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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

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cm2187

Youtube is full of videos like that. A few sample excellent channels:

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/@Lesics/videos

The problem is more that they are drowned under the volume of content available.

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I'll recommend a couple of other channels:

- Old Royal Navy instruction manuals and documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/@davidbober7035

My favorite is Hands To Flying Stations (1975): https://youtu.be/cALccuPShQc

- Historic films and clips, mostly focused on workplace safety: https://www.youtube.com/@markdcatlin

My favorite is NASA's Toxic Propellant Hazards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND2TeNfcmKA

I'd like to throw in a recommendation for Huygens Optics: https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics

Everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about light and lenses, explained in a way that's totally comprehensible if you learned electricity and magnetism physics in college.

Yes - he's one of the very best! I loved his 3 part series on making a reflector telescope from a single chunk of glass.

That toxic propellant one is fantastic.

If YouTube had a Dewey decimal style clickable directory it would be a lot easier to find content.

A librarian friend had the same complaint.

The problem is that libraries Dewey decimals are managed by librarians who want to sort things correctly. YouTube would be managed by uploaders who wants their stuff to be managed _incorrectly_.

YouTube recommendations and search is a super interesting problem not just because of the scale but also because uploaders are an adverse opponent, trying to keyword stuff their spam.

The obvious solution is to actually have librarians correctly classify the videos. DDS focuses on the nature of the work itself, not on the keywords or spam in the content. Librarians understand how to class all kinds of works, and it should be relatively simple to build a DDS/MDS index (Melville Decimal System since it's open, see https://librarything.com/mds) for YouTube videos. Just like with books, disagreement on classification is inevitable and perfectly natural; there's no perfect classification scheme, though DDS/MDS does a generally good job.

Dewey Decimal is probably not actually appropriate but it would be nice to have a good and appropriate classification scheme be used.

> The obvious solution is to actually have librarians correctly classify the videos

Which videos? The 500 hours of video uploaded every minute?

There is already auto captioning done by YouTube. It would be trivial to plug an ai that generates tags and classify each videos based on the whole content. I am sure they already do that.

All videos of accounts with more than X subscribers.

Yahoo, more or less. You’re not wrong.

rip yahoo directory and dmoz.

Also Jared Owen which does an impressive work of 3D modeling to explain how things and places work. I’m amazed by the level of documentation you have to ingest to model things in such details.

I like the game boy graphics explanations by Jesse „system of levers“: https://youtu.be/SK7XT0DWqtE

Wow, thanks for sharing!

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