[foruhar]

Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.

I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT. The few things that they do put up are often so mind expanding whether it's Berty Russel, The Beatles, or some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.

[lairv]

Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date

Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727

Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video or the channel, and the algorithm doesn't recommend it

[dyauspitr]

The non exhaustive thing is annoying as hell. You might as well delete old videos because there’s no way to get to them if you don’t remember the link. I used to be able to find this video I took in college 20 years ago. There’s just no way for me to get to it anymore.

[rschneid]

Sounds like a good opportunity for a big indexing company to add some value by using thei-

Wait...

[mixmastamyk]

Is that related to freetube removing the video tab (of a channel), sort by age dropdown menu?

[dyauspitr]

I don’t know. All I know is the video I’m looking for has a very unique title and used to come up as the main search result less than 3 years ago and it’s unfindable now. It’s from 2006.

[NJRBailey]

I've noticed that the search is especially bad on the history tab, where even searching the exact title of a video I've seen before doesn't always display it. I've found that the best search for old or niche videos is to ask Gemini with a description of the video (I found it gives better results than GPT 5.1) but it's really unfortunate that the native search isn't more useful.

[Ferret7446]

Realistically you cannot make every video discoverable given the massive ever growing amount of content.

[lairv]

Wikipedia says there's 14.8 billion videos currently uploaded to YouTube, it seems technically easy to index that amount of title+description?

The more likely explanation is that Google doesn't want YouTube to be crawled, which gives them a massive moat for AI training

[squishy47]

you can add search filters to the search bar in youtube.

e.g this will return videos published in that time range with a duration longer than 2m

cat videos after:2014-01-01 before:2014-12-31 >2m

[edit] - the duration doesn't remove shorts I think there's just no shorts published in that time range.

[wiether]

> some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.

I've seen that one!

[deanputney]

Here it is for those who haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk2jV5gJbM

When I looked it up, turns out I've seen it too!

[HerbManic]

I hope he is doing well, or at least had a great ride through life.

[ButlerianJihad]

One really stunning deep dive into the bowels of weird YT content: https://youtu.be/JAALDob9Ev0?si=vooePQoQM0TURpNK

  Grady Smith published an investigative video titled "This TikTok Girl Band Ruined My Life" on October 18, 2022. The project focuses on Taylor Red, a group of triplet sisters with red hair who originally started as a traditional country band. Smith's video explores their transition from serious musicians to creators of surreal, fast-paced TikTok and YouTube content that appears specifically designed to capture the attention of toddlers and children.

[kang]

It was in pre-tiktok world(push to regular content update) & before the purge. A lot of content is now gone. Its a great resource but very loosely coupled with humanity/human knowledge (and arguably a pretty poor resource for it, both theoretically (linear information with contant velocity such as video) and practically (the content just isn't there on youtube, search is truncated etc.)).

> I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.

Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.

[crazygringo]

What purge?

I'm searching Google trying to figure out what you're talking about but not getting any meaningful results.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

Somewhere during the 2010s YouTube became completely sanitized. It went from a general video platform for adults to some dumbed down media company that wouldn't offend negligent mothers in Idaho that gave their kids an ipad rather than parent them

Barely literate workers in 3rd world countries then went on a mass "moderation" spree deleting anything that might even remotely be considered controversial

Videos with millions of views were delisted overnight and the associated channels received community standards violation strikes

[jamesfinlayson]

Apparently there was a purge of extremist content and another purge of AI slop? I wasn't aware of any major publicised purges, though I do remember Google saying a few years ago that they'd be deleting inactive Google accounts (with the exception of accounts with public Youtube videos I think).

[rustygorgon]

(Edit: found a link that covers the first half of what I'm talking about. It took some digging. There is no way you'd have found it with the little info you had)

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/ads-shown-isis... )

I have de-lurked because I can actually contribute to this. I am almost positive that what this is referring to is the time ISIS/ISIL (as it was still sometimes referred to then) uploaded the first video of one of their hostages (a kidnapped journalist?) being beheaded on YouTube. It would have been between 2013 and 2017 inclusive.

