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How I spend less time on YouTube

pawelurbanek.com

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Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#191

Post by scrollaway »

systemvoltage wrote: post #183
scrollaway wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube has some of the best, highest quality free content available on the internet today. Stay away from the crap, remove it from your recommendations, subscribe to some good channels. It’s that simple. Don’t if that’s not your thing but you’re missing out. If you change your mind here are a few exceptional channels to get you started, they should cater well to a HN style audience: Technology Connections (misc tech…

> YouTube has some of the best, highest quality free content available on the internet today. OP's argument hinges on "vast majority of content" and then you rebute it with the narrowest possible list of examples. You just made a strawman of OP's claim.

It's a discovery problem. The vast majority of content on the internet is crap, so better have a talk to your ISP and get rid of your useless line, right?

Once you do subscribe and watch good channels and subscribe to them, you will find that the recommendation engine is extremely high quality and will do the rest of the work.

There is basically zero crap on my YouTube homepage. It's all high quality now. I often get recommended videos and immediately subscribe to their channel. It's nice not to be afraid of clicking on videos on my homepage because I know all of it is great!

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#192

Post by scrollaway »

GaylordTuring wrote: post #164

My big problem with YouTube recommendations isn't that they're so good that I get sucked in; it's that they're so bad. I would happily spend more time on the site watching interesting videos if they only would show up in my recommendation feed. Instead, I get recommended the same old crap, all coming from a small set of the same video categories over and over again (except for the occasional America's Got Talent or a…

The recommendation engine does tend to hover around recommending more of the same topics you like, because it looks like it's mostly driven off "people who like the stuff you like also liked this other stuff".

The solution to that is to bootstrap the engine with a variety of topics. I'm subscribed to channels about game design, film critics, engineering, urban planning, math, sudoku, beat saber, figure skating, history, and stand ups.

This much does mean the homepage gets pretty diverse and once in a while new topics do show up.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#193

Post by scrollaway »

ballenf wrote: post #17

What I really want is all my subscriptions to get auto-downloaded into Plex. And for Plex to have better library management tools from the player, so I can delete after watching or move to a category. Then show me all the algorithmic stuff when I'm on the website so I can find better stuff to subscribe to.

A Plex UI for YouTube would be fantastic indeed. Does that exist?

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#194

Post by seoulmetro »

scrollaway wrote: post #190
seoulmetro wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad to see 'Not Just Bikes' lumped in with these great informative videos. Not Just Bikes is extremely opinionated and is frequently swept up in emotional arguments and comparing apples to oranges. Shame really. But it definitely gives people the ammunition to pretend to fight for change (where in reality they are fighting for unrealistic expectations and to get their oranges into apples) and this leads to a feel-goo…

NJB quality is extremely high, that is a fairly objective fact. That you don't like the fact it gives cyclists "ammunition" sounds like a You problem :-) Yes it is opinionated though. I don't think it's possible to talk about what he talks about without being opinionated, because there is such a large section of the population that blindly loves cars to the point that it's become a religion, so everyone talking about…

I never said the quality was bad. MKB is the best quality on YouTube (usually) and he's entirely about subjectivity.

You can have high quality whilst also realising that the video is not made to be purely informative or educational.

>That you don't like the fact it gives cyclists "ammunition" sounds like a You problem :-)

??? Why are you talking about cyclists? I never mentioned cyclists.

>I don't think it's possible to talk about what he talks about without being opinionated

It is, and that's the crux. Though it's a lot more boring and harder.

>But he doesn't compare apples to oranges.

He very much does. I don't even need to argue on this point, it's that visible.

It's a shame indeed, but I have good reasons.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#195

Post by scrollaway »

seoulmetro wrote: post #194
scrollaway wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NJB quality is extremely high, that is a fairly objective fact. That you don't like the fact it gives cyclists "ammunition" sounds like a You problem :-) Yes it is opinionated though. I don't think it's possible to talk about what he talks about without being opinionated, because there is such a large section of the population that blindly loves cars to the point that it's become a religion, so everyone talking about…

I never said the quality was bad. MKB is the best quality on YouTube (usually) and he's entirely about subjectivity. You can have high quality whilst also realising that the video is not made to be purely informative or educational. >That you don't like the fact it gives cyclists "ammunition" sounds like a You problem :-) ??? Why are you talking about cyclists? I never mentioned cyclists. >I don't think it's possible…

I'm not sure what your point is then because the list was meant as a list of high quality channels that touch on subjects that likely interest an HN audience. Not as "here are the ten least opinionated channels on YouTube".

