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YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

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Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#121

Post by krapp »

StavrosK wrote: post #117
simonh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there. What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though. Fortunately, in my experience…

How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites. Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise? My only hope at this point is Neocities.

But what if I want to search knitting to find out how to knit, not to revel in quirk culture?

The "authentic" people are on Youtube and Reddit and Medium and publishing on Twitter and closed Facebook groups. And yet, some of those people sometimes want to make a living on their passion. I would be willing to bet most people on the web in the 90s would have as well, if they could have.

There is more hobby and enthusiast content on the web now than there ever has been, with more depth, greater quality and dimensionality than the 90's web could ever have hoped to offer, as well as far more opportunities for interaction between people. I think that's a fair trade for nostalgia and "quirk."

(Edited for less snark and more clarity since it seems this comment is getting sniped.)

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#122

Post by polymatter »

StavrosK wrote: post #117
simonh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there. What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though. Fortunately, in my experience…

How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites. Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise? My only hope at this point is Neocities.

If I needed to track down such a site I would try asking in person. Find a local knitting meetup and ask everyone there. Then go to the next city over and do the same thing. Hopefully you will bump into someone who knows someone who knows about that awesome knitting site.

And that sucks.

Thanks for the pointer to Neocities.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#123

Post by pmlnr »

StavrosK wrote: post #117
simonh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there. What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though. Fortunately, in my experience…

How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites. Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise? My only hope at this point is Neocities.

This is my problem as well. I'm tried using millionshort, obscure duckduckgo searches that exclude a lot of the big sites, and they still don't show up.

Those who wonder how these niche sites looked like, and example: http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/ This site has an immense amount of data in a reading-friendly format about old, obscure, beautiful photography equipment, in a way I've not seen for decades. Why? Because it hasn't been updated since 2005. And it just works.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#124

Post by Jenz »

II2II wrote: post #40
RugnirViking wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios. This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the fi…

YouTube has helped to improve the product, but I am of the opinion that the most of the best YouTube channels are produced by a single person who post weekly at most. They seem to have struck a good balance between audience engagement and information value. Consider Ben Eater or Technology Connections videos. The former may be more education oriented while the latter is well geared towards my quirky tastes in enterta…

> In contrast, the channels that have large production crews and publish more regularly usually feel thin on content. There is either very little value to the information or the density of information is incredibly low. There are exceptions. Vox comes to mind because they clearly respect their audience, has many more people involved in production, and produces more polished videos.

Are you familiar with the youtube channel Kurzgesagt?

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#125

Post by pmlnr »

RugnirViking wrote: post #8
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #7

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…

Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things. They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios. This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the fi…

> Maybe it's the wrong mindset, but imo compensation is precisely why the internet stopped being like that. When people are doing things for free, there is generally a maximum to the amount of effort they will put into things.

It's the other way around. When there is no compensation, people do stuff for fun, out of love, and not for optimisation, ROI, DAU/MAU, etc.

"Back in the days" - pre-dot-com - the website was part of the hobby. People wanted to put their knowledge out there, maybe for pride, maybe just "why not?". And the site was theirs, it looked the way they wanted, it was organised they way they were thinking[^1]. But when money comes in, one has to deal with making more visitors, making the site according to trends, with negative space material auto dark/light design, constantly and regularly put in updates, add JSON-LD microdata... it's endless. And the fun dies. On platforms, everything looks the same, it doesn't feel like a home any more, it's not yours. It's a job.

This is what kills quirky, niche little sites and communities.

[^1]: https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#126

Post by pmlnr »

dredmorbius wrote: post #113
thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #7

This is the consequence of monopolies. Before YouTube gobbled up the world there were great, niche video sites ran by fans of the coolest things. They are mostly gone now. It is sad. The web really used to be an adventure. I miss that part of the internet. You felt like you found these secret underground worlds where people were really into something. Now it’s different. Maybe what we have now it what is needed for c…

Sorry, but having been there at the time, and looking at technical requirments ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21256674 ), I'm calling bogus. Online downloadable audio was barely tractable in 1999 or earlier, let alone streaming video. What was this golden age, what were the sites, and what was the usage? Streaming video is almost wholly 2004 and later, generally years later.

Text. With pictures. You know, like books. Which you can actually use while, say, fixing something, unlike a video which you need to pause, rewind, watch again, while balancing pieces of a torn down laptop on your hands.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#128

Post by bufferoverflow »

pjc50 wrote: post #110
m463 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I agreed with you - imagining walmart coming into town and bankrupting the mom-and-pop stores. But can't folks still create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? domain name, virtual server, upload? (don't know about monetization)

> create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap? domain name, virtual server, upload? If you become successful, this will lose you money. If you become successful on Youtube, you can gain money. That's all there is to it.

That's not true anymore. Video CDNs are cheap. As long as you can put ads in your videos, you should be profitable.

The real problem is getting traffic, YouTube is the monopolist in that area.

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#129

Post by kuu »

StavrosK wrote: post #117
simonh wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this sentiment mentioned often, but all the things we could do back in the day are not only still possible, they are actually still being done by people out there. What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though. Fortunately, in my experience…

How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites. Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise? My only hope at this point is Neocities.

"knitting -youtube" should remove quite large part of the results...

Re: YouTube is taking down educational hacking videos

#130

Post by McTossOut »

krapp wrote: post #121
StavrosK wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you track them down today? In the old days, you typed "knitting" into Lycos and you got this wonderfully weird site of someone for whom knitting was a passion, along with a webring full of similar sites. Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise? My only hope at this point is Neocities.

But what if I want to search knitting to find out how to knit, not to revel in quirk culture? The "authentic" people are on Youtube and Reddit and Medium and publishing on Twitter and closed Facebook groups. And yet, some of those people sometimes want to make a living on their passion. I would be willing to bet most people on the web in the 90s would have as well, if they could have. There is more hobby and enthusia…

It's a result of things getting worse. In an effort to stop abuse and increase drive to sponsored creators, YouTube committed a cardinal sin with respect to their discovery algorithm. They made things worse.

Discovery on YouTube is now comically difficult, getting out of your filter bubble means making bizarre searches and filter edge cases, otherwise you see the same 15 videos weekly.

They've failed to filter the hate content they intended to eliminate, they've failed to improve their curated content volume, and discovery remains bound and gagged in the back of Ad monetization's sedan.

If you were here in 2010 it's worse now. Privacy / safety / predictability, I guess, but the magic is all gone.

YouTube could use an [adult swim] concept. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. YouTube.

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