Advertising was in full swing on youtube with household names like Pepsi and McDonalds advertising regularly on youtube. BUT ads weren't restricted to certain types of videos then... i don't know if you were paying attention to world events then but ISIS was always in the news and when they released the beheading video it was linked EVERYWHERE. so of course when people went to go and watch a gruesome beheading, before or after it played they would see "da da da da da, I'm loving it".

There was a brief but MASSIVE public outrage against any company whose advertisements were involved, because people thought these companies were endorsing ISIS and beheadings. They didn't understand that the advertisers were paying Youtube for coverage but had no say in exactly what videos recevied what ads. They just blamed the companies they saw in connection with the video. As damage control, these major companies of course instantly pulled all ads from running on youtube and pointed the finger at YouTube, LOUDLY. Youtube lost a substantial amount of revenue and reputation pretty much overnight. Probably in less than 24 hrs. To repair their own reputation and become an attractive and reliable investment for advertisers asap, YouTube immediately took measures to prevent this occurring again. Thus was the first purge.

I do not remember what other measures or standards were originally but they've changed over the years since. Most of the people talking about its rollon effects were youtubers talking about how it affected them personally in youtube videos, with vague or dramatic titles, which is why you would not find many results on google. They didnt want google to find them and see them criticising them and take their videos down too. I do not think the cottage industry we now have around influencers and content creation, including networking and news, had really gotten off the ground then, so nobody that i can think of would have been systematically documenting it in a written text-searchable form. Thus, no google presence.

It's really scary to me that such a major shaping event in our online lives and thus our culture has gone largely undocumented except through videos which people delist, delete, or get copyright struck down, all the time.

Tldr: Isis has a substantial share in the blame for ruining youtube. Isis is still going.

[FartyMcFarter]

> Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube,

Did you ever try? There are experts in many fields posting about all kinds of stuff in there, from professional knowledge, to the most mainstream of hobbies, to very obscure stuff.

[dbcurtis]

> Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.

I suspect you are not looking very hard. I have learned a tremendous amount about everything from stone cutting to metalworking to welding to Kalman filters to linear algebra. There is a lot out there. The main annoyance I have is keeping AI slop out of my feed so that I can instead learn from genuine experts. There is a huge amount out there.

[viewtransform]

Appending 'before:2024' to your search term works on YouTube and gives results from the pre-slopocine era.

[smusamashah]

There is a subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/ which brings up channels and videos with negligible number of views usually in range of 100 or less.

This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3emFAf3jqQQ for example is from 15 years ago with 102 views right now.

[pjc50]

Quite a lot of stuff is on iPlayer. But as always, licensing is the killer.

(Not to mention reputational risk, which is why so many episodes of Top Of The Pops are hidden)

[casey2]

It's one of the US's (or some future world government) greatest future public utilities for sure.

Right now it's ruining it's own content by overoptimizing for engagement slop. Making the creators dumber and consumers poorer, limiting ad growth in the long term.

[gerdesj]

"Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources."

The content is one of humani .... oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts.

Is there not a better place for human creativity than ... Google? Should my TV license fee fund Google?

Fuck off (hyperbolically)!

[fooker]

> oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts.

As opposed to governments renowned for colonizing half the world, destroying countless cultures, committing genocide in living memory?

[wolvesechoes]

> As opposed to governments renowned for colonizing half the world, destroying countless cultures, committing genocide in living memory?

Yes. Private companies are capable of the same, with addition of having profit as a sole purpose of existence.

[BloondAndDoom]

Lowkey one the best things about LLMs, finally we have truly indexed YouTube which made up a massive amount of knowledge consumable and searchable in text format. I hate watching YouTube videos but like the information they provide between Youtube’s AI feature and Perplexitiy etc. Video indexing, it’s been a life saver.

[jamesfinlayson]

Agreed - I've never followed YouTube that closely but apparently there was a time where everyone thought that YouTube favoured videos that were around 10 minutes in length... so everyone padded their short videos to 10 minutes.

[xboxnolifes]

It wasn't about favoring them. Videos needed to be 10 minutes long to get mid-roll ads.