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YouTube, the jewel of the internet

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Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#391

Post by ikurei »

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #226
brewtide wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a 9 and 7 year old and we are constantly enjoying such YouTube channels as "smarter every day", "veritasium" (spelling?), "Stuff made here", to some extent Colin furze, "technology connections", and other such edutainment. Not sure it speaks about differences in kids, in ages, in households, or likely a combination of sorts. Also, not a judgement on your kids, just a counterpoint about the resources available…

But those channels you listed are not educational, theyre "educational" e.g. you may learn some factoids about physics are learn about some cool experience but in no way will they impart to you a deep understanding of any subject. Those sorts of edutainment style videos are not ever going to compete against say, a college degree. Now there is excellent serious educational material on youtube, stuff like khan academy,…

> Those sorts of edutainment style videos are not ever going to compete against say, a college degree.

They're totally different things, obviously...

> you may learn some factoids about physics are learn about some cool experience but in no way will they impart to you a deep understanding of any subject. Those sorts of edutainment style videos are not ever going to compete against say, a college degree.

I disagree with this sentiment, even though what you say is technically true.

"Deep understanding" can't be imparted, not in school, not in a video. Here we all know plenty of engineers with degrees with no deep understanding of the programming languages they use daily. Deep understanding can't be imparted, you have to go and grab it by yourself.

"If you want people to build a ship, don't talk to them about sails and wood and tar, tell them about freedom."

Those edutainment videos have sparked my curiosity and help me appreciate things about the world around me I wouldn't have noticed. For really deep understanding, I may have to let this curiosity propel me into a book. Going into a book about urban design after a "Not just bike videos" with curiosity and an intuitive although shallow understanding, is much better than sitting through 50 minutes of a boring and bored professor drawling about something, which was a lot of my college experience.

You are right that Youtube can't replace college, or making experiments yourself, or reading a book. It's a different thing. But, specially for kids, this is how education should start, and it may be way more fundamental than the other pieces.

You are also right that if kids, or anyone, stays on the level of watching Youtube videos, not much is gained. But still, that edutainment can be a great part of education.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#392

Post by brewtide »

stormfather wrote: post #155
brewtide wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a 9 and 7 year old and we are constantly enjoying such YouTube channels as "smarter every day", "veritasium" (spelling?), "Stuff made here", to some extent Colin furze, "technology connections", and other such edutainment. Not sure it speaks about differences in kids, in ages, in households, or likely a combination of sorts. Also, not a judgement on your kids, just a counterpoint about the resources available…

Can you attribute your kids' behavior to any actions you took or policies you had? Please don't be shy about it, I would love to inculcate that into my kids as well.

No policies really just a general way of living. This is a disposable comment so am aiming to write more but things got 'busy' here and now we're getting ready for school! (And work..)

I'll elaborate this evening, but as a lower poster said, it is all rolling dice and everyone is certainly their own beast in their own cage. I will gladly share how it seemingly transpired (and I feel, more important, the reasoning behind focusing on such things).

In very short, I'm a huge believer that we seriously underestimate what small children are capable of understanding at you get ages, and have always felt that exposure to 'all the things' helps provide needed prospective about all that is available in life.

They have both absorbed enough surface level interest and actual information that when watching a video about a semi related subject, they find themselves referencing OTHER information they learned from another video/source and click the pieces together like Lego -- you can see their eyes light up when this connection is made in their head, and I feel it starts really showing that information across the board is solely a piece to a way way bigger puzzle, and that although learning about seemingly disconnected things in a jumble can often find itself existing the jumble and finding its place in APPLICATION in life somewhere.

This seems to really nail home the point that anything, really, may be worth learning because no doubt a real world use case may arise sometime in the future.

Again, I can write more when time allows, but that's the reasoning behind it all. We also do a ton of projects where we can actually, partially at least, use a lot of the things learned from videos and transcribe them from thoughts alone into tangible end results - beyond important for everyone of every age, IMO

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#393

Post by edanm »

grumbel wrote: post #367
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…

The main problem with Youtube, and almost every other social site, is not the algorithm itself, but that the algorithm is the only way you can interact with that site. The moment you want to do something different, it just doesn't work. Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list. There is no user visible tra…

> Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list.

