new and interesting content creators on youtube, but nowadays i just go to youtube itself when I'm looking for something new to watch. I think all of the new content creators I've found in the past year have come from youtube recommendations

It's decent but I feel like it lacks granularity. Everything is either genre A or genre B or genre C, with each being very narrow fields - sometimes a "genre" might contain a few select youtubers, even though there are thousands of channels that feature similar content.

Whereas twitter for me is much more nuanced, and I'm constantly being exposed to the fringes of my interests which helps me organically grow my feed.

oh wow exactly. When i go on incognito, im terrified at all the "viral" kinds of news,etc type of vids recommended to me.

btw has anyone tried YT (& premium specifically) on an iPad? it's like 10x better. I don't use it enough. Just in my bed haha.

If I hear "not what you think", "may surprise you" or "what happens when" then I just close the tab as a reflex.

agreed. I've found some great music from youtube's algorythym (niche and rare old music comes up ALL THE TIME for some reason I don't understand but I'm not gonna argue), and it's definitely better than the youtube shorts one, which shows me bullshit all the time, whereas my main feed is mostly relevant stuff.

> Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good.

I resonate with the "a bit too good", so much so that I exclusively use YouTube in incognito mode because the recommendation algorithm is too addictive, and the content that it causes me to consume doesn't really do anything but waste my time in the long run.

I also second the "horrors that lie beyond", the stuff that regularly surfaces on the default YouTube home page would suffice as an excuse for aliens to blow up our planet and put a freeway through it.

I started using an extension that blocks all recommendations. I have my subscriptions and I have the search. Of course, I'm missing out on all that new and undiscovered content... but what I get instead is life, so I think it's a fair trade.

It's weird how different my experience is, simply from spanking the algorithm every time it shows me something clickbaity that I haven't already seen.

I actively use the 'not interested' every time the recommendation algorithm tries to show me something where I don't already know what it is. I pretty much only want to see recommended videos I've already watched :)

It takes some patience to get this going, but it seems to work. Any time I see anything novel, it will get excited for a while until I settle it down and tell it I hate all its ideas. Usually I don't have to tell it never to show channels, though if it's obvious enough I will. Eventually it's back to old faves again :)

So the reward for signing into YouTube is being able to "reset" by signing out? Because (on desktop) I do all of my youtubing with browsers that have never been logged into any Alphabet service and yet the algorithm has a very clear idea about what to show me. The idea that signing out would somehow give you a pristine neutral state seems quite naive from this perspective.

> The idea that signing out would somehow give you a pristine neutral state …

If you’re on Mac, try enabling iCloud Private Relay in settings.

I rarely check the Home (algorithmic) feed or Trending feed, I just check my Subscriptions feed and I get amazing and lots of content. It take me time to build my subscriptions list, usually via recommendations by channels that I'm subscribed.

YouTube is my preferred app to watch videos by a mile, I never ever will change it for Netflix, HBO, TikTok, etc.

This is what I do too and am quite satisfied with it. It seems like a lot of people don't use the subscription page, as it seems like there are frequent complaints about missing new videos unless they have hit the notification bell. I've never had that problem as the subscriber page does exactly what it is supposed to do (though I suppose if you were subscribed to hundreds or thousands of channels you'd probably run into issues)

I am... OK with the Youtube algorithm. I find that it is pretty good at this point at not giving me stuff I find awful. However, I think it has lost a lot of ground in helping me find newer, more obscure topics that I'd also find interesting, compared to where it was 5-6 years ago.

Overall I think Youtube IS a jewel of the Internet. The amount of astoundingly interesting, informative, entertaining, educational, insightful, important or just plain COOL content that has appeared over the time it has been up is phenomenal, and it is like a Library of Alexandria of our time.

My big fear is that someday, Youtube will no longer be profitable. And then, like so many other beloved services, it will send out an e-mail saying it's been a great X years, blah blah blah, we'll be shutting down in a few months, bye.

They'll just get much shittier long before they ever actually shut down.

i do share that fear of the day that most of the youtube content will be "gone" (behind some kind of login-wall)

YouTube is like 10% of Alphabets profits and there are thousands of creators relying on it for a living. Anecdotal but the creators I follow all talk about YouTube giving them a much better monetization strategy than any other platform. So I don't think this will be any time soon

Twitter's recently rolled out their ad revenue sharing arrangement and it's a 20% margin (under $50k is 3%) vs YouTube's 45%. Maybe low balling the early days to build traction? Also people probably aren't consuming 1 person's Twitter the way they consume Youtube channels.

https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/creator-dashboard

Still it will be interesting to see how many hundreds/thousands of mom & pop careers will be built off Twitter now.

Is that really about Twitter sharing ad revenue? The page is just talking about paid "subscriptions" to Twitter creators. That seems like a business model where the revenue cut is irrelevant. Nobody will pay $5/month to subscribe to one person's tweets.

Yes the FAQ sucks but it's the same deal as TikTok/Youtube/etc: you get a 80% of revenue made from ads that appear on your content.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-share-ad-revenue-...

It apparently hasn't fully rolled out yet so the docs are confusing. They claimed it has started on Feb for Blue subscribers but that may change.

> My big fear is that someday, Youtube will no longer be profitable

Why do you think it's profitable? It makes for a decent chunk of Alphabet's income, but they don't break down costs so we have no way of knowing exactly how much it costs to store and seemlessly deliver zettabytes of video.

Why would they be unprofitable? They have a range of steps before that. Heck there are github repos that let you use youtube as free(terabytes) storage, by encoding data as noisy video. I think first step before "bankrupcy" would be to remove all videos that have 0 views in 24 months (which is most of their library).

YouTube Premium and F1TV are my two subscriptions. I watch more YouTube than anything else. By far. My algorithm is filled with creators I admire.

I've been trying out an extension to hide the thumbnails to see how it changes what I wind up clicking. The problem with my little experiment is I don't go back to see what they would have been afterward to record an observation, so I'm not meeting the Adam Savage criteria for doing science.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-thumb...

May I suggest "Unhook"? It's great for switching different parts of the UI on and off. I quite often disable everything except subscriptions now; no recommendation, no comments, no explore/trending, among other things. It's change my YouTube usage tremendously:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

I agree, there are several channels that I watch regular because of the algorithm show them to me.

My YouTube subscription is worth 2x what I pay for Netflix and recently costs half as much. I'm happy YouTube figured out their algorithm.

Might be a case of A/B testing or I've heard a theory that Adblock users are penalized- most certainly, for me, the frontpage is worthless to a point where it singlehandedly reduced my YouTube use to nearly zero.

All it does is show the same few videos from the same few popular creators in the same few advertiser-friendly categories it binned me into. None of them actually interest me, but it just doesn't catch on.

Years ago youtube offered a choice between their recomendations and your subscriptions as a homepage. Then they removed the choice and forced their recommendations on everyone. So i installed an extension to redirect from my youtube homepage to my subscriptions. Haven't even seen the algorithm in ages. When i feel like watching something I go to my subscriptions and browse a chronologically sorted list of videos from creators I like. Another extension hides all youtbe shorts. I've never clicked a bell either. The idea of having a notification shoved in my face when someone posts a video sound ridiculous to me. I've definitely complained before about the older generation being stuck in their ways and not adapting with the times, but I wonder if I'm not the same already, in my thirties and hell-bent on using youtube "wrong".

I'm in the same boat as you, being in early twenties. I also have a userscript to hide the recommendation panel right of the video player and the cards at the end of the video, though I turn that off if I'm bored enough to discover new channels and content.

I don't know anyone with similar setup though.

The YouTube algorithm is honestly pretty good at surfacing stuff I'd want to watch. My biggest carp is it's heavily based on what I was watching recently but my interest in various topics waxes and wanes and I don't necessarily want wall-to-wall basketball content just because I watched a lot of that last week.

Agreed. One annoying example is that I occasionally play white noise when I can’t sleep. YouTube will now always recommend me white noise and sleep noises when I’m casually browsing. No matter how often I press that I’m not interested.

You can remove those videos from your watch history, which should remove them from the algorithm. It's a bit of a chore, but should do the trick.

I like the algorithm, but it seems biased towards short-duration videos.

Have you set your google/youtube account to remove your history after a certain period of time. I have set mine to auto delete history older than 3 months. I think that had a big effect on my recommendations.

I love that it often recommends me videos from small channels, often with 0 view. This started happening only about a few months ago I don't know if it's just me.

The only complaint I have is that the recommendations are too biased towards what I liked or watched very recently. It would be nice to have a setting to adjust that recency weighting.

Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history, in order to pick up where you last stopped, in particular for channels with hundreds of videos.

Invidious with an account has been has been very useful for this. In the channel's pages, it shows what videos have been watched, up to which point.

You can subscribe to youTube channel pages via RSS. I do this when I don't want to miss a channels videos.

> Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history, in order to pick up where you last stopped, in particular for channels with hundreds of videos.

Absolutely. Furthermore Youtube is surprisingly bad at syncing progress within a single video. I often switch from iPad to desktop and back, and there's a lot of overlap between where I left off and where Youtube decides to continue, which forces me to manually seek forward. At the very least Youtube should save my play position whenever I hit pause but apparently it doesn't.

Completely agree. Generally look forward to checking my feed for podcasts and science videos. I actually don’t even watch videos so much as listening to most of them while working. Pretty much replaced every other platform for music and videocontent for me personally

I also think my recommendations are really good, but I believe it also takes a great deal of care and will.

I make a conscious effort to avoid watching 'dumb' tiktok-ey content as much as possible. Not because I would think watching it from time to time is inherently bad, but because I believe I would be prone to watching more and more of it and it would absolutely flood my recomendations. It's addictive. For this reason I also never watch shorts on my account.

If I really want to watch something from these categories, I do so without being logged in.

Generally agree, but I have had a couple of long term complaints which are seemingly never going to be fixed:

* There's no option to regulate how many times it recommends a video I have already watched. Ideally I'd like this to be arbitrarily close to zero. * The recommendations are much, much, much too biased on recently watched videos.

The main problem with Youtube, and almost every other social site, is not the algorithm itself, but that the algorithm is the only way you can interact with that site. The moment you want to do something different, it just doesn't work.

Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list. There is no user visible tracking of what you watched, no way to bookmark the end of that list and really nothing you can do than give up.

Don't like the over produced Youtube content and want something that gets to the point quicker? Well, use TikTok, since Youtube has exterminated that style of video quite successfully over the last decade with the help of their algorithm.

Meanwhile Shorts just feels utterly stupid, it's a broken interface with the ability to seek through the video removed. It's just annoying. The irony is that Youtube can display Shorts just like regular video, but you have to do some URL editing to do so. Most Shorts are just parts of full videos anyway, so there isn't even much point in having them. They should have called it YoutubeZap and just be time stamps into the interesting parts of videos that already exist on their site instead of this duplication of content.

Another big problem is how under utilized playlists are. They exist, but since you can't subscribe or pin them, you'll have forgotten that they exist by the time you open up Youtube again.

The algorithm itself also has some big problems, such as never being able to put multipart videos together properly. When you see a video marked with "Part 4", you'd think the other parts would show up, but they don't or when they do it often skips parts.

And of course the algorithm filter bubbles you to an extreme. You get exactly the recommendations for the videos you just watched. It doesn't really try to broaden your horizon. It ignores your subscriptions. And really just doesn't have a way to change directions. The only thing that worked for me was to create different browser profiles with different accounts and switch between them, that keeps recommendations for different topics apart. And whenever I click a wrong video I have to go into the history and clean it up, or the profile is turned into a mess for weeks.

As watch-time optimizer and ad delivery machine the algorithm does a good job. But it really feels like the algorithm is using you, more than the other way around.

> Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list.

Some of your complaints are valid (though they are mostly UX gripes), but this one I don't get.

I've done this multiple times and it's like three clicks. You click the channel's name, you click "videos", and you scroll down, that's it.

> You click the channel's name, you click "videos", and you scroll down, that's it.

