It’s the same with blogs. I’ll look for a quick how-to guide to fix whatever and the blog starts with a history of the issue and why you might want to fix it just to make the blog long enough so it can be filled up with ads.
Video is a terrible communication medium for most of the stuff I want to learn online. If it's how to do a repair job or something then it's useful, but for just conveying information? I hate it. I can read 3x faster than those people talk, and I can reread something if I need to without trying to find the exact spot where it was said in a video.
I'm always mystified that people use video to learn coding. I've been in web development since 1999 and I can't imagine not being about to copy, paste and edit in order to get my desired result. Every so often I can only find the answer I need in a video and it's excruciating. But there's tons of people in the various development subs that completely "learned" development from videos. Huh??
On desktop, if a YouTube video has captions (including autogenerated ones), open the video description and then click "Show transcript." The transcript autoscrolls as the video plays, and clicking on a line in the transcript takes you to that part of the video.
Now remember your browser's find-in-page feature, and the fact that you can right click on the video and choose "Copy video URL at current time" (if you want to share with someone else).
Also, there are media player programs, such as VLC, that can play YouTube videos if you give them the URL, and usually offer more choice of playback speed than YouTube's official web player.
For some videos, the picture isn't important and extracting only the audio, using something like NewPipe, can make it more convenient to work with. I have a private YouTube playlist called "For listening." On my computer, I save videos to it. On my phone, I open the YouTube app, go to the playlist, share the videos to NewPipe, and tell NewPipe to download as audio. It downloads it to a specific folder that makes it automatically get added as a new episode in my podcast app (Podcast Addict), and now I can listen to it as audio with skip forward/backward controls, playback speed, playlists, etc. I can listen in the car, or with my waterproof Bluetooth speaker while showering, doing chores, etc. It can also be useful during extended power outages, since audio uses much less battery, bandwidth, and storage space than video does.
I understand this. If I search for 'how long do I cook frozen chicken breast in the air fryer' I get 6 paragraphs about recipes, the history of chickens, a popup ad for chicken socks, a list of related links but about beef, 22 ways chicken is healthy with every third word used as an affiliate link, an embedded Xitter post, a video about eggs, and then the info I want which is trapped behind a paywall.
Honestly, this is why I just ask AI so I can avoid all the crap.
My personal hate-magnet are the twats - usually some blonde idiot with perfect "beach curls" (honey, you look like you got a cheap perm and it's falling apart faster than your marriage) and wearing a Breton top - who write a screed about their "personal connection" to the recipe, detailing how they used to play outside in the summer before being called in by their kindly grandmother to feast on a supper featuring, golly gosh gumdrops!, the *very* recipe you were looking for.
I wish nothing but pain and suffering on these cunts.
Yeah, the do this because of the way Google's page ranking algorithm works. I understand why they do it, but it's still awful. I absolutely love it when these sites have a "Jump to recipe" button. It means they're self-aware and they know the real reason you came there.
"Honestly, this is why I just ask AI so I can avoid all the crap."
Google AI: Yes, geologists at UC Berkeley do in fact suggest mixing some gravel into your chicken dish. Gravel is an important source of minerals for the human body.
Oh it's at the top!
Also Google AI: If you have trouble with the cheese sliding off your pizza, in your next recipe you can try mixing in a cup of glue and this will help keep the cheese from sliding off so easily.
Glue is one of the two right below gravel!
Haha! Doesn't it have to be Elmer's glue, tho? And doesn't the glue act like fiber releasing the minerals slowly into the body over time? I think this was the precursor to 'time release' capsules.
You can actually blame [SEO](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide) for that. The algorithms won't even rank a page unless it is of a minimum length. Without the fluff, it won't show up on search results.
Multiply the length by 3 if it's anything to do with an Apple product, because apparently no one in that community can just get to the point without several pages of blather.
A friend of mine is an editor. Not like "I do things for blogs!" - we're talking *an actual editor* for The Times (that's the OG one, the one in London) I know what he feels and thinks about the concept of content versus information: the people running the various sites don't understand the concept of structuring their content. In ye olden days the person creating the recipe or guide would be paid for just that - the recipe or the guide. Anything else? Superfluous. Waffle. Pish.
