[foofoo4u]

Google, YouTube, etc., they're all getting worse. I'm finding it ever more difficult to learn anything anymore from the internet. Whether it's learning how to play the guitar, how to fish, weight lifting or how to do mostly anything, I get trash results. Google results are exclusively shallow content, most of which are trying to sell me on something. YouTube is full of short videos with click baity subjects entirely irrelevant to what I actually entered: "Don't make this {topic} mistake!", "This one trick will make you better at {topic}!", "Top 10 ways to become a pro at {topic} in two weeks!".

Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding me, which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-down of society, I've naturally gravitated towards books. Books are leagues better in terms of quality of content. They are more detailed and thorough. It's a richer experience so far.

[digitalsushi]

Steel that was formed before we started making nuclear contamination, known as low-background steel or pre-war steel, often in the form of old naval vessels and other large, old, steel infrastructure, has a special value to us. It can be used for building instruments with high sensitivity to radiation, as the steel made since becomes polluted with what is now part of the world.

I see a strong metaphor for literature authored before a specific time, roughly when the web came to be, or certainly when two way discourse on a page, or aggregation, became prevalent. And certainly far before bespoke communications targeted at us, as individuals or interest groups.

If the modern web were air it would taste of metal; I have a fear that I will become biased that older texts are superior for the sole reason that modern texts can be assumed inferior.

[boznz]

It did not matter how many times I read the Haynes Manual to bleed the clutch on my 1989 pickup truck, having someone show me on video was the only way it was going into my thick skull. However it worries me that the way google works anything useful like this with only a few hundred views will eventually be deleted to make room for the next funny cat video or 'influencer' pulling shit out of their asses.

[agnosticmantis]

Did you pay for the video proportional to the value that you received? Most people don’t, so why expect the services to not get worse, and be forever subsidized by another cash cow?

[smackeyacky]

A lot of enthusiasts simply want to create content for other enthusiasts. You pay with advertising. It was working well until recently.

[robotnikman]

>Due to the constant trash these algorithms insist on feeding me, which I believe is actively contributing to the dumbing-down of society

This part really worries me right here. We don't know the long term ramifications of the modern day internet, but so far they do not look good.

[toss1]

And the people making the algorithms & internet interfaces could not give a flying fork less about those long term external consequences . . .

[Andrex]

SEO, including video SEO, is constantly in tension with people who want to make money vs. people who want information.

Even if Google were incentivized to clean up their algorithms, the people who want to make money will necessarily always be one step ahead in the cat-and-mouse.

[SrslyJosh]

In the case of YouTube, it's not trash videos that frustrate me, it's YouTube's UI.

First, they have been injecting unrelated recommendations into search results, under headers like "For you" and "People also watched". I don't want to see a pimple-popping video when I'm searching for something related to woodworking. (That's an extreme example, but I have actually seen those types of videos injected into completely unrelated search results. In fact, I just did a search for "hand cut dovetails" as a test and YT recommended two different disgusting pimple/pore videos in the first few dozen results.)

Second, they don't admit that they are out of results. Instead, when search results dry up they coughing up unrelated recommendations so that you can keep scrolling forever. This makes it look like there are more results than there actually are, which is completely unhelpful.

[lolinder]

At some point YouTube broke it with an update, but for a while I had uBlock Origin configured to block the Home page of YouTube entirely, so I'd just see a black screen. I still have it blocking the recommended videos sidebar and the comments.

YouTube actually has a lot of decent content still, if you can find it. I've found that jumping over to look at channels that do collabs with channels that you already know is a good way to discover new content.

[benhurmarcel]

If you deactivate the video history, Youtube’s homepage stays empty

[yodsanklai]

> Whether it's learning how to play the guitar

I don't know about other topics, but it should still be pretty easy to find quality content if you want to learn guitar. Spend a couple of hours to find the channel that suits you best and stick to it.

Overall, there's still lots of great content on youtube, but you need to look it up yourself. The recommendations are useless and make you lose time, and the suppression of the dislike count makes it much harder to filter bad stuff. Also most professional YouTubers don't have much to say. They repeat themselves over and over.

Maybe someone should come up with a custom recommendation algorithm. Don't know if that's doable.

[Unfrozen0688]

I still feel like the Youtube recommendations are A+

I watch only certain channels and a lot of long form documentary and gaming content. So that is what I get recommended. The few times I use the "dont recommend" button it never pops up again.

[65]

I used some custom CSS to block out my YouTube home page, so I never clicked on anything on the home page. I was getting god awful "content" suggested to me on the sidebar of videos. Once I disabled the CSS and started watching some of the recommended videos my recommendations got instantly better. It seems the recommendation system gets better the more you interact with it.

It also is helpful to search for videos and click on those. If I search for long form podcasts or interviews, I will get more of those kinds of videos recommended to me.

[MrDarcy]

How do you get rid of the trash Shorts?

[Unfrozen0688]

I just tested now and

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-youtube-...

works.

[MrDarcy]

Confirmed thank you!

[stef25]

You're right about the trash results.

Recently I was thinking about getting a dog and was trying to find as much information about certain breeds as I could. Everything was just the same stuff repeated over and over, very little substance.

It took me a few days to realise but a lot of the Youtube results were actually entirely created by AI. Not just the voice over and what it was saying but the actual video was as well.

You can get AI to spew out content on whatever topic and as long as there's money to be made from said content, this does not bode well at all.

Repeating a comment I read here a while back - Google has lost, perhaps even given up, the fight against spam content.

[phoerious]

Funny you mention YouTube. We did another study on this as well. https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_20...