It's an infinite-scroll list, it loads in 9 or so videos at a time, than it takes a second to update your scrollbar before you can scroll down further. You can't instantly jump to the last page, load all videos at once or invert the sort order. Every time you accidentally click away from the page you have to start from scratch as it doesn't remember your position, you can't bookmark it either. Some channels have hundreds or even thousands of videos. It's impossible to access them in any timely manner with the normal YouTube interface.

I mean, I'm not saying you're exactly wrong, but I just tried and it took me like 30 seconds to go back a year on a channel that released like 2-3 videos a day.

It's certainly not the most convenient UX, but, you know, first world problems and everything. The greatest store of knowledge almost-instantly availalbe at our fingertips, these minor UX quips are small-potatoes IMHO.

And for sure I don't think the statement "the only way to interact is via the algorithm" is accurate, when what stands between us and finding old videos is to wait a few extra seconds. That's a really strong statement compared to the reality.

> Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list.

This is where locally archiving the videos you like helps.

Me too but I have to constantly manage my history.

Thankfully the AppleTV app makes this easy if you click and hold in the History view you can remove single videos after watching them (so my home is not filled with lolcats).

Like, I like Courtney Ryan but I’ll never keep a video in my watch history (only Follow), otherwise I start seeing all those Tarzan-meets-Jane podcasts etc. that the author mentions.

Mainly it seems to be about keywords so you have to kinda guess what keywords go with a video and remove it from watch history if ypu dont want the algorithm to go down that route.

It’s a shame YT doesnt have a separate history for gaming and music,along with a separate "recommened" there. I would go on binges there frequently while still being able to chill in the evening on my tv with the content I expect in the Home tab. Without this I am forced to stay away from exploring music or gaming, too much watch history maintenance.

Yeah I continue to be impressed by their recommendation engine - and the very well executed niche channels. The latest example I’ve seen is Idaho Horseshoeing School which is some combination of woodworking, artisan craftsmen/women, animal welfare videos, etc. and that I had no idea I would enjoy but I can see why the algorithm figured out that’s in some Venn diagram for me

Completely agree. You need to feed the algorithm the right data. Spend a little time to explicitly tell it to not recommend specific content and channels. You see a channel doing outrage porn (X destroys Y!) and clickbait thumbnails that tell you exactly zero about the content, shallow content mill: Right click -> Don't recommend channel. Completely ignore Shorts. Pay for youtube premium to get rid of ads. Add extensions: Sponsorblock and Video Speed Controller.

The algorithm that YouTube uses to suggest videos to me is really good.

Whatever mechanism is used to select the ads to show me seems like a stubborn practical joke - it is appalling. And I'd love to know why it likes to show me ads for commercial products (such as accountancy software) when I watch on my Apple TV but completely different nonsense on my other Apple devices.

Pretty much all my homepage is, is video essays and Invader Zim clips

Mine is pretty good too, but what I'd appreciate more than a page of random algorithm-matched videos is something with structure.

Like a tree, where a video I watched, or one of my subscriptions, points to suggestions. To wit, often the links suggested at the end of a video are the most interesting to me.

As someone who uses YouTube to consume foreign news, I'd also love a setting that lets me see only content and recommendations in a given language.

I agree. My wife and I get the YouTube Premium with Music family plan, and we both agree that of all of the monthly subscriptions we pay, YouTube Premium is the best deal because we use YouTube as much as Netflix, HBO, Prime, etc. combined.

For me, the hidden jewels on YT are philosophy and other “thoughtful” style streams, Chess, Thai Chi, some alternative news, news from foreign countries, and short sci-fi content. But, there are thousands of niches like what I follow, something for everyone.

The recommendation algorithm is not perfect for me, I need to do some work to find content, but it works well enough.

I've been referring to it as the "Youtube synchronicity algorithm". Often it suggests channels and videos that are niche-ish but hugely relevant to me personally. It's one of the few things from Google I still love.

I agree with the author. I just cancelled Spotify and got YouTube Premium and it was an absolutely brilliant decision. Pretty soon I’m going to cancel Netflix and Prime too and just take out the odd month subscription to a streaming service if there’s something I really want to watch. I’m probably better off watching some informative documentary on YT than I am watching Netflix anyway and if I want entertainment, there are millions of hours of TTRPGs, stand up comedy and web series to watch that are often of a really high quality (e.g Critical Role, Ari Shaffir, Wayne).

It’s an awesome resource and I think Gen Z are at a massive advantage because of it. They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent. I think we’ll see them leapfrogging millennials on the career ladder because they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free. No other generation in history has had such an opportunity. You were limited by your parents bank balance or the resources of your local library.

As a Gen Z-er who grew up learning as much as I could about my passions, mostly on YouTube, I hope you're right about us! I'm really hopeful that my generation can go on to do some pretty great stuff. We do have a patently odd sense of humor, though...

This assumes that this generation will spent its youtube time learning something useful. While this will be true for part of the population, most people are just wasting their time and, in aggregate, it may happen that this generation will have even lower skills than the previous generation that had access only to a local library.

> they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free

I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc.

I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. They are passionate about cheap mindless entertainment. I see the same things in their friends and classmates. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.

I’m sure there are a few youths who are using their time productively and it will pay dividends for them. But, from what I’ve seen, the vast majority aren’t interested.

A lot of that stuff is going to be AI generated in the future and it'll hit those dopamine circuits better than human generated content ever could

Now we know what all the Borg were doing in their cube ships. Between occasional bouts of conquest and assimilation they were all frying in a sizzling bath of repetitive dopamine triggering meme soup created by AIs and other members of the hive mind.

Maybe they lurched out and attacked or assimilated someone when a new trending channel appeared that urged such activities.

I joke but it really is a bit spooky how plausible the Borg are today to the point that I can imagine what it would be like to be part of them. It’d be like scrolling TikTok but with Neuralink.

That explains the skin conditions and baldness (of the Borg, though I see a lot of hair loss among under-30s)

It’s your responsibility to guide them.

If only it was that simple. In my experience (with four step kids aging from 23 down to 16, and I've been in that position for over 13 years), I'd say my input has had maybe 5-10% influence, if that.

If they're not interested in that area (and mine aren't), then there's not much you can do, even if you spend a lot of time and effort trying.

Like I said, you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Agency is a double edged sword.

The "agency" that is dominated by the influence of their peers, schooling, and media you allow them to consume as impressionable and innocent individuals.

Normally I'd say let them grow, have their own agency and learn the world in their own eyes with parental supervision. But right now, the media and culture are so highly toxic and degenerate, that I say it's our duty as parents (and humans) to shield them from that, and instilling positive values.

I have a 9 and 7 year old and we are constantly enjoying such YouTube channels as "smarter every day", "veritasium" (spelling?), "Stuff made here", to some extent Colin furze, "technology connections", and other such edutainment.

Not sure it speaks about differences in kids, in ages, in households, or likely a combination of sorts.

Also, not a judgement on your kids, just a counterpoint about the resources available and how some people will tend to gravitate in different directions.

7 year old daughter is learning to knit and forgot how to "cast on" , so she jumped on YouTube to search a how-to and had one of the methods figured out in 20 minutes.

So, perhaps it does have more to do with the availability of such edutainment since they were very young -- we've been on this path for 5 years or so and it has just become "the norm" if we are to use YouTube as a household.

(I will admit that as Dad, my time on YouTube is split between learning about whatever new hobby has peaked my interest , currently SDR related stuff, and car related material for fun. I've also fallen into the LTT universe, but am aiming to back away because it, in my opinion , is just providing that mindless watching which I aimed to get rid of around 16 years old (ie, decades ago) to better use available free time.

Seems everyone is just different, but the resources are for sure there!

Can you attribute your kids' behavior to any actions you took or policies you had? Please don't be shy about it, I would love to inculcate that into my kids as well.

Not OP, but no matter what they say take it with a grain of salt. Rising kids is like throwing dice. No matter what you do (or don’t) within normal ranges of behavior, it’s pretty much a crapshoot to predict what comes out of them. The only correlation I’ve seen is they tend to emulate the parents’ intelligence levels and if you’re passionate about what you do, they might be too.

I think you are probably right and that there are many things in the environment, that also have influence. However, I would say that there are some tricks one can try:

Reading stories to children for example. If the story is interesting, the child will want to know how the story goes on. As soon as they can read, they will be tempted to grab that book and find out.

No policies really just a general way of living. This is a disposable comment so am aiming to write more but things got 'busy' here and now we're getting ready for school! (And work..)

I'll elaborate this evening, but as a lower poster said, it is all rolling dice and everyone is certainly their own beast in their own cage. I will gladly share how it seemingly transpired (and I feel, more important, the reasoning behind focusing on such things).

In very short, I'm a huge believer that we seriously underestimate what small children are capable of understanding at you get ages, and have always felt that exposure to 'all the things' helps provide needed prospective about all that is available in life.

They have both absorbed enough surface level interest and actual information that when watching a video about a semi related subject, they find themselves referencing OTHER information they learned from another video/source and click the pieces together like Lego -- you can see their eyes light up when this connection is made in their head, and I feel it starts really showing that information across the board is solely a piece to a way way bigger puzzle, and that although learning about seemingly disconnected things in a jumble can often find itself existing the jumble and finding its place in APPLICATION in life somewhere.

This seems to really nail home the point that anything, really, may be worth learning because no doubt a real world use case may arise sometime in the future.

Again, I can write more when time allows, but that's the reasoning behind it all. We also do a ton of projects where we can actually, partially at least, use a lot of the things learned from videos and transcribe them from thoughts alone into tangible end results - beyond important for everyone of every age, IMO

peaked my interest

That's "piqued my interest". It's a homophone. Also used in "fit of pique" and, very rarely "piquant". It's a word on its way out, but I like it.

It's a homophone, not a homonym. If you're going to correct someone's grammar, you should probably proofread your correction.

Speaking of corrections, it appears that homophones are a type of homonym, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym

When I was a schoolkid, I received various lesson materials that labelled homophones as homonyms. It took me years to discover that was wrong and unlearn that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym#Related_terms

Muphry's Law

That begs the question: does correcting a homophone constitute a correction of grammar or of spelling? And another: can I successfully provoke another correction by 'misusing' "begs the question"?

>"veritasium" (spelling?),

Close, V E R I S T A B L I U M

Hosted by good ol' Dirk!

(For those not in the know, this is an in-joke originating at least from the Hello Internet podcast, with CGP Grey and Brady Haran. "Veritasium" is, indeed, the correct spelling.)

RIP Hello Internet

> Hosted by good ol' Dirk!

Ol' Dirk Miller! Heckuva guy!

But that there's that other guy Derek Mueller who has totally copied his channel.

But those channels you listed are not educational, theyre "educational" e.g. you may learn some factoids about physics are learn about some cool experience but in no way will they impart to you a deep understanding of any subject. Those sorts of edutainment style videos are not ever going to compete against say, a college degree.

Now there is excellent serious educational material on youtube, stuff like khan academy, etc, but thats not what people are watching for leisure.

If youre going to learn something useful, it is going to be difficult - e.g. it requires work on the part of the watcher. Gen z isnt just learning physics by idly watching veritasium videos.

> but in no way will they impart to you a deep understanding of any subject.

Technology Connections will provide deep understanding of the refrigeration cycle, how different types of gas lamps work, how heat pumps work, and how developing film works.

And those are just the video series I can remember.

When I was a kid I learned everything I could by watching discovery channel which in the late 90s was the equivalent of what you get from the Popsci YouTube channels. This was good enough for me to write a space settlement design proposal, submit it to NASA and win. The “surface level” stuff is more than sufficient to pique your interest and get a good understanding. Combine this with good schooling and you’re on path to be a great scientist leave alone a well learned person.

The person you’re replying to has kids in the single digits for age. Thinking about a college-level education for a 7 and 9 year old seems fairly unrealistic, and learning “educational” topics like you point out at that age is perfectly fine. You’re still learning addition and subtraction at age 7.

I don't think any of those channels are trying to replace an actual science education in any given subject. But they are certainly imparting a lot more than physics "factoids", and some are probably closer to intro lectures on specific topics intended for a general audience (done by a talented and engaging educator).

It's not directly equipping the audience with professional skills for a scientific career, but it is generating interest in science, and indirectly encouraging people to expand their own STEM skills and knowledge. I'm sure that dozens (hundreds? thousnads?) of people have gone into mathematics at least in part due to an interest generated by the likes of numberphile, etc.