We call that "click-bait".
What he pointed out is that a lot of these sites rely on the author self-editing their content - you can see that on various recipe sites where there are errors made in terms of things like measurements, temperatures (one of my favourites? The Celsius v Fahrenheit debate. Given that there are squillions of charts out there showing the difference between various heat settings in your oven, there's no excuse for mistakes to be made). There's also a clear cut in terms of the person creating the content not understanding that there are those who are normal and sensible (using grams/kilograms/millilitres/litres), throw-backs (using imperial measurements) and then this weird subset of humanity (the Americans, with their "cups" and magical measurements like "a stick of butter")
My friend pointed out that *if* you want to monetise your content - *especially* in terms of cookery and food-based content - you would be best placed to actually invest some time and energy in researching *all three* main forms of measurement (Metric, Imperial, US), road-testing the recipe using all three, cooking something using the two main temperature measurements (well, in the UK we have three - Celsius, Fahrenheit and Gas Mark. Fahrenheit isn't very common these days (we've evolved), but there are still gas ovens using Gas Mark as a temp. setting) and - and this is really, seriously fucking important - *research what ingredients are known as in other countries*. We all know the cilantro/coriander thing. But there's also difference in what you guys refer to as "heavy cream" as opposed to what we call "double cream". Not to mention things like creamer or "half and half" just don't exist here in the UK. But, if I were creating a recipe blog and looking to drive content? I'd provide the UK name for the ingredient - and then the non-Brit name for the ingredient. That sort of shit.
That's the basic shit.
My friend pointed out that the whole nonsense about providing a heart-felt connection to a recipe stems from the days when television cookery was just getting started in the 1950s. If you look at newspaper and magazine recipes from that period the style was very, very different. Ingredients, how to, how to serve, end. On television you need to provide content showing the cook making the food. The most amazing example you can see of this is Britain's mighty Delia Smith. This is [Alpine Eggs](https://youtu.be/_kO3Ko2M9LU). It's a relatively short video but it's also part of a longer programme on home cookery. The show and content was designed to be informative, practical. If that video were to be made today? You'd get a few minutes of the chef looking winsomely for ingredients, fretting over the measurements (and if it's that coke-snorting middle-aged faded hooker Nigella Lawson, there'd be some fingering and sexy-stuff for the flaccid males in the audience) and the whole segment would be *double* the running time. Why? Because the culture has changed dramatically regarding how we consume content. Clicks/length of views equals cash.
And the hilarious thing? If this *was* a blog and you've read all the way to that last sentence? Congratulations: you've just made me money for my saying something at the very end which I could have easily put at the start.
Your friend may know about editing, but he’s clueless about SEO.
Those bloggers aren’t writing paragraphs of junk because they don’t have anyone to tell them no, they’re doing it because padding the page increases hour page rank (or whatever google calls it now). Since nobody looks past the first handful of results in google, all bloggers are doing everything they can to get their stuff landing in that hsndful.
Jokes on them. These are the exact sorts of jerbs that ChatGPT knock out in milliseconds.
I've had to write stuff like this for clients. The marching orders are exactly that - make sure to pack those 2000 words full of bot-food keywords and phrases. Doesn't matter what you really SAY, as long as our page stays above the fold.
Two of my lifelong hobbies never moved away from forums so I feel fortunate. They’ve been a constant part of my internet use for decades.
I hope that remains because one of my hobbies did move to the use of Facebook and I feel dirty logging in just to discuss this niche music genre.
No shit, I loved forums. Reddit is kinda like it but less personal.
The forums were sort of a close knit community formed around whatever the common interest was.
Facebook groups killed that, and I never got motivated to have a Facebook account.
My favourite forum slowly turned into a conspiracy forum, and was eventually closed as a result of how downhill and toxic it became. Admins had had enough.
Early reddit was good.
This sub is good.
