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Youtube "how to" videos are mostly useless

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tggzzz:
It is worse than the crap search algorithms :(

I've just bumbled across the piece below, from the UK "Private Eye" magazine[1]. I wasn't aware of the phenomenon, but it matches some of the points made in this thread.



"Musa Mustafa" does have a yoootoob channel and it looks as obnoxious as the article suggests. I won't link to the yoootoob channel, in order to save people's sanity, however, it ought to be obvious how to permute "ht tps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZXI2rbymZ0"

[1]PE has been going since 1961, regularly exposes dodgy practices in local/national government, medicine, law, business, construction, newspapers/broadcasting/publishing .... The editor (since 1986) is the most sued man in British legal history. When PE wins, it often sets usefui precedents.

Several of its memes have spread far beyond the magazine, e.g. "tired and emotional" and "Arkell v. Pressdram(1971)".

PE doesn't have much of an online presence. You have to pay for print, and it is worth it.

soldar:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on March 22, 2024, 01:30:00 am ---The bad crowding out the good. Not only because of sheer volume, but also because the algorithms push crap.  How so?

Google favours the new over the old; that's also visible in its text search results. Consequence perennially good stuff that doesn't change over years is "deprioritised" in favour of today's clickbait.

It is also in google's financial interest to push stuff that drives advertising revenue, which is typically more idiotic (cats anyone?) or controversial.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote from: jonovid on March 22, 2024, 02:58:21 am ---in recent years I have noticed a trend of deliberate dumbing down of how to content on youtube that is made for the so-called modern audiences.
to make it easier for non technical low IQ people to understand.   call it kiddie playschool science if you like.

also there is a trend of more professional full time youtubes posting for instant video gratification or quantity over quality.
--- End quote ---
Exactly. There are thousands of suggestions to videos which are crap or even dangerous, videos which ask the viewer to believe and invest in scams or to do very dangerous things like mount saw blades on a right angle axial grinder.

Youtube allows videos which are dangerous, mechanical, electrical, does not matter. But it will promptly censor anything if viewers complain. For example, Shawn Woods has a channel about catching mice and rats but he cannot show the animals being caught by a kill trap. He cannot show a mouse being killed by a snap trap.

I get suggestions to a video called HOW TO GET FREE ELECTRICITY FOREVER - TESLA'S HIDDEN INVENTION and I know it's crap but many people must fall for it because it has 5.7 million views in one year.  And all sorts of free energy scams and other dangerous proposals.

There is just too much crap and it drowns out the good stuff.

Nominal Animal:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on March 22, 2024, 12:15:42 am ---It's just a completely "open" platform at zero direct cost (if one has a problem with the indirect costs, frankly the best would be to just go elsewhere), so complaining is exactly like, say, listening to hundreds of people in a meeting on some topic and coming back with "wow, those guys really suck!" Yeah? :-//
--- End quote ---
No.  I see people choosing shortcuts and pretend advice instead of thinking things through.  I'm not saying they suck, I'm saying they could do better.  Much better.

If we concentrate on the types of videos I have complained about, then it is more like pointing out fake/oblivious tutors spouting bullshit shortcuts.
Just because it is free like litter in the wind, does not make it okay.

Do I want Youtube to enforce something or some rules here?  No.  All I want is some social pushback to inept tutors and how-to posters posting bullshit advice, and that is exactly what I am doing, on Youtube and elsewhere.

nctnico:

--- Quote from: Buriedcode on March 22, 2024, 04:36:44 am ---This thread is very reminiscent of an Eti thread.

I don't like x.  I expect x to do this. but x doesn't do this, and people should make x do this for me.

Viewing youtube videos is optional.  And if you are complaining that many - perhaps most - are "useless" to you then I'm not sure what you expect anyone to do about it - or care.

--- End quote ---
I disagree. The article tggzzz posted matches my own experience. There is a lot of fake AI generated content on Youtube. For example, I'm looking for a new bench DMM at the moment. When going on Youtube to find reviews, the results are swamped with videos called '5 best bench multimeters'. None of those videos is real as in somebody went through the trouble of actually reviewing 5 multimeters. It is just chat GPT selecting 5 random DMMs and repeating the manufacturer's marketing wank. In the end those videos are just useless noise and Youtube should do something about it.

5U4GB:

--- Quote from: tggzzz on March 18, 2024, 09:00:41 pm ---The problem is the time wasted on determining that a specific video is worthless.

That's easy to do by speed reading articles, but there can never be the equivalent for videos.

--- End quote ---

Yup.  And when you do a Google search for how to fix some problem the first twenty hits are invariably useless Youtube videos where you have to sit through eight minutes of drivel (the optimum length for monetising a video on Youtube) to find out that there's nothing of any use in there and you need to skip to the next eight-minute load of drivel video which will also probably be totally useless for what you need to do.  And then there are also a ton of howto videos like this, Russian Roulette via Table Saw (trigger warning for woodworkers), which demonstrate pretty much everything you can do wrong when using one.

Having said that, there are occasional videos that'll show you how to solve a particular problem, but they're in a channel with six followers in Turkish with no CC available.

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