But the original comment said Youtube can replace school.

> They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent. I think we’ll see them leapfrogging millennials on the career ladder because they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free.

I think you misunderstood the comment. It could be better written as "By the time they leave school they can already be..."

Right but hats the point im making - unless a kid is very strictly trying to actually learn a particular subject, no amount of edutainment is gonna give them any kind of professionally applicable skills.

Now if a kid watching videos that are long form treatments on specific subjects and are following allong with a pen and paper doing practice problems, sure, thats a case where youtube might give you some serious skills, but that is a tiny fraction of kids and those same kids would have been doing the same shit with textbooks at their local library. Youtube is waaaaaaaay closer to being purely a distraction than to being something we could consider "educational" in any serious sense.

School isn't a panacea either. I think I've done above average in school for the most part, but I never learned enough to have "professionally applicable skills". And the skills I actually use in my profession I learned outside of school.

The thing is, when people are motivated to do something, they'll learn what they need. Otherwise, not even school can force feed students into learning those things.

@nonethewiser > But the original comment said Youtube can replace school.

Are you sure, that's what the original comment said?

I interpret the quote you posted as "they can already know everything about their passion when they leave school", which would mean that YT is not a replacement for school - but an addition to it.

> But those channels you listed are not educational, theyre "educational" e.g. you may learn some factoids about physics are learn about some cool experience but in no way will they impart to you a deep understanding of any subject.

And that's exactly what kids need. They can wait to hone rigor and scientific intuition. As long as the interest takes root, they'll find their way.

Veritasium is cut in the same cloth as Bill Nye (and Mr. Wizard before him), and we anecdotally know Bill inspired folks to pursue STEM.

Well that’s fine, but it falls short of the original claim that YT can replace a college education.

I think he’s right in theory, but in reality kids just watch what’s entertaining.

They said children could leave school with a college level foundation, not that they'd be college level at the age of seven.

> They said children could leave school with a college level foundation

And is that because of infotainment?

> Those sorts of edutainment style videos are not ever going to compete against say, a college degree.

They're totally different things, obviously...

> you may learn some factoids about physics are learn about some cool experience but in no way will they impart to you a deep understanding of any subject. Those sorts of edutainment style videos are not ever going to compete against say, a college degree.

I disagree with this sentiment, even though what you say is technically true.

"Deep understanding" can't be imparted, not in school, not in a video. Here we all know plenty of engineers with degrees with no deep understanding of the programming languages they use daily. Deep understanding can't be imparted, you have to go and grab it by yourself.

"If you want people to build a ship, don't talk to them about sails and wood and tar, tell them about freedom."

Those edutainment videos have sparked my curiosity and help me appreciate things about the world around me I wouldn't have noticed. For really deep understanding, I may have to let this curiosity propel me into a book. Going into a book about urban design after a "Not just bike videos" with curiosity and an intuitive although shallow understanding, is much better than sitting through 50 minutes of a boring and bored professor drawling about something, which was a lot of my college experience.

You are right that Youtube can't replace college, or making experiments yourself, or reading a book. It's a different thing. But, specially for kids, this is how education should start, and it may be way more fundamental than the other pieces.

You are also right that if kids, or anyone, stays on the level of watching Youtube videos, not much is gained. But still, that edutainment can be a great part of education.

I agree with you entirely, but my post was in response to someone saying that a kid could finish high school with professional skills due to youtube... thats just not realistic. Sure it might pique their interest but so can books, television, talking with adults, school, etc. So I still do not think youtube is a particularly effective "professional skills education" tool

It 100% is realistic dependent on the field. If you combine what you learned from YouTube with personal projects you can be professionally proficient in:

- An instrument/songwriting

- Music Production

- Video Production

- DevOps

- Network Administration

- Any kind of programming (Frontend, Backend, Game Development, Assembly, whatever you can think of)

- Vehicle Mechanics

- Electronics Repair

- Maths

- Hair and Makeup

- Costume/Fashion Design

- Fitness/sport coaching

- Graphic Design

- Bookkeeping

- CAD Design

- Carpentry

- Plumbing

And these are just the ones off the top of my head. They might need to get the piece of paper in order to legally practice, but the kids out there who like delving into how things work (and they do exist) could absolutely have all the knowledge they needed to work in a professional capacity and often do. Proficiency and reputation trump certificates.

> you may learn some factoids about physics

are MIT lectures "factoids" now?

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mit+opencoursew...

> Gen z isnt just learning physics by idly watching veritasium videos.

This is a massive generalisation. Sure, I'd probably agree with you that a large cohort are watching a lot of trash. But there's a sizeable amount who are putting the work. And I imagine that the percentage of those putting in the work probably increases the closer they are to the poverty line growing up.

"infotainment" or "edutainment" is what that type of content is - I think it's mostly mindless entertainment masquerading as informative or educational content

This. It’s the entire reason that I’m the unpopular parent that doesn’t let my kids have unlimited YouTube.

I am currently in high school, you definitely are right that the majority of people my age do just waste their time on YouTube (I do too sometimes) but there are a few of us that really take advantage of it. I have personally spent a large amount of time on YouTube learning to program over the past few years, I have now become quite competent and built some pretty cool things on my own (search engines, chess bots, personal web apps, competitive programming, etc.) My brother older brother spent a lot of time watching videos about physics and math to the point where he is now doing a physics degree. A lot of my other friends have used it to cultivate other skills and knowledge for free too.

Keep doing what you are doing!!!

(Old person here)

But what is the breakdown? 1 in 100, 1 in 1000, 1 in the entire school that gets YT as a knowledge mine?

(Possibly as simple as how many you know of compared to how much of the school population you know.)

Yep, same with my nephews and nieces too. It doesn't help that YT algo pushes these contents to the front and center as trending content.

But, those who do put some effort on actually making good use of this platform definitely has huge advantage than our generation growing up though. So, in that regard I'm still optimistic that our future generation will be much smarter than us.

Watching kids watch youtube is like watching zombies.

I know a kid who is a big fan of any kind of sports. He is constantly watching youtube videos that are basically stats and clips packaged up with some slight humor but very little analysis. This kid has basically an encyclopedic knowledge of sports... stats. All from youtube. I was also like this to a degree as a kid, but I got my info from stats books/magazines/newspaper sports sections. So in a way the outcomes are the similar -- young kids love looking at the numbers -- but I can't help but feel icky about the way youtube can just lock a kid in for hours and hours.

* Example video about Tim Lincecum that basically enumerates the stats of his career but doesn't discuss anything else -- his personality, his pitches, his unconventional delivery, etc. Just clips (that repeat) and stats. It's bizarre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgaPKJIF_Zo

Not really sure what you’re talking about when you say that vid just enumerates stats. There’s a lot of narrative and comparison and context put into that video. Comparing it to how I grew up watching ESPN Sportscenter, I find that YT video much richer and varied

> There’s a lot of narrative and comparison and context

There's not though. Most of what is narrative is cutesy jokes. Comparisons are just... stats. If you re-watch with a critical eye you'll see it's basically a formula: in these X games he pitched this well, then he'll compare him to some historical figure on stats alone, over a clip or a screenshot of baseball reference. At some point he just reads passages off wikipedia. There really isn't any subjective thought being put into it, it's just a clever packaging of google searches in a lot of ways.

> Watching kids watch youtube is like watching zombies.

My heart breaks when I see nephews playing dumb mobile games and watch youtube videos of someone playing games, all these interrupted with multiple full screen ads which they also diligently watch. Fuck these platforms and all their creators.

We banned YouTube after the kids would do nothing but watch junk like PrestonPlayz for hours and hours. It was really rotting their brains. We have seen positive growth in their interests and behavior since it was banned.

YT is full of good content but the good content is not addictive or viral and the viral addictive content is not good. There might be a few kids that will gravitate toward substance but I have yet to see one. If we visit a home with YT enabled the kids are watching hours and hours of trash.

One trick I've used is to disable Youtube on all of the kids' devices [1] and only enable it on the family living room TV.

Then rotate video selection powers to each family member so that there's an equal mix of Mr Beast and Practical Engineering/Vertasium/Tom Scott/City Beautiful/Sebastian Lague etc.

[1] Chromebook with Family Link to only enable specific websites.

> I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it.

Anyone good suggestions?

Kurz ge sagt.

Smarter every day

Practical engineering

For the competitive athletes, all attack.

Maybe something with Scratch, but id argue they should be doing scratch, not watching someone else create content.

Any peppa or similar extremely benign cartoon if you are reinforcing a foreign language (Spanish, French, Italian, etc)

I will add Mark Rober to that list

https://www.youtube.com/@PBoyle For good deep dives into finance. A lot of information but it's a great professional look.

https://www.youtube.com/@JamesKerLindsay For good deep dives into international politics.

https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel For good videos on civil engineering.

I would recommend these channel for older children who can digest the information. They are all understandable for to the layman.

Math - 3blue1brown

Programming - freecodecamp

AI - Andrej karpathy

Science - acapellascience

totally in agreement, my kids are just the same. me and wife, we read a lot of literature, poetry, classics, they don't touch books.

The lesson I get from all these replies is (shock & horror!):

Kids are different. I hear of kids who are intelligent, energetic, curious... all those good things. Probably NURTURE (i.e. the parents) has something to do with that.

But then: also NATURE. Not having any kids myself, I'm not going to preach.

The variety in temperament, interests and ability between even siblings varies greatly. The people most eager to share parenting advice is usually parents only one child who is calm and attentive :) I've seen several parents in that category have a second child and come out shocked.

I'm believe that beyond a base level of food, clean clothes and love, your influence as a parent is marginal. It's also a wildly unpopular but intelligence is highly genetic (at least 50% of outcome determined by genes).

I wouldn't argue against intelligence being highly genetic.

But people usually aren't talking about intelligence. They're talking about success in life, be it career or school.

Our oldest had a terrible time at math early in this year, and the teacher thought she was doing well in the start because she never asked questions.

But the first practice test showed otherwise. After that we made a point to ensure she understands math. It was a rough couple of months at the start of the year, but that's paid dividends and the last 5 have been pretty smooth.

She didn't get smarter. And if she didn't have parents with the time and ability to help her, she woulda flunked.

If it’s 50% genetic, you’d see lineages of scientists or brilliant in whatever but it doesn’t seem to happen often does it?

Check out the Dyson family.

A few months of effort at home with our 6yo got him from being well behind in reading to caught up with his classmates. We had no idea he was struggling until his teacher told us.

The effort at home involved gentle encouragement and keeping him focused on the phonics homework. It wasn’t tough on him or us but it has restored his confidence and he’s keeping up with his classmates now.

This is totally the kind of problem that could have festered and led to poor outcomes for him in all of his schooling if we’d ignored it.

Relevant comic: https://imgur.io/8g2UAGS

I do believe parentage changes "the difficulty level" of life. Some kids are born to loving, nurturing, well-off parents and essentially "play the game of life" on level easy. Some kids play on level hard. However, it's the kid's own choice how they will play it.

The heredity of intelligence actually depends on the environment. Those high percentages you mention only emerge in a 'stable' environment. That's not saying that people can grow (far) beyond their genetic makeup, but the opposite can happen.

If you think of (defending against) all those negative effects, I think the impact of a parent goes well beyond the basics you mention. That goes even further when you consider all other skills that one can foster that benefit a future member of our society.

The thing you’re missing is that it generally doesn’t matter how much YouTube a kid watches. Parents stress out too much over doing everything exactly right when it probably doesn’t matter that much. Kids are pretty resilient and hard to screw up.

Most kids grow up to be average adults with average jobs doing average things. No amount of Smarter Everyday is likely to change that. And if they do grow up to be an astronaut or whatever, Smarter Everyday shouldn’t get all the credit, it’s more luck of the draw.

> And if they do grow up to be an astronaut or whatever, Smarter Everyday shouldn’t get all the credit, it’s more luck of the draw.

I'm not sure an astronaut is the best profession to get your point across here. The resume of an astronaut is normally off the charts. They put in an absolute fuck ton of work, it's definitely not luck of the draw.

