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Comment by balaji1 | Hacker News Reader

"educational entertainment" videos are way too many, way too popular and binge-able - much more recommended by YT's AI. Actual education are much harder to discover on YouTube.

I have been wanting to build a YT front-end that lets me control how many "new" videos are recommended. New videos are the time-sinks.

Instead this new FE should make me re-watch so I absorb and retain better - maybe thru more Q&A like OP's platoedu or even make me write out some notes. Then I am forced to curate videos and maybe be more productive.

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This is a problem I've had too, my current solution is to have multiple profiles on YouTube so whenever I click on a random video one it doesn't pollute my other education heavy account. Also just removing videos helps... but even then YouTube still pushes edu-tainment over harder educational videos.

One of my ideas that's on the backburner is build a BERT classifier to separate between Educational, edu-tainment, and random, then use that to filter suggestions from the ones of people that use Plato

Anyway if you have any good suggestions for better educational content I'd love to add that to Plato over the categories I have now!

Multiple YT profiles is a smart hack! And also, great work on the app!

The YT algo is pretty good - it catches on to what I want to follow and magnifies (ie suggest more content on) that topic. But it never pushes me to educational videos.

I suspect educational videos are best to watch on Coursera. I know people who just open up Coursera and start listening on commutes, etc - instead of infi-scrolling.

The pedagogical (instruction techniques, content structure, etc) aspect in those vids is different. I wonder if there is inspiration for creators/topics from Coursera?

This. I don't think most educational content on YouTube is worth remembering (or the best way to spend your time in the first place).

So I'd be cautious about an app that helps you memorize the contents of said videos. You might end up with a lot of superficial, clickbaity pieces of knowledge.

I invite you to share your own superior knowledge to the masses via your own YouTube videos so we can learn from you. Until then, I’ll learn from what is made available for others. Post back here once you’ve created some better content so we know where to look.

Papers, textbooks, tech talks, university lectures.

That's where you'll find actual knowledge and not in high production value videos which have to be financially viable for their creators.

It's hardly a secret that Youtube has a problem funding long form videos with a certain depth and instead favors clickbaity, short material. No reason to be offended.

As a rule of thumb I'd say everything with a sponsored segment is entertainment but too shallow for education.

> Papers, textbooks, tech talks, university lectures

Perfect list. Tech talks, university lectures (recorded videos) are almost as consumable as YT edu-tainment videos. Papers, books and textbooks are accessible but requires more motivation.

To the parent comment (zadokshi), if YT content is education, why don't the biggest creators make 5-10 videos on a topic, back-to-back? 5-10 is minimum for learning, example Coursera content - I'm not even comparing to semester/yearlong coursework at schools. Because there isn't a demand or incentive for that on YT.

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