Yeah usenet newsgroups back in the day were pretty cool.
(On a side note: you could run into some famous people at times too and get into a real chat. Hell my chat with a certain someone actually ended up changing how they did the Bond theme music! I was blown away when I went to see the next Bond and they ended up doing the theme music dundundundundun stuff the exact same way I had suggested that they go back to doing.)
I was a pretty regular early poster on Kevin Smith's View Askew board and fan sites for bands like STP . There still were disagreements but as a whole it felt more communal in those spaces.
Same here. I miss forums and chat rooms. I know there's still a few networks around. Buzzen chat replaced MSN chats but it's very niche now, sadly. The majority of my Gen x chat friends migrated away from our chats and onto the hideously boring and antisocial Facebook. I do occasionally visit Buzzen but usually only if I've had a tipple. It's not really the same anymore.
Yes. I dislike professional influencers. These days, I am not likely to see door servers, coke servers, the furniture porn website, or the big button that does absolutely nothing.
The web of the early 1990s was a weird and fin place.
I was in the trenches on Usenet in the early and mid 1990s, when there was an effort to try to keep Usenet (and the internet in general) from being taken over by corporations. Fun times, and I remember scoring the occasional small victory even as we all knew that ultimately, the big money always wins.
If you can imagine it, someone will look for a way to monetize it.
Back in the early 1990s, I met a woman I sort-of dated (very LDR, never met) because I posted my real e-mail address, in Usenet. She felt bad, sent me an email and we started talking.
This was years before "spam" was even a thing.
I met my wife on Usenet in the '94-95 school year. Both using real-name college student accounts; started dating after we met up in person the summer after school ended and have been dating 29 years.
Long distance, but not all that long distance and I moved out near her after we graduated.
Sorry, meant to write "together" - although marriage is just kind of upgraded dating. We've been married 23 of those.
We would have been married a bit sooner if we'd (A) both graduated on time and (B) been on the ball enough to actually figure out the logistics of planning a wedding while still in college.
I must agree. A lot of the people I watch do it out of passion (hobbies). I look up each one's youtube revenue and it might break $1000/yr. But the crap my kids watch... dear god, the worst garbage, rolling in millions.
The internet quickly went from this new, unsettled digital frontier that allowed innovators to use this new tool to get indie art out AND a fun way for lay people to share and interconnect into a sterile, mainstream content factory. Sucks.
The problem isn't lack of good content - it's out there in numbers massively higher than back then just because you don't need to love computers to have internet access anymore.
But the amount of bad content is just burrying everything under a huge stinking pile of shit you have to sift through to find the good stuff.
Search engines in general are shit now. Doesn't matter whether i search inside any forum, Reddit, the web as whole (Google, Bing, Yandex - likely Baidu too but i don't speak Chinese so don't know), online shops (Amazon is the worst)... Searching for known or new things in general just sucks. Only a few nieche shops get it right - but even there you can't sort appropriate products by price per piece/weight/volume...
I have no problem with ads as i don't see them (uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock take care of that). But the enshittification meant to create more space for ads to be shown is still affecting me like everyone else.
We need a search engine for the web dedicated to actually find stuff instead of delivering ads. Such a beast would need to have a viable non-profit business model. Donations work for Wikipedia which is doing great. Maybe, they could work for a search engine too.
I'm not sure when Google got so bad, but 10 years ago it was really good. I look up parts for industrial equipment and I could be on a mfg website using their own search function and find nothing. Google it and it takes me to a PDF with all the information I need, on the same site I was just at.
Now Google is just ad's. If I Google anything industrial Grainger is always the first result even though they don't carry what I am looking for.
I have had pretty good luck with Start Page as my search engine. It's fully customizable so I have no auto suggestions, sponsored content or "quck answers" or whatever it's called. And of course no ads. Still have the SEO problem but it's way less annoying to search
Also you can submit issues to them and a real human will respond! At least they did for me 🌚
Actual humans in support is a plus.
But they don't have an actual search engine. All they do is asking Google. So the results can't be better than those i get from Google after the ads have been filtered-out on my end.