From a stat I saw it's something like 10 astronaut candidates selected from a pool of around 18,000 applicants. So really doing a fuck ton of work doesn't give you a very good chance to become an astronaut because hardly anybody becomes an astronaut. That's 17,990 people with off the charts resumes who go home disappointed.

My point was that generally there's no parenting method that produces a specific outcome very consistently. Kids are generally going to end up how they're going to end up no matter how many Baby Beethoven CDs you make them listen to. It's just easy to fool ourselves into thinking that "this method works" because we don't see the million other people who end up the same way as a result of a different method.

> They are passionate about cheap mindless entertainment.

Everyone hopes that their kids will be exceptional.

You just have normal kids, get over it.

I recently watched Steven Spielberg's recent autobiographical movie "The Fablemans". He portrayed there his own childhood and teenage years.

What I found most interesting is the fact that Spielberg's father was apparently a skilled computer engineer who worked for the IBM. There was a scene in the movie where Spielberg's father tries to show his kids the beauty of engineering while building some simple structure from wooden sticks but they all are disinterested and shortly run away. There is a scene where Spielberg's father tells teenage Spielberg that it would be better if he ditched this filmmaking hobby and started doing something more meaningful with his life.

Steven Spielberg did turn out to be exceptional but in a completely different way from his father.

Gen Z here. I grew up on YouTube. I’m 25 now, so technically a cusper but had an iPod touch and YouTube since third grade.

Videos of travel have a lot of value. I was stuck behind a desk for 4 years at my programming job. The last 7 months of travel has done so much for the rest of my entire human experience that I could never get from a textbook. Plus it’s fun to see people explore the world. We’ve been fascinated by this stuff since the beginning of humanity.

Reality videos and reality TV all show elements of how relationship dynamics work. They often are fraught with bad narratives, but they model conflict and resolution between people. This can be helpful as a guide to understanding human interaction.

I’m not saying that it is all bringing value to their lives, but there is something inherently interesting about the content they’re consuming. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be.

The challenge for you is to go into their world and understand what they value. You might even change your definition of the word “value”

Nice observation. Algos do unlock some of that value. But long way to go. Cuz they need much more info about ppl.

For example, I know my younger cousins like certain topics that they cant get enough off, but if I see them busy with exams or homework I hold back on pointing it out.

> Videos of travel have a lot of value. I was stuck behind a desk for 4 years at my programming job. The last 7 months of travel has done so much for the rest of my entire human experience that I could never get from a textbook.

The last 7 months of real travel, or watching YouTube videos of travel? Feel like you’re making a big leap here.

Does watching people program help you become a better programmer?

Same thing with travel

7 and 11. My kids also like the same things but enjoy the shorts about science, space , microbiology, one minute animals and the bees.

My thoughts about this are that youtube is great if you have a specific learning task/interest, but if you don’t then it will lead you astray.

There is no doubt however that it has pulled off the magic trick of incentivizing thoughtful and knowledgeable people to produce good videos. This seems as close as we’ll get to a mutually beneficial arrangement in the attention economy.

> ’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it.

How did you try to do this? This sounds like a horror story I'm scared of happening when I have kids.

I'm on the socially insular side as well and find my time learning instead of shared viewerships like sports. I'm checked out on up to date sports even if I do participate in kick boxing. There's tons of technique breakdown videos that's more interesting than watching every fight. But for those training up, seeing full definition replays of fights from amateur to high paid professionals at your fingertips as well as full breakdowns and other professionals in the comments is just building up tons of people to finesse their skills deeply in their crafts.

OTOH

I have a family member who is into those "shallow" videos but she is tuning her social media posts to be more interactive and her posts are "very extra". Many of these vloggers do a lot of behind the scenes in depth trade secret videos once in awhile and she seems to find out video trends. Her hobby is content creation, selfies, and making homevideos that other people watch.

Reminds me of my dads and uncles lugging around cameras at every social function and upgrading to digital but she's now at the level of compressing it to something quick and watchable and a slideshow of what happened rather than a full recording like it was a documentary. She's gotten the engagement factor dialed in.

It's nice to have her taking and editing videos as that's something of worth. Taking boring events (get together) where a straight video or group photos is the usual and making them personalized and basically something people want to add and to share on their wall if they were at those locations.

Otherwise she's been watching a ton of home-based businesses walkthroughs and interviews with small business entrepreneurs. Those are big in niche communities and these shows are in our mothertongue.

She does bounce ideas off me a ton for business ideas. She's more interested in retail ideas and wanted to advertise using social media than is interested in selling her services as a social media person.

She's in her 60s. I'm in my 30s. She's more tech literate than me in regards to social media use even if I work at one. She's also more in tune with what people my age range are interested in and willing to pay for.

If she does go into business I don't mind funding her, lol. She has a way of breaking into trends before mainstream moves into those trends.

Science and math and other cool stuff might help round out young people but I don't push that stuff to my older family members. I'm the "youth" and none of my generation as kids yet. I don't see a reason to push the older folks into those subjects on YouTube. I might send them gardening tips, ideas, and a boring lectures or someone building out some fancy yard feature but I doubt they sit through it. I did send some tree planting advice and they fell asleep to it.

Very opposing to what people push to youth. But there's still value in "wasting time" I think

And YouTube shorts. It is shocking how addictive they are. I suffer it myself, and continually interrupt my son to ask him, "do you really want to run out your limited screen time on that garbage?" He agrees no, then is back on them 5 minutes later until his phone shuts him out. Thank god for parental controls.

The shorts are terrible, whereas my 'normal' home page is a combination of informative/hobby/tech related content and background music, the shorts are a bunch of useless crap that eat my time like nothing else without giving anything in return (apart from triggering of my reward systems I guess).

I just delete them from my homepage and they stay away for 30 days. If they return I only notice it because they sneakily start eating my attention again. Maybe there's a setting that doesn't make them return.

> I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc.

When I grew up, and computers and the internet was new, we were mostly using it for entertainment and fun as well. I learned programming early, but I was an exception at my school (now lots of kids learn programming at an even earlier age). And I still wasted a lot of high school playing Anarchy Online (MMORPG), to the point where it affected my grades.

I'm not sure the value they'd get is the videos they watch regularly.. but just the knowledge/habit/skills around finding a video to help learn a new topic or solve a problem.

I've heard that they're losing the skills around using a general purpose PC though, since they're so used to smart phones, iPad and simple ready-made web solutions for everything. Not sure that's a big problem though.

When I was a kid, my parents hated that I was passionate about "cheap mindless video games".

Guess who's become a successful software engineer and happy human as a result?

Don't dismiss what your kids are into because you don't understand it. Their peers will, and their peers will give them money for it.

Now I know Mr Beast's target demo.

> They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent.

I really wonder about that. Learning anything requires active participation and motivation. YouTube provides great content, but I'd say it's the easy part. BTW, public libraries existed before youtube.

My personal example, I graduated in maths 20 years ago and spent countless hours solving problems. Nowadays, I'm a youtube addict, I casually watch lots of videos, but I have very little attention span left, and don't build serious knowledge about anything.

But your hypothesis could be assessed based on data. I may be wrong, but I suspect students math proficiency has declined in most western countries.

School is less about learning a subject to any serious degree, and more about socialization and exposure to a breadth of subjects. I am suspect of people who view school purely as an educational experience.

Is "calculus" a hard core counterexample?

I think parent speaks more about younger people. By the time you get to calculus, you're probably expected to be mature and somewhat independet.

You say "socialization" but I think the real word is "conformity".

Yes, societal institutions have a flywheel effect of normalization on those who pass through them. This is foundational to a cooperative society. They provide a background context to evaluate actions within, and define oneself in, or against.

Consider your Shannon Information. Meaning does not exist without context.

Socialization is an artifact, not the purpose, of most modern schooling in America; not like kids weren't socializing in mines and factories, though they likely had way more sense of consequence for their behavior in those environments. That said, education is also secondary except for, in urban public schools at least, the tier of students that are filtered for to benefit.

I think the socialization argument is a fallacy, in my experience there is absolutely no effort to guide or educate or provide any sort of understanding or framework of how to socialize, how to cope with interactions, your own feelings, etc.

It's just putting them all together and taking action if something too drastic happens, but there's no actual dedicated time for teaching how to socialize, you're on your own.

> just cancelled Spotify and got YouTube Premium

Did this some time ago. Never looked back.

It took me a while to cancel spotify even though YT music came free with YT premium. I assumed the algo would be on par given the quality of the video recommendations but it took months for my YT music recommendations to get close to Discover Weekly.

My problem with yt music is that certain albums will ask you if you approve playing, even with age and content restrictions off.

Rage Against The Machine’s first album has “disturbing” album art.

It asks for EVERY song.

Song in a playlist?

Playlist stopped waiting for you to ask.

Terrible UX, imho.

Its soft censorship, yt is famous for it.

archive link unpaywall : https://archive.is/20230422002004/https://www.ft.com/content...

YT helped me learn a lot about software engineering before I had a professional SWE job, but it was nowhere near a replacement for a bit of experience. My first 6mo at a good company was very formative.

It's a supplementary, I'd say.

From my experience, I learn more from a structured material (aka courses, books) and structured process (aka working in a company).

But I often get the motivation and knowledge from unstructured material like YouTube.

> I think we’ll see them leapfrogging millennials on the career ladder because they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free.

I’m a millennial and I spent my youth learning everything there is to know about my passions for free. YouTube is not they only avenue of free online education.

The resources that makes someone professionally competent are gatekept until you enter the industry and no amount of video content will change this. This means that despite a hire potentially being extremely competent in the subject matter, everything else around that is likely to be a "red flag" in the hiring process and prevent them from gaining that professional competency.

Which I hope changes, I suppose we'll see if millennials-as-managers can change enough about the process to find and hire these talents to nurture their professional competency. MAM's also generally will also be less strict about traditional processes which is exactly the type of environment these talents need.

> They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent.

Do you have evidence for that?

No training makes someone professionally competent, only being a professional does. Even people who go through intense years of law school or medical school, studying directly and interactively with world-class scholars and peers, in actual labs and courtrooms, are not professionally competent lawyers or doctors. People with PhDs are not professionally competent professors.

But focusing on training: I don't just accept any training when hiring. What evidence do you have that videos on YouTube provide a similarly high level of training? The Internet is filled with nonsense, misinformation, and disinformation, and it's clear that people don't make the effort to discrminate between that and truth, and between just any truth and the best knowledge and training. I'm certainly not giving someone or YouTube the benefit of the doubt.

A strong counter-signal is someone saying they learned from "YouTube", which is like saying they learned from "a book", and demonstrates a lack of discrimination or even an awareness of it - here is someone who lacks even the awareness that it's problematic.

And learning from a video or a book has never been a high standard of training; it's been a pejorative - 'they learned to be a doctor from a book'. It's just not the same at all as interactive learning with an expert (a professor), with peers, with a diverse cirriculum, resources such as labs, an institution geared toward creating effective learning programs. Again, it shows a lack of discrimination and judgment, and of even enough thought and skepticism to be aware of the issue.

People like YouTube because it's convenient, and because it's trendy they can get away with not questioning it (and dismissing these issues). I hire people who are committed to being the best, who think deeply, skeptically, and insightfully. I don't want to hire those who make serious decisions - such as their career preparation - based on convenience and who turn over analysis and decisions to the Internet crowd-think.

Anecdotally, I've had people assert that to me how informative certain YouTube videos are and show me them. When I take the time to research it, most are nonsense - I just lack expertise in the field and couldn't tell by watching (research establishes that people are very poor at that, and I'd guess that the obviously false ones don't get views). I have sought and used some videos from specific sources, but then I'm not learning from YouTube, I'm learning from that person. YouTube as nothing to do with it; the medium has nothing to do with it; if they wrote a book or article I'd have used that.

One way of thinking about the problem: Why is learning from YouTube any better than learning from a book before YouTube?

Not everyone is doing a job that requires lab work. There are a lot of jobs out there which you can learn to do entirely through Youtube and your own personal projects.