Being engaging is a requirement of being high quality. Someone who isn't engaging, even if their videos are very informative, will quickly lose his viewers. This is a problem because quality of the research isn't enough if nobody makes it to the end of the video.

And no, once again, he doesn't compare apples to oranges. He shows how things can work. He shows the potential. His channel is essentially just an opinionated tour of how urban design works in the Netherlands.

It's not like he says "Phoenix AZ should work exactly like Amsterdam and be designed exactly this way".

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#196

Post by TheRealNGenius »

scrollaway wrote: post #189
systemvoltage wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's narrative porn - shallow but engaging. How do you test that? Just replace the narrator and the entire value of Wendover productions disappears. Other channels are pretty good though.

I watch Wendover on mute with subtitles sometimes so clearly you're wrong. That the narration is good quality is a bonus. Calling it shallow and "one google search away" (parent) is absurd, his videos take weeks of research. It's okay not to like the channel but know your criticisms.

Speaks volumes that you think it takes weeks of research.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#197

Post by TheRealNGenius »

scrollaway wrote: post #189
systemvoltage wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's narrative porn - shallow but engaging. How do you test that? Just replace the narrator and the entire value of Wendover productions disappears. Other channels are pretty good though.

I watch Wendover on mute with subtitles sometimes so clearly you're wrong. That the narration is good quality is a bonus. Calling it shallow and "one google search away" (parent) is absurd, his videos take weeks of research. It's okay not to like the channel but know your criticisms.

It's okay not to like the comment but know your criticisms. Those were but my own opinions, but you seem to take things personally, as evidenced by your other replies in this thread.

Between Wendover and HAI, they crank out content at a pace that hardly suggests "weeks of research". What's truly absurd is suggesting anything to the contrary.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#198

Post by thebiblelover7 »

nirav72 wrote: post #48
ballenf wrote: post #17

What I really want is all my subscriptions to get auto-downloaded into Plex. And for Plex to have better library management tools from the player, so I can delete after watching or move to a category. Then show me all the algorithmic stuff when I'm on the website so I can find better stuff to subscribe to.

I've been using TubeArchivist for grabbing newly posted videos in my subscriptions. It will grab the meta info and thumbnails as well. Has a built in video player, so you can watch the videos directly within the web app. https://github.com/bbilly1/tubearchivist Another one I've used before is Tubesync- although it doesn't have a built-in player. But it has the ability to integrate with Plex. https://github.com/meeb/t…

Tubearchivist is great! They even added support for ARM which means that you can put it on your RPi or smth.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#199

Post by scrollaway »

TheRealNGenius wrote: post #196
scrollaway wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch Wendover on mute with subtitles sometimes so clearly you're wrong. That the narration is good quality is a bonus. Calling it shallow and "one google search away" (parent) is absurd, his videos take weeks of research. It's okay not to like the channel but know your criticisms.

Speaks volumes that you think it takes weeks of research.

It speaks volumes that you don't. The guy has a whole team dedicated to this.

He released a behind the scenes about his process on Nebula. Oh let me guess, he's making this up for clicks too?

And i could reimplement Dropbox in a weekend with curl and SFTP.

Re: How I spend less time on YouTube

#200

Post by disqard »

yonaguska wrote: post #153
typicalbender wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early 30s here. Possibly to your point and completely anecdotally, I generally have a much harder time learning via text than I do from a more kinetic learning environment or watching a video... but I wish it was the other way around. All of the benefits described above for why text is better I totally agree and I get generally frustrated trying to find the relevant part of the video but for whatever reason seeing th…

I've recently tried to get back into making art. I had a very active imagination as a child and would draw for hours on end. Now the inspiration isn't there and I have a hard time just visualizing scenes or landscapes.

Thank you for sharing that!

Imagination is a "mental muscle" that must atrophy with disuse.

Off-topic, yet relevant (for you):

When I upvoted your comment, your karma crossed 500, so you should now see up/downvote buttons in hn :)

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