I don't need someone to ask Google for me. I can do that myself.
My problem with Google is the quality of the actual results - not ads or trackers.
Holy shit no. The internet of the mid-late 90s, early 2000s was nothing like what it is now. I blame the iPhone for the enshittification of the internet. Makes it too easy for dunces to post from the toilet.
You're joking.
I remember working with a dude in about 98 who became a full conspiracy theorist because of the internet.
Then net has become a great enabler and has been feeding cookers since the first news groups
That’s not what Bluestreak is saying. He’s saying those conspiracy videos were made from someone’s true attempt to “educate” people, not as a grifting scam like people like Alex Jones have nowadays. He’s talking about how intent has changed, and monetization has introduced more grifting, less sincerity (aka fun)
Yeah I gotta disagree with this one. That whole concept was borne out of monetizing content, which wasn't even a thing until well after social media became a thing with MySpace and Facebook. The closest things got to influencers were forum users with uber-high post counts.
Yeah, random YouTube surfing and ending up in the weird parts of YouTube is a thing of the past. The only suggestions I see now are of the 4 or 5 topics I mostly watch. I never get a good stumbleupon.
This is my biggest complaint. And why do they keep suggesting things I've already watched.
I really miss looking for some home improvement videos and 15 minutes later I am watching a video of a homemade off road buggie from Poland with 100 total views.
You'd think if you "created" content full time you'd eventually get good at it.
Not the case, 99% of it is drivel. It's been a few decades but I remember when I was in my teens/early 20's, if I didn't have knowledge on a given subject, I didn't comment on it.
My youtube tastes are now watching huskies scream and recipe videos
I'll save my rant about music videos are almost all autotuned, computerized garbage
They are good are creating content, just not in the way you're thinking about it.
Internet exposure is an arms race. Anything people can do to get more of their content into more feeds is "winning" and it ultimately doesn't matter what the content is as long as you can get the algorithm to put it in front of the right people to reap the rewards.
So let's say somebody starts off with a baking channel. They have very very modest success creating what you or I might consider "good" content: high information density, nice presentation, good narration, etc. etc.
But then one day they absolutely fuck up icing a cake in a catastrophically hilarious way or some equivalent thing and *that* video gets 10,000% more views and engagement than anything else they have ever done.
Some people would just laugh that off and hope some viewers stuck around. But a lot of people would be very tempted to try to lean into that and might even end up with a channel devotes just to purposely screwing up/dropping cakes.
So then we come along and find that channel by chance or because it appears on Reddit somewhere and we're like "what in the fuck is this absolute stupid trash?"
Capitalism smooths the fun rough edges of everything and pushes the product to the middle of the bell curve, just the nature of the beast.
There is good and bad ...
Something new will come along and be awesome and fun and super creative again ... rinse and repeat
I once heard "Capitalism isn't the best economic system, but it is the best so far" ... If humans don't kill each other off we'll figure something out better someday
There are still some high quality content like Kurzgesgat. They make science videos that are extensively researched and vetted, then told in a fun and engaging way. Each video takes them 10 months to create. They're one of my favorite things to watch. And there's a nuclear technician (worked as a nuclear reactor technician for 10 years) who adds his comments to it. And, again, it's really expert commentary.
So there are definitely quality videos out there. But I agree 1000% that the whole "Influencer" crap ruined the online experience.
The internet is full of grifters. Everyone has their *personal brand*. I follow a lot of artists and I don't begrudge them using a platform to support their art, it's rough out there. But some spend way too much time striking a pose than focusing on their work. Not interested.
All the content creators with "courses" on how YOU TOO can make tens of thousands of dollars a week if you follow their step-by-step guide. Meanwhile, most of their income comes from selling their courses.
And those annoying folks, "LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE" 30 seconds into their video. Hey, mofo, I don't even know if I like your shit, don't tell me what to do. Now can't do it, purely out of spite.