Still just empty claims - just like the YouTube videos make. To me, if I'm your interviewer, it looks like you've internalized the fundamental anti-lesson. You can't distinguish BS from accurate knowledge, and you don't even understand that. The BS may get you by on HN but not in a serious workplace. I'm not paying you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for that.

Every other objection still applies - including all the other benefits of college education. What about those issues?

Again, why should I trust you and your YouTube training. Also, which jobs?

There are literally full courses for AWS DevOps qualifications, Network Administration and the like, with hundreds of comments underneath them saying, “thanks, I passed my AWS cert today because of this course”, “thanks, I got a job because of this course”, “thanks, I got a promotion because of this course”. Here is but one example of many:

https://youtu.be/SOTamWNgDKc

There are thousands of interviews with people who have taught themselves how to set up businesses, or code websites, taught themselves music, video production or any number of things through YouTube.

> Again, why should I trust you and your YouTube training.

Because if the person can demonstrate that they can do the job, then they can do the job. Believe it or not, this was how the world used to operate for thousands of years. The whole piece of paper and a university campus thing is a only a very recent development. People got by on experience, competence and reputation.

For whatever reason, you can’t seem to accept that whilst there is a lot of bullshit on the internet, there is also a lot of quality, helpful and informative content.

>Because if the person can demonstrate that they can do the job, then they can do the job.

This is exactly right, but "I watched some YT videos" is not equivalent to demonstrating ability, which I think is the OP's point.

If you can learn something from watching videos, and then prove that you've mastered it by actually demonstrating your skill, then great! But if your resume just says "I watched some videos and have zero professional experience", that doesn't count for anything.

Also, a demonstration isn't worth that much, though better than nothing. There's only so much you can learn in an interview 'demonstration', and I can't afford to give everyone six months or a year to demonstrate what they really can do.

What the YouTube videos demonstrate to me is a lack of effort and committment to find the very best sources and learn the best material; obviously to me, computer science theory and a real professor would be better (skill training is good after you have that, though I'm greatly simplifying here). If that's how they approach their skill-aquisition project, that's evidence of how they'll approach projects at my business. If they follow the herd on that, it's evidence that they will follow the herd otherwise.

I know which way the herd is running. It's not only the wrong way (there's no correlation between herd direction and the 'right' direction - in fact, I'd say there's an inverse correlation because the herd is driven by other things), it's to my competitive advantage to go another way. I want people whose standard is the very best and who think for themselves. And in addition, the social media culture from which the YouTube training trend arises, is highly reactionary, which is crushing to creative, enthusiastic, independent thought.

> It’s an awesome resource and I think Gen Z are at a massive advantage because of it. They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent. I think we’ll see them leapfrogging millennials on the career ladder because they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free

I don't follow this. I'm a millennial, graduated university 10 years ago, and by my estimation, that was the golden age of MOOCs (many of the courses available for free back then require payment now, and several of the MOOC platforms have shut down)

I don't consider bespoke youtube videos to be as rigorous with regards to structuring a topic

Yeah, including Wikibooks... and why hasn't anyone brought up Wikipedia yet ?!

It's when I discovered it in 2006 when it really dawned on me just how immense the potential of the Internet was !

Youtube videos are good for "fixing your own pipelines" kinda of problem.

I don't think they're good for, for example, programmering.

A guy a few years older than me at school was massively into maths and took out every book he could find from all the local libraries. When he finally arrived at Cambridge University to study, he ended up going to third year lectures because he already knew all the material in the first and second year classes. He went on to do a Phd in maths there. Imagine if he had access to YouTube. He probably would have ended up being capable of jumping straight into the Phd on arrival.

I've heard that reading about a subject for 30 minutes a day will, in six months, make you among the world's experts.

Probably won't work for playing piano. Unlikely to work for anything involving problem solving, because...you gotta solve problems, not read about solving problems.

In what subjects will 90 hours of reading - a little more than two work-weeks' worth - make you a world expert?

Where did you hear this? Was there any examples provided of people that have done this successfully? I'm extremely skeptical of this lol

Top 0.1% of the general public, certainly. One of the go-to experts in the world? No

I can't understand people paying for streaming services like Netflix & competition, where all their catalogs are region-locked and every single one of them producing mostly crappy shows/movies (at least that's the Netflix I experienced last time I was able to use someone else's account on someone else's computer many years ago, so I must assume as everything else, things get worse, not better).

What would I pay for? A good streaming service where I can choose movies that at least for me are worth watching: good stories, classics, italian, french, spanish movies, independent productions, low-budget productions and non-mainstream gargantuan productions. Definitely not a service that literally invites you to consume whatever crap they produce and put in front of your screen to keep people paying for subscriptions. What I would also pay for? A service that after watching a movie allows me to actually purchase a digital DRM-free copy of the movie for some extra few bucks. Any suggestions?

I've heavily switched my screen habit, now I find myself most of the time reading books, as my father used to say: "You produce your very own version of the film in your head". I used to read regularly as a kid, then there's a huge gap where I haven't touched books for years. The only regret I have is that I haven't kept this habit all this time.

Edit: Some corrections.

You might like the Criterion Collection streaming service. Not a customer but love their movie collection.

LOL. I'm currently in Italy and I'm getting: "Sorry. This is currently unavailable in your region. Type in your email below and tell the producers you want it in your country!" (when trying to sign in, don't know if it's worth trying with a VPN service tough)

My local cinema does that DRM-free movie on USB key thing... even if you do not watch the movie first !

(As you can imagine, it doesn't show any Marvel movies or the like...)

Take a look at mubi. (movies only, no series)

Thanks for that one. The catalog that they have seems very interesting!

You're welcome. You can find a 3 month free trial if you search around a bit.

It sounds like you want to find some movie critics whose tastes line up with yours, buy DVDs of their highly rated movies and then rip them.

> They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent.

How? (I'm misunderstanding.)

Well for starters, you have courses on the freecodecamp channel which will literally teach you everything you need to know to get AWS DevOps qualifications. But you can teach yourself literally anything. MIT has seven thousand videos on its MIT OpenCourseWare channel. 3Blue1Brown and Khan Academy can teach you maths and science. If you want to be a repair man, or a mechanic - you can find a video of how to do it on YT. Design circuit boards, make movies, learn instruments - all on YT.

It's not that university degrees don't work. But there are other ways that self motivated people can learn and there are currently very few paths for those people to get recognition for their learning other than coughing up thousands for a piece of paper from a university and jumping through hoops. Personally I think we should have a lot more universities like WGU where you can just go and test out of exams immediately if you can demonstrate you already have the knowledge.

> No other generation in history has had such an opportunity.

I'm a milllenial that learned how to code at 14 using the internet. To be fair to your point about "free" I did use pirated software and a few pirated video courses

At 14 I learned to code for "free" - minus very expensive computer m y parents bought and a pirated copy of turbo pascal and computer magazines. Magazines and books were not as good but remember Internet made some other resources disappear or rendered them less visible.

I'm not convinced for YouTube. For the most part, I just see Gen Zers teaching other Gen Zers. It is very rare to find someone older on YouTube with actual, professional, real-world experience, and if you do, the channel is not popular and is thus buried in search results.

> Pretty soon I’m going to cancel Netflix and Prime too

No one is paying Prime for their video services...

Most of the world outside US is paying for Prime Video. Here's an article on their video library size (and costs) in various parts of the world: https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/amazon-prime-vi...

>I think we’ll see them leapfrogging millennials

No. Youtube is not a replacement for rigorous training and that in and of itself isn't the actual purpose of higher education, which primarily functions to create life-long lasting networks.

Gen Z'ers who think they can replace an education with Youtube and college networks with Discord will, and already have, ended up as permanent gig workers with no social capital at some NFT firm. It's worth noting the complete decline in highly valued tech ventures started by very young people from 2010+ onwards. There is no Gen Z Zuckerberg or Facebook, and they're already into their mid-twenties. Gen Z is caught up in influencer and hustle culture.

Not just GenZ. I spent most of my 51 years of life having zero idea how my car or engines in general worked. Then my son got into eBikes and then motorcycles and I helped him along, now I know how to wire up a 3 phase motor and rebuild a carb, among various other skills like bleeding brake lines and even welding. This wouldn't have happened without the loads of tutorial videos out there. I'd watch and think, "Oh, I see. We can totally do that." Not to mention all the other great stuff I watch like Baseball highlights, chess, science and technology, travel, history, etc.

YouTube has turned out to be the best thing on the internet since the web. A Premium subscription is well worth the benefit I get out of it.

You know I was about to do that but I noticed a few quality of service issues with the music I wanted to listen to. You of course were talking about YouTube Premium and I am referring to YouTube Music which also charges a monthly premium. I wanted to point out that previously there was an abundance of ripped albums at high quality that were obscure (it seems to depend on genre). I noticed some records from larger acts sounded pretty bad for some reason if you are speaking about quality. My sample size is still small and I am referencing a popular RHCP record but than I tried another funk track that should bump in my car as they have previously and I was disappointed. I think we take for granted something about signal chain and someone is trying to capitalize on that or the algorithm. I guess with good enough equipment anything should sound good I mean you can really mess stuff up with gain or normalization. Now I have been tremendously pleased with other larger obscure records I have learned about from wwww.rateyourmusic.com as there music has consistently been available on YT Music which is awesome. Some of those artists are not represented anymore and not available on Spotify or were not initially. If you are talking about quality what I am saying is that you can't just pick any upload from algorithm.

I only sub to YouTube premium and have never used Spotify because yt music is awesome.

"an awesome resource and I think Gen Z are at a massive advantage because of it"

You're not thinking it through, because that always on ubiquitous nature is very much a double edged sword. There has never been a time when the youth has been so incredibly targeted to hijack the release of dopamine with doom scrolling endless entertainment.

A child who is constantly inundated with passive entertainment never has the opportunity to cultivate their own voice.

> I just cancelled Spotify and got YouTube Premium and it was an absolutely brilliant decision.

What’s great about YouTube Music is that it includes user uploads, meaning that you get tracks (e.g. video game music) and versions/recordings of tracks (like old 12" versions and remixes, or live recordings) that you are unlikely to get on a purely commercially-sourced music service.

I cannot agree more. In my opinion it's the only music platform that hasn't been entirely captured by the mainstream record labels. I get all kinds of cool DIY bands recommended through it. I got more good recommendations from using it in a couple of hours than I got in the last few years via Spotify.

I am not against gaming, play and fun. Far from it. It is probably a necessary part of our lives. I myself put in countless hours of play into a few games that I mastered (and sometimes wish I had achieved something else instead in that time).

However, I would argue, that, while there is more educational content available at no cost (besides our privacy), there is also a lot more trash, that makes it difficult to find the really good content, that does not teach things wrong. Furthermore, there is probably no generation before Gen Z, that wasted more time with stuff that does not result in learning anything valuable.

(Take for example, how many more people are using computers (in any form) and how much bigger the ratio of people is, that still don't know how to use their machine properly. Well this is of course subjective, as I am talking from a sotfware developer perspective.)

Ultimately, only few are able to take advantage of what is available, because of mind set, motivation, and other issues in life.

As a Millennial, I can confidently say this is not true.

I learned LAMP architecture as a kid by reading tutorial webpages and following along. No bank account or library card needed. Wikis and how to's were updated regularly, were uninterrupted by ads and were easily searchable! I learned SQL on a dynamic website where I could write code and see results (or errors) instantly! If I needed help, message boards were there. Even today, I learn things way more quickly from a stack exchange post than a YT video.

Anyone can be motivated to learn something on their own, but if they are successful, it's not going to be because of YT.

Well as the Millennial who wrote the comment, I can confidently say that it is true. Just because you preferred to learn programming through reading tutorials doesn't mean that the same is true for everybody else or that text is the best medium for the majority of skills out there. I'm pretty sure the majority of mechanics and construction workers would prefer to see videos of a repair over a text description.

Just because you preferred to learn programming through reading tutorials doesn't mean that the same is true for everybody else or that text is the best medium for the majority of skills out there.

It's a shame this isn't what I said.

I'm pretty sure the majority of mechanics and construction workers would prefer to see videos of a repair over a text description.

Ah, so your source is "trust me, bro"? OK...

