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YouTube, the jewel of the internet

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321–330 of 488 posts

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#321

Long form YouTube is amazing. I just wish I could completely disable Shorts from my YouTube Premium. It is the diet equivalent of eating raw sugar with honey on top - it just wants to suck you in with stuff you had no intention of watching. I'd pay extra on top of the going rate for that.

I definitely agree with you, I know some people don't like the idea of paying for YT Premium instead of just using AdBlock but YouTube is just so good that I think it's more worth my money than any other streaming service

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#322
post #269
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.

Where did you hear this? Was there any examples provided of people that have done this successfully? I'm extremely skeptical of this lol

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#323

"Even so, the real heroes of the site are not those who make original content. It is those who post old programming from the analogue age." What the author is stating here, which may be lost on some readers, is that he thinks (video) file sharers are the real heroes of YouTube. He thinks the heroes are not necessarily the folks who make videos intended for YouTube (original content), but the ones who generate digital…

Indeed. You are doing gods work here :-)

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#324
I have one issue with Youtube shorts today. I keep getting the tate brothers and pearl recommended even though I have disliked the videos and informed youtube to stop recommending them. I have even sent a message to Youtube but still no luck. Nothing against those people, I'm just bored of their message they spreading and want to see something new

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#325

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…

> "...praising the video creator for being great and wonderful but saying very little of substance"

Exactly this. Many videos contain a deluge of comments that sound like they came from a praise vending machine.

I watched a short video recently about a gadget review. It was extremely basic, not informative. All the comments mentioned nothing about the topic and instead went into gushing mode, praising the creator with copy-paste lines such as "you deserve more subs" etc. Often from profiles that have no content, and look to be spammer accounts.

Spammer profiles and bots are exploiting the high-ranking "positive but empty comment" in order to increase chances of engagement on their own profile by dominating the "top comments". This is why I switch the sorting to "newest first" to avoid the fake top comments.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#326
post #9

I agree with the author. I just cancelled Spotify and got YouTube Premium and it was an absolutely brilliant decision. Pretty soon I’m going to cancel Netflix and Prime too and just take out the odd month subscription to a streaming service if there’s something I really want to watch. I’m probably better off watching some informative documentary on YT than I am watching Netflix anyway and if I want entertainment, the…

"an awesome resource and I think Gen Z are at a massive advantage because of it"

You're not thinking it through, because that always on ubiquitous nature is very much a double edged sword. There has never been a time when the youth has been so incredibly targeted to hijack the release of dopamine with doom scrolling endless entertainment.

A child who is constantly inundated with passive entertainment never has the opportunity to cultivate their own voice.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#327
post #9

I agree with the author. I just cancelled Spotify and got YouTube Premium and it was an absolutely brilliant decision. Pretty soon I’m going to cancel Netflix and Prime too and just take out the odd month subscription to a streaming service if there’s something I really want to watch. I’m probably better off watching some informative documentary on YT than I am watching Netflix anyway and if I want entertainment, the…

I can't understand people paying for streaming services like Netflix & competition, where all their catalogs are region-locked and every single one of them producing mostly crappy shows/movies (at least that's the Netflix I experienced last time I was able to use someone else's account on someone else's computer many years ago, so I must assume as everything else, things get worse, not better). What would I pay for?…

Take a look at mubi. (movies only, no series)

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am... OK with the Youtube algorithm. I find that it is pretty good at this point at not giving me stuff I find awful. However, I think it has lost a lot of ground in helping me find newer, more obscure topics that I'd also find interesting, compared to where it was 5-6 years ago. Overall I think Youtube IS a jewel of the Internet. The amount of astoundingly interesting, informative, entertaining, educational, insig…

They'll just get much shittier long before they ever actually shut down.

i do share that fear of the day that most of the youtube content will be "gone" (behind some kind of login-wall)

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#329

"Even so, the real heroes of the site are not those who make original content. It is those who post old programming from the analogue age." What the author is stating here, which may be lost on some readers, is that he thinks (video) file sharers are the real heroes of YouTube. He thinks the heroes are not necessarily the folks who make videos intended for YouTube (original content), but the ones who generate digital…

archive.is

works for a lot of paywalled sites

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#330
post #260

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.

You need the extension "Clickbait Remover" - it just grabs a random frame from the video and sets it as the thumbnail, will change your youtube life: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...

This looks great. It's surprising how much mental energy is spent fighting these initial triggers like icons/clickbait.
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