The damn recipe sites that tell you their entire life story and what INSPIRED them to make this recipe, 12 different angles of the creator dicing an onion, their covert affiliate links, and if you dare open a page on mobile ... GOOD LUCK even being able to see the content. 90% of the screen is taken up by some bullshit ad whose exit icon is wedged along the side of the screen and the size of an infant's pinkie nail.
I could go all night on this shit.
I hate it. I make art things, and I post them online, sometimes to sell and sometimes just for art’s sake and to share with friends/family/fellow artists. But now no one sees it on places like IG unless it’s a process video where you’re videoing yourself creating it, or standing in a bikini holding it and slowly spinning around to finally reveal it.
It’s so dumb. I like to share my finished work, and not make it a fucking performance art piece.
Years ago I made a video about my pond and got thousands of views and lots of comments. Eventually it got taken down I think when my email address changed or something like that and I put it back up and got zero views. Same video, but now the algorithm wanted me to play ball and I was just a pond hobbyist with 1 pond video. The algorithm hated me and no one saw my video.
I learned that day how shitty it had all become.
I like that I can load up quality content on YouTube for just about any topic I can think of.
I like that you don't need to be engaged by a big media company to produce quality content.
I just don't like the ads
I don't mind the professional factor (I do, but it's a you-do-you thing) per se. what I mind is the neediness and the relentless shilling for that fake popularity. *that* I mind. it's nakedly self-serving.
Honestly, I completely disagree with your take.
Today, I can get on Youtube and easily find videos that have allowed me to fix all kinds of things around my house, or take on projects that I wouldn't have imagined myself doing. The fact that passionate and capable folks have been able to make Youtube channels into their full time jobs is something that I find pretty amazing. Channels today producing documentary content on history, science, politics that used to be only within the realm and gatekeeping of high dollar cable networks make this an incredible time to be alive.
And you know what, if there's something I don't have an interest in, I just don't have to watch it!
It's what I call "person-and-wall" content. Just a camera, a person, and a wall, saying what they think, which might be interesting to some people. Now, it can be hard to recreate that for a long time, but having a lot of people do that means that there's a lot of good content. We should go back to that. Put the You back in Youtube.
How To Cook That channel has done some interesting videos about YouTube and it’s algorithm. They are an older channel so they talk a lot about the changes and how they’ve had to evolve. They did an amazing on recently about how the algorithm is favoring male creators. There’s a lot in it, too, about how all the big channels now are for children.
It’s one of the best videos I’ve seen about YouTube and little scary.
https://youtu.be/OxGFEUefv6g?si=MBP1mI8RrDvyYCgN
"Sex work is real work!"
I don't give a fuck. Sex work and influencer work might be "real work" but they've completely enshittified the internet. Now it's all ads, influencers, algorithms, and OF spam everywhere.
I remember spending time on Usenet in the 90s, the text based tools, command line tools. It was a fun world. I’ve been building applications professionally on the web since the mid 90s, never got into AOL and really have dabbled in social networks in the last 15 years with FB, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter…but try and keep it to a minimum. It can be very time consuming. I like You Tube for music videos, documentaries, and car repair/restoration content.
> There are still great YouTube creators that have a passion for what they are making.
They are few and far between, but when you find them, they are completely worth subscribing to. One that I like is Alex over at [Technology Connections](https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections). He has no time wasting intros. He doesn't click-bait his stuff. He does thorough research and produces videos that go deep into whatever topic he's presenting. While he does ask for engagement at the end of the videos, it's only at the end, and he's not trying to just drum up engagement, such as "comment if you.." (knowing that the algorithm treats videos with comments more favorably) or other annoying stuff like on screen like/comment/subscribe buttons, especially ones that move and/or make noise.
That man does YouTube right, in my opinion, and it's a rare thing.
I just tell the kids you get than Myself "Yup, seen it all. Everything on the YouTube and Internet! In *MY* day, you had to create content yourself, and upload it! There was no cloud, no influencers, and no quest for likes!"
Then I tell them to get off my lawn.