Also, don't just completely forget other methods of learning, some of which I brought up, like hands-on/experiential learning or learning from interacting with others. Good luck getting getting your ASE certification from just watching YT videos.

"Even so, the real heroes of the site are not those who make original content. It is those who post old programming from the analogue age."

What the author is stating here, which may be lost on some readers, is that he thinks (video) file sharers are the real heroes of YouTube.

He thinks the heroes are not necessarily the folks who make videos intended for YouTube (original content), but the ones who generate digital video files from analogue content and upload (post) them to YouTube. (assuming the persons generating the digital video files are also the uploaders)

To retrieve FT articles, one can use 12ft.io. Here is example using popular programs curl and firefox

   usage: echo https://www.ft.com/content/c57e3503-6fc0-44dc-9d50-35f8f9da25d2|1.sh > 1.htm
          firefox ./1.htm

   #!/bin/sh
   sed -e '/www.ft.com\/content/s>.*>url=https://12ft.io/api/proxy?ref=\&q=&>' \
   -e 's/:/%3A/2' -e:a -e 's>/>%2F>5;ta'|curl -sA "" -K- -o/dev/stdout|gzip -dc \
   |sed '/./{/t=.o-cookie-message/,/Manage cookies/d;};/<\/a>$/d;/<\/div>$/d'

Indeed. You are doing gods work here :-)

archive.is

works for a lot of paywalled sites

Another great thing about YouTube not mentioned is the quality of comments. Something happened in the last 5 years or so that changed them profoundly.

Once the laugh of the internet they are now one of the most wholesome in it. Almost unbelievable for a public site.

I'm fascinated by this. I feel the same way. Do we know if The YouTube team if ordering comments using some sort of sentiment analysis? This might be the key to moderating social media. Is almost like negative/toxic comments are shadow banned and relegated to the bottom of the comments section.

Youtube's system is extremely heavy handed. You can sometimes notice your comments getting shadowbanned if you see the same comment from another account/computer. And I think you can notice it for other people when you get a reply notification, and can even read the comment, but it doesn't show in the comments if you open the list of comments in notifications ?

(Posting multiple comments for the same video seems to be an easy way to get them (shadow)banned. Even more posting links, even when it's literally a timelink to the same video using the mm:so format !)

There was a HN submission on this a while back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30151021

I see masses of bots and dregs in support of authoritarian states.

The real comments are wholesome but a significant portion of them are obvious scammers. It looks like such an easy problem to solve, they are by accounts that literally post exactly the same comment with a link on loads of videos.

Yeah. They seem to have had problems recently with some very obvious spam bots, but other than that the quality is alright.

On some niche nerd channels the comments are often exceptional and informative. Usually they're at least pleasant or amusing.

> Another great thing about YouTube not mentioned is the quality of comments. Something happened in the last 5 years or so that changed them profoundly.

It's not uncommon to get spam from bots trying to impersonate the video creator (same username, same avatar) and trying to push crypto scams everytime one answers a comment. Youtube hardly does anything about it.

I think the comments have become much worse. Good channels used to have good comment sections where people had normal reasonable discussions about the topic of the video, but these days it seems like nearly every channel's comment section is filled with sycophantic noise, praising the video creator for being great and wonderful but saying very little of substance.

Of course I'm not talking about the comment sections of music video channels or provocative video essayers or front page youtubers like pewdiepie. Those were always abominable crap. I mean the small channels of that make niche but thoughtful content, that appeals to people with those niche interests. These sort of channels used to have good comment sections, not the spam and flamewars that people talk about when they say youtube comments were crap. Most of that is gone now, sacrificed for the 'greater good' I guess. The good got ironed out with the bad, and now everything is bland.

Just for instance, railfan videos (e.g. people who watch trains.) The comment sections used to be people giving personal anecdotes about interesting trains they had seen, or their uncle who worked on a similar train, various comments of that nature. Now it's all "Very interesting!", "Another excellent video", "Love these videos, keep them coming", "Great video Danny."

We can all agree he never disappoints us with his content

> "...praising the video creator for being great and wonderful but saying very little of substance"

Exactly this. Many videos contain a deluge of comments that sound like they came from a praise vending machine.

I watched a short video recently about a gadget review. It was extremely basic, not informative. All the comments mentioned nothing about the topic and instead went into gushing mode, praising the creator with copy-paste lines such as "you deserve more subs" etc. Often from profiles that have no content, and look to be spammer accounts.

Spammer profiles and bots are exploiting the high-ranking "positive but empty comment" in order to increase chances of engagement on their own profile by dominating the "top comments". This is why I switch the sorting to "newest first" to avoid the fake top comments.

They shadow ban ~100% of comments, unless they detect positive sentiment. If you express any nuance or criticism, poof, your comment is disappeared. What remains is a sea of positive, fully vapid, fully useless comments: an authoritarian dream of milquetoast public discourse.

still one million times better than what came before.

That's an interesting dilemma between free speech and moderation.

I'd also say the current system is better, but losing the dislike button and pushing for positive sentiment can lead to fake positivity which we should beware.

Reminds of the anime "Avatar", where there's an episode featuring a character with an outrageous fake smile who turned out to be sort of a political oppressor.

The problem with human comments are the humans?

I'm a YouTuber with a moderate channel (60k subs). Bad comments are not magically shadow banned, they go into a queue that I have to moderate. The filtering is very good, I never get false positives. Even the really, really nasty ones are there, I just get a warning before I can see them.

I can, of course, choose to delete those comments and/or ban that person from commenting on my channel again. I can also choose to approve them.

I imagine most big YouTubers can’t moderate each comment like that though, so it’s effectively the same as a shadowban in that case

They have teams of people doing it.

Comments only go into that queue when certain words are used, and they have to be bad. Well reasoned disagreement never goes in there.

Even just “what you said is dumb, I know better that you” doesn’t go in there

It’s always comments like “f$&@ you, moron, “.

But links often go there as well

They do. Which means if you don't want your comment to go in the queue on YT, don't post links in comments.

Which really hurts your ability to share information with others, and it doesn’t tell you this anywhere so you can spend ages writing out a comment without realising that no one will ever see it

I prefer to think of it as a meeting where Robert's Rules are followed and enforced vs. an anarchist shouting match.

You call it milquetoast.

I call it pleasant.

Things get done under Robert's Rules, nothing gets accomplished when everyone is yelling "shitcock" at each other in an overwhelming din.

> Another great thing about YouTube not mentioned is the quality of comments. Something happened in the last 5 years or so that changed them profoundly.

What videos. I can certainly say some YouTubers attract much better comments, but on average YouTube comments still strikes me as one of the dumbest places on the internet.

OP's point though. The YouTube comments used to be an absolute joke and disaster. I'm sure it came at the cost of some non-insignificant revenue and engagement but there's a model where it works, that Twitter could emulate perhaps (if they cared).

Yes, I have started watching the "how much do you pay for rent in New York (I think there are also other cities but I mostly get nyc videos) and the comments are polite, dare I say kind even.

Very thankful for this change, whatever the cause might be :)

I need to mention how terrible YouTube search has gotten.

Instead of giving you actual search results, it only gives a 2-3 relevant videos and then some random recommendations that are often completely unrelated to the query

Google itself no longer does search and does recommendation in its place. I hate it so much. They must have such an incredible moat if they aren't getting smashed by the competition by just doing actual search, with all the words in the query string, ensuring every single one of them is actually in each result.

Yes, I often now use another search engine, such as DDG, to search YouTube.

The trick is to go into search settings and select “videos.” All the other sections go away.

You have to do it each time, though. I’ve heard there’s a browser addon to do it automatically, but I didn’t install it.

I'm troubled by YouTube. There is absolutely incredible content there. And there is so much shit in between the good stuff.

Does anyone run a frontend that offers control over the shit? I want my kids to have autonomy in viewing interesting things there, but I don't want to YouTube algorithm attacking their developing brains.

Maybe a browser plugin?

> And there is so much shit in between the good stuff.

Yeah discovery is really hard on there. So much loud crap :(

There are alternative front-end apps. Not for iPhone, because of course not, but Android has Newpipe at least. For desktop, I haven’t looked but sure there are some.

There's Restricted Mode[1], but it's extremely aggressive to the point of hiding too much.

I personally use the drop-down feature to tell YouTube I'm not interested in a particular recommended channel or video, as well as maintain a manually updated BlockTube list for channels and keywords.

I've also heard that clearing stuff like your watch history is a good way to flush weird recommendations. Generally, disabling all targeted stuff goes a long way to ward off the craziest stuff. On top of disabling the main trending page so it goes directly to your subscriptions.

[1]: https://www.howtogeek.com/770192/how-to-turn-off-restricted-...

Well, YouTube Kids?

That's my problem with it as well... I keep on clicking "I'm not interested" for all kind of clickbait brainless content, but they keep on coming back.

recently, I started getting videos with less than 500 views from tiny channels. I guess YT is trying to be fair and send traffic to those channels. But I felt those videos were just clickbaits. That's one problem with the algorithm.

Positives of YT, mentioned in other comments also: Algorithm is very good in general. Quality of content is good lately (or at least you can stick to such content). Easily replace Netflix time. Comments section is also good. YT Premium is worth it.

YT almost got beaten by Insta and TikTok but survived. And the YT app on a smart TV is much better than Netflix and others.

I don't have this issue at all. All my recommendations are pretty accurate and I don't see much mindless content. I have been using YouTube for years now, have over 1000 videos on my Watch Later list, and probably watch multiple hours of YouTube a day. Maybe it just knows me better.

The only thing that works for me is to say that I dont want any recommendations from that channel. It seems brutal at first but actually I think it's entirely fair and solves the problem. If a channel posts a video about why the S23 is the best phone to buy then I can safely ignore that entire channel. The likelihood of him also posting christian documentaries into the same channel is basically zero.

The following are all web browser add-ons:

"Unhook" hides the related videos, comments, shorts tab, suggestions wall, homepage recommendations, trending tab and other distractions on YouTube pages.

"BlockTube" lets you block channels or videos by ID, title keywords, or comment content.

"Channel Blocker" puts an X next to the channel name on each video. Clicking the X instantly and permanently removes the channel from search results.

"uBlock Origin" removes ads from the beginning and within videos.

"SponsorBlock" skips over a variety of uninteresting sections of videos via crowdsourcing. You can choose which types of sections you want to skip.

I need to do a lot of work on this extension but I made one that filters out negative and political content: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/healthy-surf/

Also works on old.reddit.com/r/all which is its main use case for me

For excellent front-end alternatives, without recommendation, see:

https://invidious.io

Click "Use invidious" and bookmark 1-2 of the choices

Long form YouTube is amazing. I just wish I could completely disable Shorts from my YouTube Premium. It is the diet equivalent of eating raw sugar with honey on top - it just wants to suck you in with stuff you had no intention of watching.

I'd pay extra on top of the going rate for that.

I definitely agree with you, I know some people don't like the idea of paying for YT Premium instead of just using AdBlock but YouTube is just so good that I think it's more worth my money than any other streaming service

YouTube is amazing but a couple of disappointments:

1: YouTube financially rewards 12 minute videos. I feel like this has resulted in a collapse in creativity as now most videos are 12 minutes. You get what you pay for.

2: being a walled garden, YouTube is devoid of technical innovation. This really hasn’t evolved far beyond broadcast TV and that’s because YouTube owns all the content and developers can’t innovate the core experience.

YouTube has gotten much much better at rewarding videos based on context not just length. They weren't always great about it, but they've improved tremendously. I can see them further adjusting this, so that say if you've uploaded ~11 minute videos consecutively it'll prevent you from adding that "middle video" ad break (note: I don't know if they already do this).

I don't believe these changes have collapsed creativity, there isn't another platform on the planet that is creating as much long form content as on YouTube. People aren't posting their great absurdly high detailed yet entertaining content on Medium or Substack, no it's on YouTube. This has led to a walled garden of sorts, but it's also reaping benefits from their improvements from the days where you could easily game YouTube with shallow thumbnails.

> 1: YouTube financially rewards 12 minute videos. I feel like this has resulted in a collapse in creativity as now most videos are 12 minutes. You get what you pay for.