Some of your complaints are valid (though they are mostly UX gripes), but this one I don't get.

I've done this multiple times and it's like three clicks. You click the channel's name, you click "videos", and you scroll down, that's it.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#394

Post by pmoriarty »

grumbel wrote: post #367
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…

The main problem with Youtube, and almost every other social site, is not the algorithm itself, but that the algorithm is the only way you can interact with that site. The moment you want to do something different, it just doesn't work. Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list. There is no user visible tra…

> Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list.

This is where locally archiving the videos you like helps.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#395

Post by jimktrains2 »

beAbU wrote: post #316
GalenErso wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't remove anything; you're not logged in, which is the point of opening in an incognito window in the first place.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#396

Post by pnt12 »

alephaleph wrote: post #239
exo-pla-net wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shadow ban ~100% of comments, unless they detect positive sentiment. If you express any nuance or criticism, poof, your comment is disappeared. What remains is a sea of positive, fully vapid, fully useless comments: an authoritarian dream of milquetoast public discourse.

still one million times better than what came before.

That's an interesting dilemma between free speech and moderation.

I'd also say the current system is better, but losing the dislike button and pushing for positive sentiment can lead to fake positivity which we should beware.

Reminds of the anime "Avatar", where there's an episode featuring a character with an outrageous fake smile who turned out to be sort of a political oppressor.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#397

Post by UncleEntity »

crazygringo wrote: post #291
UncleEntity wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still remember, all these years later, how my CC statistics teacher “taught” us that airplanes don’t indeed fly by the Bernoulli principle producing lift but because the wind hits the underside of the wings and pushes it up into the air. Totally random I know.

I can't tell why you're putting "taught" in quotes...? Your teacher was correct. Or you mean because it was outside their official subject matter?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explai...

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#398

Post by freemanofthewan »

crazygringo wrote: post #108
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…

Yup, I'm the same. I've totally given up on navigating anything except my home page, I'm actually astonished at how good it is. The newest videos from my favorite channels are always listed first, and then it's a smattering of older popular ones from the topics and channels I watch the most, and a handful of things "adjacent" to those that are sometimes not for me but sometimes become my new favorite rabbit hole, so…

Is this because we have a tech background and some understanding of how the algorithm works? I like to think I have curated my results to a degree by exercising this knowledge. ie: I noticed all of my news results were leaning starboard and things started to sound like an echo chamber. So I started seeking news content from the port side as well. Now I receive a mixture of both. I know my grandfather is not able to grasp this concept and I have seen his landing page.. I still have nightmares about what he is being fed in his echo chamber.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#399

Post by nonethewiser »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #381
nonethewiser wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that’s fine, but it falls short of the original claim that YT can replace a college education. > They can literally leave school and already be professionally competent. I think we’ll see them leapfrogging millennials on the career ladder because they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free. I think he’s right in theory, but…

They said children could leave school with a college level foundation, not that they'd be college level at the age of seven.

> They said children could leave school with a college level foundation

And is that because of infotainment?

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#400

Post by grumbel »

edanm wrote: post #393
grumbel wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with Youtube, and almost every other social site, is not the algorithm itself, but that the algorithm is the only way you can interact with that site. The moment you want to do something different, it just doesn't work. Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list. There is no user visible tra…

> Try watching the old videos of a channel you just discovered, that's 20 clicks and a lot of waiting just to get to the bottom of that endless scroll list. Some of your complaints are valid (though they are mostly UX gripes), but this one I don't get. I've done this multiple times and it's like three clicks. You click the channel's name, you click "videos", and you scroll down, that's it.

> You click the channel's name, you click "videos", and you scroll down, that's it.

It's an infinite-scroll list, it loads in 9 or so videos at a time, than it takes a second to update your scrollbar before you can scroll down further. You can't instantly jump to the last page, load all videos at once or invert the sort order. Every time you accidentally click away from the page you have to start from scratch as it doesn't remember your position, you can't bookmark it either. Some channels have hundreds or even thousands of videos. It's impossible to access them in any timely manner with the normal YouTube interface.

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