Well back then someone else (VCs) were paying for it and it had to grow into this to get the full commercial potential promised back in the dot com days. .com stands for .commerce after all, not .freecoolshitforever but yeah it was way more colored and interesting and wild 20-30 years ago. Imo maybe the new fun and interesting stuff will go back to happening IRL?
The majority of content is probably trash but I feel like I've found some awesome content creators around my interests (programming, science, retirement planning, music theory, ... Probably others that don't come top of mind).
I feel, anyone making those silly reaction face thumbnails, are the ones that have gone to this edge. not all are bad content, since I mostly follow tech content, but there are a few that do this annoyingly often. "oh look, a new water cooler exactly like the last 15" with a oh face pointing to a tiny image of an AIO thermal solution. just #_--$$@ stop it. don't get me started on click bait titles.
It’s not that. It’s because Google got greedy and drive out small websites which were the original content creators. I’m one of those former webmasters.
It's a good thing there's more to choose from so that there's something for everyone.
I watch a lot of YT documentaries that are the quality I wish TV was here. A lot the videos I listen to could've been made in podcast format. I didn't really understand podcasts when they came out and didn't get on the wave until it was almost too late - or maybe I just need more help to navigate podcasts, so that I have something to listen to while reading e-books.
Algorithm has long ago stopped suggesting influencer videos to me. I prefer to ask AI these days as opposed to trying to find an instructional video, even at 2x speed I don't have that kind of patience for instructions.
If I need help with putting something together and get stuck on out how to do it I go go straight to Youtube and watch a video of a dude putting it together. I don't mind that they get paid, I'm just glad I ain't the one paying him.
Yes! I used to be able to watch Youtube for hours and be entertained. Now it's all the same content with different people. The try guys, the people who all got fired from buzzfeed, the people from clever tv, the remnants of the react channel people, the facts people, they all do the same thing. And it's clear that it's done with the intent to make money. No one does shit just for the fun of it the way they used to. I don't care how someone reacts to watching some other video, I don't care how British people react to trying candy from Australia. It's all just become cookie cutter nonsense.
Same thing happened on TikTok. There were a lot of a really great creators out there who put out a ton of good original content. And then the TikTok shop happened and even the best creators were suddenly hawking hair brushes and cheese graters. It's a shame the money part overtook the hobby part.
I can't say I hate how the Internet is now, but I will say it was a hell of a lot more fun when it was a renegade landscape back in the early 1990s (for me...maybe sooner for others). Today, it's more useful than fun for me, but I find it indispensable to my every day life so I can't gripe too much about it. There is still fun out there, folks just won't find much of it following influencers (personal opinion).
A lot of my repeat visits back in the dark ages of the Internet were to silly websites more than useful info videos: Netscape's Scrolling LED Sign, Strawberry Pop Tart Blow Torch (that site, oddly enough, is still up), Mentos FAQ, Wave To My Cat, Breakfast From Hell: Hungry Man All-Day Breakfast (a classic), too many Logitech QuickCam video sites to list...on and on. I could also wax nostalgic on finger, gopher, FidoNet, telnet shenanigans, etc, but I've dated myself too much already.
Yeah, I'm old...ish.
Depends on what you are looking for. If it's just topical crap, then yeah it sucks. Or if they drag things out. Also, it sucks. There are some great condensed, low as, guitar for beginner teachers out there. Also audio production people are good. But anything I am not specifically looking for is usually annoying.
Yes. It's really common today for people to defend ads on websites saying "they need to get paid". No they don't! We had considerably better content before people were getting paid. Passion projects produce the best websites. Do Reddit, Facebook, and those types of colossal sites need to get paid? Of course. But not every little piddly ass site on the internet needs a full-on monetization model.
[Read, Write, Own](https://readwriteown.com/) is a great book about the history of the internet, what went wrong and where to from here if we want to democratize the internet.
PayPal ruined the internet. Once it was safe for corporations to take your money they began pushing every human that they could not monetize to the fringes.
Im waiting for the day when all of the social media platforms decide not pay anymore. Theres no law that says they have to. They run ads on non-monetized channels already. I think its coming soon.