I checked my subscriptions page and of the latest 18 videos, here are the lengths stats

* 1× <1min

* 3× 4-6min

* 1× 10-12min

* 6× 13-20min

* 7× 20-40min

Levi Rozman talks about this a bit in his videos, I feel like the better rule is that you need at least one ad break, but two is also a good inflection point? I don’t think its 12 the number specifically, but 12 guarantees the first ad break.

My experience with YouTube seems to be entirely dissimilar with the clickbait/algorithm horror stories I'm reading here in the comments. I watch a lot of Youtube and I let my 1st grader watch YouTube somewhat unregulated. It's seems entirely fine to me. When I do look over his viewing history, I'm relieved it's all fairly wholesome content. No, he's not always learning science and math (but sometimes), but I simply do not consider his research into "what every color light saber means" as harmful. Looking over my own current recommendations it's all science and engineering related videos because that's what it knows I'm interested it. You get out what you put in.

A major fail, in my opinion, is YouTube TV. The user interface is horrendous. YouTube TV's UI is mostly images (video thumbnails) and it is hard to see what the currently selected item is. A mostly-text UI, with thumbnail only for the currently selected item would have worked much better. I tried to switch to YouTube TV as soon as it launched, but canceled because of the horrible UI. Recently I tried again — surely they would have fixed the issues — but no, navigation is still terrible, so canceled again.

As someone that only uses YTTV to watch sportss, pecifically NFL Redzone, F1, and baseball/basketball playoffs, I really enjoy YTTV interface because it always knows what I'm going to YTTV for. Very rarely do I need to click more than 2 buttons to get to the thing I'm trying to watch

YouTube’s video player is the best and most responsive video player online. I don’t think I want any UI changes around it.

YouTube TV is for watching broadcast and cable television. It has a different UI.

YouTube will pull you towards controversial clickbaity crappy content since that’s what generated clicks. These days I just surgically search for what I need, watch that, then get out, ignoring all recommends because invariably they are crap.

And YouTube is poison for young children who don’t know better than to follow what the algorithm tells you. You like super Mario? Here, 500 ways to die in Mario. And next - what would happen if all Mario characters killed each other bloodily? And it starts getting worse.

We banned YouTube for our kid and couldn’t be happier - the damage that thing was doing to his mind was noticeable and no amount of guidance or curation was able to keep him away from the cesspool.

Yeah but if you’re immune to the most obvious awful shit (not your kids) it’s kind of the only drawback.

I get the occasional “lets debunk flat earthers” but a) I don’t find that content interesting and b) I know that’s the lip of the rabbit hole, so if I just avoid those kind of videos, my feed is fine.

Your problem is legitimate and your response is understandable, but what would you think of YouTube if that weren’t a problem?

> What would you think of YouTube if that weren’t a problem?

Not op, however I avoid YT at all costs. I would sing a tune of a product giving back to the world. Education, knowledge and entertainment. Quite a dream compared to the current as of the moment; corruption of education, knowledge and entertainment.

No, YouTube is not a corruption of any of those things.

You can’t have the things you like without some way of allowing the people who created those things to no have to do other things to survive.

Youtube only gives you what they think you will click on. If you don't click on the crappy content (or at least leave the video immediately) then they will stop recommending it.

I guess this advice doesn't apply if you are sharing an account with your kid, then you're screwed.

I think YouTube will really struggle to figure out how to weigh lowest common denominator content that does well with personalized recommendation that satisfy some deeper intellectual curiosity. I'm already finding it's a kind of "work" to keep the geopolitical and economics content that makes me feel like YouTube is a positive for me on the front page over shorts and sports montages.

Maybe my algorithms just in a bad place right now, but it feels like there's been some kind of shift this year, and I'm wondering if others are noticing something similar.

I’m a very strict curator of my watch history. If I ever succumb to click bait and click on some video I immediately regret, I go into my watch history and delete the offending video. This puts an immediate stop to any recommendations of similar videos. I recommend it to everyone!

I use a second account to watch videos that i think will muck with my recommendations in any way I don’t like. Comedy, political news, music videos, etc… it’s nice to have a separate feed that gets my taste in these things without distracting my main algorithm from focusing on my deeper interests

same, single greatest control of what it recommends. sometimes i will go off on a tangent, but i dont want it populating my feed, so i'll prune the history, and it's perfectly happy.

I do it slightly differently. My watch and search history have been paused for 3+ years, leaving the algorithm to only use my highly curated list of followed channels and Liked videos to recommend me videos from.

Even if I watch a meme video or two, it should have no impact on my recommendations.

If there's a random video that I want to revisit though, I only have my PC's browser history to rely on. Outta luck on mobile.

I'm the same, and it has been working really good for me so far. The only downside is that it's very easy to stay in your bubble of subscriptions and not get broader view from other sources. That's why occasionally I will still just browse the Home Page and pick some random stuff from it.

YT's algorithm is great - shows me a great mix of mindless stuff I like that I can just watch and not think or put on in the background (sports highlights, music playlists); or stuff that I need to pay attention to (politics, finance, how-to's), and even some guilty pleasures (film/tv clips, comedy sets, etc). It's great.

The shorts, however, need to just die. Youtube, stop trying to compete with TikTok. You have a niche, and need stick to it. No need to dumb down with crappy content and actively work to shorten attention spans with cropped clips and cannibalize your main product.

My kid is 9 - YouTube is her search engine. All my efforts to explain that is what Google is for have failed. Every time I use Google she laughs at me and calls me old :)

Doesn't that make her slower? Youtube has better quality results most of the time, but it takes so long to watch the video and get to the information I want... I always start with a google search for that reason.

Yea I am always wondering the same thing but what I am searching for normally is instant answers to questions while I am finding she is searching is more like “how do I…?” it is all fascinating to me…

Her older friends use TikTok in lieu of YT which might be “best of both worlds” but I am not ready to let her use TikTok

Interesting. If she wants to know "how do I" stuff, then I guess chatgpt will be a huge success for her generation!

There is indeed great content on Youtube. It's just more than unfortunate that the algorithmic pull is towards the - shall we say - less informative end of the spectrum?

Some people learn a lot from it. Most people just seem to gawp endlessly.

YouTube is an internet in itself. There are many sub-Youtubes and you can end up in any set of them depending on where the algorithm takes you.

> less informative end of the spectrum

My experience is that my recommendations are 80% good but lightly sprinkled with random stuff that is known to addict and exploit people in my demographic. It reminds me of gambling and other businesses that make a disproportionate amount of their money off of a few "whales" who invest an unhealthy amount of their lives into it. They're happy to serve you and make a tiny bit of money off you, but their real goal is to turn you into a whale.

My theory is that some small percentage of my recommendations (2-3%) are dedicated to YouTube's best guess at, "What would this guy watch if he was miserable enough to watch YouTube 16 hours a day?"

YouTube is by far the most reviled live streaming platform. Even if you ignore the insane automatic demonetization trap labyrinth and play perfectly by the books, the monetisation is slapped on as an afterthought, such that you have to already be a celebrity to make any real money out of it.

And as for the "how to fix my panasonic..." Style videos the article praises, unfortunately that video which could be 45 seconds and informative is 11 minutes padded in the first minute for keyword and adult filtering sorting terms, drawn out with filler to 10 minutes to get full ad revenue, and the video itself is interspersed with unskippable "sponsored content" detours because creators are forced to being their own ad agency on top of YouTube's ad system.

That is, if you got the right video in the first place and not a speech to text generated copy that utilizes a better subject and preview icon to steal traffic from a video that was found to be useful.

For all the things Meta is doing wrong, even THEY are creating a better curated video content and streaming platform than YouTube right now. One which supports legitimate creators and not algorithm miners.

I think the point is that the "how to fix my panasonic..." videos don't exist anywhere else.

Sure you could work it by googling "panasonic manual pdf" out but a lot of the times someone has had the exact same issue and have thankfully shared their fix on Youtube.

I agree with the author that YouTube is a great resource. My appreciation of it went up a great deal when I started skipping ad inserts with uBlock, skipping sponsored content with SponsorBlock, and skipping the terrible recommendations and just going straight to my subscriptions with a descriptively named extension called Replace Youtube's Home with Subscriptions. Without those, I don't know whether I'd find it useful.

> It has a greater trove of content than Netflix, HBO and Amazon Prime combined and squared

And one third of that is presented by Simon Whistler.

Who?

Simon Whistler.

Who?

I couldn’t agree more. Most of my other “social media” consumption involves either low effort humor or getting mad at strangers.

I’m constantly learning stuff from YouTube. I’m watching chemistry channels, DIY channels, history channels, etc. It’s an amazing learning tool.

Or it was, anyway. Youtube's choice to tune its algorithm for profitability rather than things I'm actually interested means my home page and "related videos" are almost entirely useless. Youtube's strict search limits also make it very hard to find anything obscure, and impossible to find every video on a particular topic. Maybe it's not the most intellectually healthy thing in the world, but if I want to watch every single, say, reaction video to The Verge's terrible PC build, how dare YouTube decide I'm only allowed to see the three most popular ones before my search results are replaced with random monetized nonsense?

YouTube's search is pretty much horseshit now. Trip off any wrongthink keywords and it will give you nothing but CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and NPR. I wrote an add-on that blocks all these channels by filtering out anything with the verified checkmark, and it's pretty revealing as to how much content YouTube suppresses. It's pretty clear who's buttering their biscuits.

It's truly disheartening to go back through your favorite creators and liked videos and see how many have been removed for violating new community guidelines or deleted by their creators because they no longer fit a marketable image. If I hadn't already had complete archives of my favorite channels due to an obsession with carrying media on the go, I'd probably have broken down and wept at the devastation of channels like Retsupurae and ChipCheezumSA. I learned that if there's any chance I'll want to watch something again in the future I need it saved to disk.

I often use a another search engine, like DDG, to search for videos. Much better.

I pay happily for YouTube, but just so you know... if your politics are considered wrongthink they will happily delete accounts or apply repressive algorithm changes to search results. For example, they kicked well-intentioned people off for suggesting that Covid might have been caused by the Wuhan lab until the New York Times finally published an article suggesting exactly that.

This comment will be downvoted and flagged, but before you do so imagine how you'd feel if you wanted simply to watch a video but Neil Mohan didn't want you to and gave you a shit Fox News video instead.

I wonder if your concern that your opinions will be downvoted and flagged are misplaced. The rest of the commentariat may prove me wrong. But Hacker News tends to be more open to real discussion than most pubs on the internet.

During the COVID period (which I consider functionally complete Fall 2022 with Omnicron's cycle completed), there was a need for keeping the channel from being flooded. The academic discussion of potential counterfactuals, usually to be found in conferences and certain blog webs, were often misconstrued by content producers, conspiracy mongers, and others driven by less-then-truthful motives to convince the gullible or distracted. As this causes very real harm [0], quelling the contrarian-without-evidence voices was important in the short term. We will see regarding the long term impacts as acts of governance are often seen as tyranny by the same groups that push contrarianism for their personal profit.

[0] https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/09/22/kicked-in-the-ribs-haras...

> The academic discussion of potential counterfactuals, usually to be found in conferences and certain blog webs, were often misconstrued by content producers, conspiracy mongers, and others driven by less-then-truthful motives

Don’t care. Price of a free press.

> As this causes very real harm

History shows that the people who suppress free speech are never the good guys, especially when it’s the US government or their complicit media.

Also, thanks for engaging in good faith. If I’m wrong, I want to hear it from you, not a censor.

> Price of a free press

I'm not sure FB, YT, HN, Reddit, etc. are press. Can one publish local legal notices through them?

> History shows that the people who suppress free speech are never the good guys

To be fair, there are no good guys in history. Realpolitick or ideology are the only two options I'm aware of, and not for lack of thought though perhaps due to lack of imagination. We could argue that there is contention for the government to ensure the common welfare and defense in pandemic times, and avoiding censoring (and encouraging private organizations to also avoid censoring).

> To be fair, there are no good guys in history.

Disagree strongly. On balance the American framers (Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Mason, Jefferson, et. al) were amazingly good for the world, far better than Marx, Lenin, Mao, etc.

