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.
YouTube, the jewel of the internet
321–330 of 488 posts
Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet
#322Earlier 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.
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…
Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet
#324Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet
#325Another 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…
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
#326I 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…
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
#327I 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?…
Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet
#328Earlier 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.
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…
works for a lot of paywalled sites
Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet
#330Earlier 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-...