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Comment by friend_and_foe | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me, off topic but I once found a YouTube channel or playlist of this African women teaching how to read. Apparently a lot of African women can't read and she wanted to solve the problem by making a video course to teach them. I can't for the life of me find it, when I search its either kids ABCs videos or TED talks about empowered black woman authors. I wonder if any video course aficionados might know what channel I'm talking about.

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Is it this channel?

https://www.youtube.com/@adultliteracyandenglishlang

Here is the reading/writing playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9RaD1SLwSoZhMNz7pqRw...

I like her pacing (not fast, not too slow) and the way she presents herself. It seems like a high quality course, even if the audio and video quality are not perfect. I wonder how we could bring more awareness to this great work and others like it.

No, the one I was looking for was a west African woman in Africa, teaching people to learn to read English from scratch.

It’s so disheartening that you can have this much of a laser focused understanding of what you’re looking for and not be able to find it.

I have the gut feeling that a while back you could find it with a Google search. Nowadays I don't think I can find such stuff.

Wonder if they could use Google Takeout [1] to export all their YouTube data, and then try to search through the history data.

[1] https://takeout.google.com/

Well, I don't use a google account and use invidious and piped as proxies, so that's a no go for me.

It shouldn't be this hard to find something this specific on a video host with the worlds most powerful search engine bedded into it. It's gotten to the point where I archive and store links for anything I might want to find later, but I found this before I was of that mindset and I've wanted to share it with people. When search rot is worse than link rot there's a big problem.

Because the search isn't to help you find what you want anymore, it's to help you find what they want you to watch.

It's unfortunate. Think how powerful such a channel is, people can teach themselves how to read at a whim. Nope, its hidden behind politically charged nonsense for some reason. You can't search stuff about black people or African people anymore without getting a bunch of speech giving grifters, I want this fantastic woman who teaches illiterate underprivileged women how to read because she's a fantastic teacher but all I get is overpriviledged women lecturing and propagandizing. The irony of it is ridiculous.

In the past, you could type 'west African woman learn english from scratch' in youtube or google and you'd get it. Now I bet a third of the results is nonsense and the two thirds are probably news related results on west africa or english west african political relations, history, etc and probably some ads for rosetta stone.

It's unbelievable how shallow and narrow and bad google/youtube search has become. It didn't happen over night. Year by year, little by litte, it got worse and worse.

Lol I tried searching those exact keywords in google and this thread is like the 5th result, but still no dice on the actual target. I wonder how many west African women teach English from scratch on YouTube.

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