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YouTube, the jewel of the internet

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Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#311

Post by blt »

stametseater wrote: post #174
tambourine_man wrote: post #70

Another great thing about YouTube not mentioned is the quality of comments. Something happened in the last 5 years or so that changed them profoundly. Once the laugh of the internet they are now one of the most wholesome in it. Almost unbelievable for a public site.

I think the comments have become much worse. Good channels used to have good comment sections where people had normal reasonable discussions about the topic of the video, but these days it seems like nearly every channel's comment section is filled with sycophantic noise, praising the video creator for being great and wonderful but saying very little of substance. Of course I'm not talking about the comment sections…

We can all agree he never disappoints us with his content

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#312

Post by skybrian »

1023bytes wrote: post #115

I need to mention how terrible YouTube search has gotten. Instead of giving you actual search results, it only gives a 2-3 relevant videos and then some random recommendations that are often completely unrelated to the query

The trick is to go into search settings and select “videos.” All the other sections go away.

You have to do it each time, though. I’ve heard there’s a browser addon to do it automatically, but I didn’t install it.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#314

Post by stemlord »

Stephen_0xFF wrote: post #310

YT is the greatest media content platform to ever exist. I’ve tried to tell people to cancel Spotify and just rebuild your playlists on YT. The algorithms are just as good. You can also find ALL music on it. When I’m looking for a song that wasn’t popular I can usually find it as one of those slide show videos with the lyrics on it. The only thing I wish it did better was podcasts. If it followed Netflix’s footsteps…

Big problem is that videos disappear regularly (copyright 99% of the time). I have music playlists hundreds of videos each spanning 15 years and there are so many lost videos especially toward the beginning. No way to tell what's even missing. Very bad from an archival pov.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#315

Post by sitkack »

nomilk wrote: post #262
sitkack wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had the YT algorithm "hunt me" for a weeks, keep recommending some what looks like a dumb-ass video, only when I finally cave in and watch it, I get it, I needed to see it. The thumbnail and the title didn't did it the opposite of justice. I even tried using the yt api to see if I could scrape the recommendations but they aren't in there. You would have to scrape the browser while logged in.

Russ Roberts (host of Econtalk podcast) says: take the teacher, not the class , meaning (at least in economics) you'll get more value from a great teacher of a boring topic than from a poor teacher of an exciting topic. I feel that describes my YouTube preferences: I'd prefer to see amazingly intelligent/engaging content on any topic than just average content on topics I'm ostensibly very interested in.

I had that experience with the Robert Sapolsky lectures on Human Behavioral Biology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLtdr2qSB8H...

My take away is that everyone is probably interested in everything, only we let the messenger kill the message. By let, we seem to have a messed up pathology where we think they are the same, so much so that it is a huge cognitive flaw, easily used for sabotage.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#316

Post by beAbU »

GalenErso wrote: post #104
WanderPanda wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching one „wrong“ video can mess everything up for a couple of weeks though, which always gives me some level of anxiety :D

I open Incognito mode when I'm about to watch a video like that.

I discovered the other day that incognito mode removes the Premium privileges, which makes 0 sense to me.

I want to watch one video without it contributing to my history, and now I'm subjected to ads again. No thanks.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#318

Post by mudil »

It says something about the power of YouTube that Russian government still did not ban it, but it banned Facebook and Instagram. I suspect that banning YouTube might be dangerous to the putin regime.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#319

Post by cipheredStones »

TMWNN wrote: post #269
rcarr wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A guy a few years older than me at school was massively into maths and took out every book he could find from all the local libraries. When he finally arrived at Cambridge University to study, he ended up going to third year lectures because he already knew all the material in the first and second year classes. He went on to do a Phd in maths there. Imagine if he had access to YouTube. He probably would have ended up…

I've heard that reading about a subject for 30 minutes a day will, in six months, make you among the world's experts.

In what subjects will 90 hours of reading - a little more than two work-weeks' worth - make you a world expert?

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#320

Post by xbmcuser »

mastax wrote: post #81

I'm going to go against the grain here and say my YouTube algorithm is great. Signing out of YouTube and viewing the default home page is a reminder of the horrors that lie beyond, but my little corner of it is a bit too good. There was a period of time semi-recently when the algorithm was better than my heuristics, too. I had associated too-good thumbnails with overproduced shallow clickbait videos churned out by co…

Have you set your google/youtube account to remove your history after a certain period of time. I have set mine to auto delete history older than 3 months. I think that had a big effect on my recommendations.
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