I appreciate your opinion even if I do not agree.

Same, brother.

The author states: "All praise to the moderation algorithm."

"Algorithm" is becoming some sort of online pop culture buzzword.

According to the dictionary, algorithm means a rule or a set of rules for solving a problem.

Restated without buzzword: "All praise to the moderation rules".

Maybe we should praise the people who actually do the moderation.

"Google and YouTube approach content moderation the same way all of the other tech giants do: paying a handful of other companies to do most of the work."

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-...

""I understand the content I will be reviewing may be disturbing," reads the document, which is titled "Acknowledgement" and was distributed to employees using DocuSign. "It is possible that reviewing such content may impact my mental health, and it could even lead to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).""

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/24/21075830/youtube-moderato...

"Facebook, Google-owned YouTube, and Twitter uphold content moderation as a key component in the fight against abuse of their services by actors such as Russian operatives and violent extremists. In the past couple years, the companies have hired through outsourcing firms thousands of moderators, who watch or read traumatic posts about suicides, mass murders and child pornography, and must quickly make a decision about whether to leave them up or take them down based on whether they violate the companies' policies."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/08/inside-...

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/facebook-content-moderation...

Of all my subscriptions, YT Premium would be the last I’d cancel. Love the diversity of content: you can watch MIT lectures, cat videos, documentaries, 90’s commercial compilations, whatever you want. Being able to enjoy all this ad-free content is so nice.

I do wish there was a way to get certain videos out of your feed without worrying about skewing the algorithm. Eg. “I don’t want to see this skateboarding video, but please keep suggesting other skateboarding videos”.

Really happy with YT Music as well. Never not been able to find a song or artist.

Hope it never changes.

> If the tone of Twitter is a twee leftism, parts of YouTube are conducted in the register of the aggrieved alt-right. There is lots of dating advice on there of the me-Tarzan-you-Jane kind. But these flaws — arbitrary power, weirdo politics — afflict lots of platforms.

This quote says more about the author than about YouTube. It seems obvious that YouTube is much more centrist on average than Twitter, where political polarization is stronger than anywhere else.

I am currently watching a lot of videos on race relations (Douglas Murray vs Robin DiAngelo). What Youtube is doing well compared to other platforms is to give all sides a voice and let the (hopefully better) educated mass make the choice for themselves. That laissez-faire approach to content moderation is what makes YT great in my opinion. And as of now (April 2023) there is a lot of interesting content off the beaten path that can be found.

I'm not sure what my problem could be - but I just can't watch anything on the site. The inline ads and popup banner ads at the bottom haunt me. Plus the stretching of forty lines of text into a twenty minute video irritates me. When it works it's golden - no doubt about that (say changing a spark plug) but most of the time it's the wrong medium and it makes things worse.

My YouTube feed is 40% videos I’ve watched in the last 2 months, 8/10 of those with a red tracking bar showing 98% ~ 100% watched to completion.

Recommendations are good when I've found myself in a sort of ecosystem of people who are all into the same thing. For example, independent comedians who play multiple characters in solo videos. And I believe that I've had more recommendations turn me on to really good stuff that I've followed long-term; for example, I seem to recall that I was watching Ginny Di and Mann Shorts awhile and YT found Deerstalker Productions for me; that was a really great rec. And then they held up VLDL and I resisted because it looked dumb and silly, and when I finally gave in, VLDL had another loyal follower who binged their back catalog in the space of a week or two. And this story keeps playing out.

Sometimes I need to purposely search out channels, and also ignore recommendations, because YT got the wrong idea. For example, right now I am interested in local Irish performers from Donegal, but YT has decided that I want to see any old Irish country-and-western performers. False on two counts: genre matters less than specific location.

I wonder if the author ever had to deal with "this video is not available in your country" though... The biggest enemy of the "information super highway" that the internet could have become - and, thankfully, in large parts have - is the greed of corporations, manifested in overly broad copyright laws, licensing terms, and TOS.

(via Google): Nearly 17 years ago, Google purchased YouTube for the hefty sum of $1.65 billion. The actual date the news hit was Oct. 9, 2006. The transaction closed on Nov 13, 2006.

Can you imagine if there had been any snag in the paperwork or with the legal team or the deal fell through?

I think wikipedia is the jewel of the internet, but that's just grumpy old me.

YT is the greatest media content platform to ever exist. I’ve tried to tell people to cancel Spotify and just rebuild your playlists on YT. The algorithms are just as good. You can also find ALL music on it. When I’m looking for a song that wasn’t popular I can usually find it as one of those slide show videos with the lyrics on it. The only thing I wish it did better was podcasts. If it followed Netflix’s footsteps in producing really good studio quality shows I’d probably cancel Netflix too.

Big problem is that videos disappear regularly (copyright 99% of the time). I have music playlists hundreds of videos each spanning 15 years and there are so many lost videos especially toward the beginning. No way to tell what's even missing. Very bad from an archival pov.

The sound quality suffers though

HN is the jewel of the internet. Youtube might be the amethyst maybe?

HN is too small to be the jewel of "the internet", and irrelevant compared to YouTube for impact.

Man, I dunno. If you're only looking at hype cycle peak, maybe. But discussions on HN are what become the buzz-worthy products after 5 years or so.

Over the christmas holiday I was surprised you couldn't purchase youtube premium as a gift card for someone else. Seems like this would be a non-trivial source of revenue for YT.

You can pay for YT premium from Google play dollars which have gift cards. It's a little bit annoying to set up though.

Bizarre to see this YouTube love-fest in the comments. Lately I've been finding their recommendations a disaster of click-bait shorts that seem like a desperate attempt to compete with TikTok. The worst part is that the algorithm is way too sensitive so if you ever accidentally click on something, you're guaranteed to be force-fed a fire hose of that for life (good luck trying to convince the algorithm otherwise).

Youtube overwhelmingly shows me videos that it's showed me 100 times before and didn't click on, or stuff that I've already watched. The only time it's anything else is when a channel that I'm interested in posts new content. I find it super frustrating to the point I don't even bother going there anymore unless I'm looking for something specific.

I’m old enough to remember the advent of YouTube and remember thinking that it would obviously be one of zillions of video-streaming sites. Nope. Still I am mystified by the dynamic whereby there is just one website people go to to watch videos and just one Twitter and just one Facebook. Somehow, having all the choice in the world funnels into its opposite.

This leans in to what I’ve been saying as an armchair board member:

The value prop of YT is everygreen content.

There is a net-negative effect when they try to be the “right now” platform (they pollute the index of factually-right answers). If YT doubled-down on hosting evergreen content they wouldn’t have to fight for market share against TT/IG/SC/WE because those apps need 10 years to catch up to where YT is today.

I use RSS feeds to follow YouTube channels I enjoy[1]. I absolutely never watch the "Trending" page nor follow the suggestions on the right side of the video.

When I want to search for something, I do, and hope the search algorithm isn't going to screw me over.

[1]: I use Akregator and I can just enter the URL of the YouTube channel for it to find the RSS feed automatically.

I have one issue with Youtube shorts today. I keep getting the tate brothers and pearl recommended even though I have disliked the videos and informed youtube to stop recommending them. I have even sent a message to Youtube but still no luck. Nothing against those people, I'm just bored of their message they spreading and want to see something new

My problem with YouTube is that its recommendation algorithm is too good nowadays. The website is seriously an addiction for me.

My biggest gripe is that I cannot search playlists by name - especially when I want to add a new piece of content to a previously created playlist. I end up having to scroll through many playlists or end up creating duplicate playlists.

"Even so, the real heroes of the site are not those who make original content. It is those who post old programming from the analogue age."

someone should tell the author about archive.org

Sans paywall:

https://t.co/ZyQ4Xz9zX9

It says something about the power of YouTube that Russian government still did not ban it, but it banned Facebook and Instagram. I suspect that banning YouTube might be dangerous to the putin regime.

Why didn’t the author linked to the examples he cites? It’s almost cruel.

> Why didn’t the author linked to the examples he cites?

And generate traffic and revenue for another company without getting a cut?

You gotta be kidding, right?

I know you’re jesting, but he’s singing the praises of those channels in specific and YouTube in general.

Unless the author meant or even linked in the original but the editor cut it out, which is actually probable, considering it’s the financial times.

wowowow, hold on.

Where is my noscript/basic (x)html interface with a nice <video> html element.

And do we finally have a standard way to select a streaming location in a big video file and get the full time of the video? That for proper video seeking from the "video player" and displaying a consistent progession bar.

For instance https://cdn.net/uhentouhognagna/signed_end_time_ms?t=signed_...

I never log in. I block all YT cookies. I use Enhancer for YouTube, Clickbait Remover for Youtube, and uBO. I never ever visit YT home page. I have a self-curated shortlist of channels that interest me enough to keep up with, via local bookmarks/notes.

No ads. No clickbait faces/emoji/etc. No distracting annotations/cards/referrals. No shorts. No auto play. The list goes on.

When used in this manner, YT is amazing. However, it is a bit of a shame that I have to go to these lengths just to make it bearable.

P.S. Yeah I know I’m a bit of a leech in this regard, but I do not agree with the business model that Google has chosen. And even still, I probably care about them more than they care about me.

There’s free with ads and premium without ads, what else could you want out of a business model?

I think content "embed-ability" is a core feature of YTs success. It makes matching content much easier. Like embedding relevant videos in a stock dashboard. https://app.finclout.io/p/C

> "If the tone of Twitter is a twee leftism"

US democratic party establishment loyalism is not "leftism".

I just want a way to get rid of the Shorts or how addictive and draining they are. Does anyone have a way?

Switched the algorithm off years ago. It's rare I even look at YT.

Sure it's great, but one man can watch so much ads for Grammarly!

Youtube is OP right now. People are literally wasting away their lives watching Youtube, for better or worse that's a sure sign your startup worked.

I want to know what the next youtube alternative is going to be. And don't say peertube, you're delusional.

You can't even read the subtitle now. Focus on the clickbait.

Want the best youtube experience? Use libretube or newpipe.

Deriving pearls from the complex oyster that is our world.

I hate what Wojcicki did to Youtube but their decision to pay content creators will go down as not only one of the greatest business decisions, but for all things internet related in the past 30 years.

You spelled "Wikipedia" wrong. :-/

for me it's worth paying premium for until it isn't. I hope I will catch the next one.

Too bad only the US can pay for premium

I'm in the Czech Republic and I used to be subscribed to YouTube Premium until they removed dislikes at which point I canceled my subscription. Not sure what country you're from but I am pretty sure there is an array of countries where you can get Premium now.

a cavity concealed jewel perhaps?

btw the feynman lecture mentioned in the article is first rate, a bit mind blowing

What is truly astonishing is that there are not many other competitors that are consistently as good.

the jewel AND the cesspool

Recently:

YouTube, the Jewel of the Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35670162 - yesterday (1 comment)

This website has no connection to Internet Archive.

No, but it does have a paywall that you can get around by reading the archived version.

I didn't comment on that. Just the mistake about having something to do with Internet Archive.

(Edited the above.)

No, no, surely it's Facebook!

I joke, I joke.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

Wikipedia these days... Imagine putting an article there about the "Woke pipeline" or similar.

Here's a NYTimes podcast on the subject. Not really a made up thing on wikipedia: https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole

The NYT is very left-wing, so of course they are more willing to support and promote such theories. My point is that similar things could be said about the "woke" just as about the "alt-right", but Wikipedia would never allow such an article.

Yes indeed. I think you'll be astonished by the data demonstrating the trend here.

It shows how around 2010 [1], there was an inflection point in main stream US media. It appears to be a coordinated campaign. Which would make sense given Operation Mockingbird [2]

[1] "Many trends develop over decades but I’ve never seen change so rapid as the breathtaking success of what one might call social justice concerns. Beginning around 2010-2014 there appears to have been a inflection point. Here from Zach Goldberg on twitter are various words drawn from Lexis-Nexis."

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

[2]

"Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War and attempted to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

I think the inflection point did likely occur naturally by reaching "critical mass". Additionally such memetic processes are now sped up via social networks and their much more efficient means of communication. Particularly Twitter with its focus on short message length stands out here.

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