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YouTube, the jewel of the internet

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Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#411

Post by paulcole »

AlbertCory wrote: post #91
irrational wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc. I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want…

The lesson I get from all these replies is (shock & horror!): Kids are different . I hear of kids who are intelligent, energetic, curious... all those good things. Probably NURTURE (i.e. the parents) has something to do with that. But then: also NATURE. Not having any kids myself, I'm not going to preach.

The thing you’re missing is that it generally doesn’t matter how much YouTube a kid watches. Parents stress out too much over doing everything exactly right when it probably doesn’t matter that much. Kids are pretty resilient and hard to screw up.

Most kids grow up to be average adults with average jobs doing average things. No amount of Smarter Everyday is likely to change that. And if they do grow up to be an astronaut or whatever, Smarter Everyday shouldn’t get all the credit, it’s more luck of the draw.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#412

Post by rocket_surgeron »

exo-pla-net wrote: post #222
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.

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.

I prefer to think of it as a meeting where Robert's Rules are followed and enforced vs. an anarchist shouting match.

You call it milquetoast.

I call it pleasant.

Things get done under Robert's Rules, nothing gets accomplished when everyone is yelling "shitcock" at each other in an overwhelming din.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#413

Post by jim_gorski »

I'm not sure what my problem could be - but I just can't watch anything on the site. The inline ads and popup banner ads at the bottom haunt me. Plus the stretching of forty lines of text into a twenty minute video irritates me. When it works it's golden - no doubt about that (say changing a spark plug) but most of the time it's the wrong medium and it makes things worse.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#414

Post by javajosh »

mcmcmc wrote: post #199
javajosh wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

peaked my interest That's "piqued my interest". It's a homophone. Also used in "fit of pique" and, very rarely "piquant". It's a word on its way out, but I like it.

It's a homophone, not a homonym. If you're going to correct someone's grammar, you should probably proofread your correction.

That begs the question: does correcting a homophone constitute a correction of grammar or of spelling? And another: can I successfully provoke another correction by 'misusing' "begs the question"?

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#415

Post by audunw »

irrational wrote: post #17
rcarr wrote: 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…

> they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc. I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want…

> I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc.

When I grew up, and computers and the internet was new, we were mostly using it for entertainment and fun as well. I learned programming early, but I was an exception at my school (now lots of kids learn programming at an even earlier age). And I still wasted a lot of high school playing Anarchy Online (MMORPG), to the point where it affected my grades.

I'm not sure the value they'd get is the videos they watch regularly.. but just the knowledge/habit/skills around finding a video to help learn a new topic or solve a problem.

I've heard that they're losing the skills around using a general purpose PC though, since they're so used to smart phones, iPad and simple ready-made web solutions for everything. Not sure that's a big problem though.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#416

Post by bundze »

durandal1 wrote: post #102
AlbertCory wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lesson I get from all these replies is (shock & horror!): Kids are different . I hear of kids who are intelligent, energetic, curious... all those good things. Probably NURTURE (i.e. the parents) has something to do with that. But then: also NATURE. Not having any kids myself, I'm not going to preach.

The variety in temperament, interests and ability between even siblings varies greatly. The people most eager to share parenting advice is usually parents only one child who is calm and attentive :) I've seen several parents in that category have a second child and come out shocked. I'm believe that beyond a base level of food, clean clothes and love, your influence as a parent is marginal. It's also a wildly unpopul…

Relevant comic: https://imgur.io/8g2UAGS

I do believe parentage changes "the difficulty level" of life. Some kids are born to loving, nurturing, well-off parents and essentially "play the game of life" on level easy. Some kids play on level hard. However, it's the kid's own choice how they will play it.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#417

Post by bluGill »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #371
hiepph wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't exactly know where this Shorts trend came from (I guess Tiktok?) but it really destroys the generation / has bad impact. My attention span is encouraged to shrink to only 15 seconds.

And "our" generation has already had its attention span reduced, not even on purpose but from e.g. having access to fast internet & multiple tabs. I can't read a book on programming back to back (I don't think I ever could btw), it's good enough for me to google it to find a solution for the one problem I'm trying to solve at this time. But I do miss out on in-depth knowledge of a library or language that way. But th…

In the 8 bit days there were programming books meant to be read back to back. I loved them as a kid - though I'm not sure that I learned much from that exercse. Even K&R "the C programming language" (first edition, the second edition wasn't as readable from what I remember, though that might be just because it was too repetitive for someone who had read the first edition) could be read that way.

These days that isn't a good use of paper books. There is rarely any reason to start with any one construct, and if you are not a novice programmer you know there must be something that does what you need and don't want the book to assume you understand the syntax of the while loop when you look up the do-while loop.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#418

Post by doug_life »

UncleEntity wrote: post #397
crazygringo wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

A good follow up by NASA https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/ber...

"So both “Bernoulli” and “Newton” are correct. Integrating the effects of either the pressure or the velocity determines the aerodynamic force on an object."

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#419

Post by thirdsun »

layer8 wrote: post #340
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 only complaint I have is that the recommendations are too biased towards what I liked or watched very recently. It would be nice to have a setting to adjust that recency weighting. Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history, in order to pick up where you last sto…

> Another, non-algorithm related complaint is that it’s difficult to watch a channel from oldest to newest, that is, keeping track of up to where you’ve already watched within the channel’s history, in order to pick up where you last stopped, in particular for channels with hundreds of videos.

Absolutely. Furthermore Youtube is surprisingly bad at syncing progress within a single video. I often switch from iPad to desktop and back, and there's a lot of overlap between where I left off and where Youtube decides to continue, which forces me to manually seek forward. At the very least Youtube should save my play position whenever I hit pause but apparently it doesn't.

Re: YouTube, the jewel of the internet

#420

Post by yabones »

theredlancer wrote: post #279
JKCalhoun wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am hooked as well. (But, please, stop with the YouTube Shorts, I'm just not that into you.)

I would love an option in the settings to disable youtube shorts. I don't want them.

There's an unofficial filter list for uBlock Origin to hide shorts videos/links

https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

It works very nicely without adding additional browser plugins.

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