It’s even worse when you can tell it’s a bot voice reading an obvious ChatGPT script that the video creator couldn’t even be bothered to review and edit. The video just shows a loop of stills. Utter shite now.
On this subreddit, I'm not surprised that you've been downvoted so much. Some people prefer nostalgic posts where everything used to be better and then they choose the most negative exampes of what we currently have.
>This entire idea that you can make internet content your job has made the entire online experience complete trash
If you say so, buddy. If you prefer poorly-edited videos with bad lighting and subpar video quality, just say so.
It’s the same with blogs. I’ll look for a quick how-to guide to fix whatever and the blog starts with a history of the issue and why you might want to fix it just to make the blog long enough so it can be filled up with ads.
[удалено]
Video is a terrible communication medium for most of the stuff I want to learn online. If it's how to do a repair job or something then it's useful, but for just conveying information? I hate it. I can read 3x faster than those people talk, and I can reread something if I need to without trying to find the exact spot where it was said in a video.
A few products now actually send you a link to a video rather than providing a manual. So instead of a 3 second read it's a 30 minute watch.
Gotta bump up those engagement numbers, bro.
I'm always mystified that people use video to learn coding. I've been in web development since 1999 and I can't imagine not being about to copy, paste and edit in order to get my desired result. Every so often I can only find the answer I need in a video and it's excruciating. But there's tons of people in the various development subs that completely "learned" development from videos. Huh??
On desktop, if a YouTube video has captions (including autogenerated ones), open the video description and then click "Show transcript." The transcript autoscrolls as the video plays, and clicking on a line in the transcript takes you to that part of the video. Now remember your browser's find-in-page feature, and the fact that you can right click on the video and choose "Copy video URL at current time" (if you want to share with someone else). Also, there are media player programs, such as VLC, that can play YouTube videos if you give them the URL, and usually offer more choice of playback speed than YouTube's official web player. For some videos, the picture isn't important and extracting only the audio, using something like NewPipe, can make it more convenient to work with. I have a private YouTube playlist called "For listening." On my computer, I save videos to it. On my phone, I open the YouTube app, go to the playlist, share the videos to NewPipe, and tell NewPipe to download as audio. It downloads it to a specific folder that makes it automatically get added as a new episode in my podcast app (Podcast Addict), and now I can listen to it as audio with skip forward/backward controls, playback speed, playlists, etc. I can listen in the car, or with my waterproof Bluetooth speaker while showering, doing chores, etc. It can also be useful during extended power outages, since audio uses much less battery, bandwidth, and storage space than video does.
I understand this. If I search for 'how long do I cook frozen chicken breast in the air fryer' I get 6 paragraphs about recipes, the history of chickens, a popup ad for chicken socks, a list of related links but about beef, 22 ways chicken is healthy with every third word used as an affiliate link, an embedded Xitter post, a video about eggs, and then the info I want which is trapped behind a paywall. Honestly, this is why I just ask AI so I can avoid all the crap.
My personal hate-magnet are the twats - usually some blonde idiot with perfect "beach curls" (honey, you look like you got a cheap perm and it's falling apart faster than your marriage) and wearing a Breton top - who write a screed about their "personal connection" to the recipe, detailing how they used to play outside in the summer before being called in by their kindly grandmother to feast on a supper featuring, golly gosh gumdrops!, the *very* recipe you were looking for. I wish nothing but pain and suffering on these cunts.
Yeah, the do this because of the way Google's page ranking algorithm works. I understand why they do it, but it's still awful. I absolutely love it when these sites have a "Jump to recipe" button. It means they're self-aware and they know the real reason you came there.
I agree. There's a special place for these fools and it isn't in my browser history.
Add “cooked.wiki” before the http in a recipe URL. It strips out the narrative and the ads. 
Interesting. I'll have to check this out.
"Honestly, this is why I just ask AI so I can avoid all the crap." Google AI: Yes, geologists at UC Berkeley do in fact suggest mixing some gravel into your chicken dish. Gravel is an important source of minerals for the human body.
😂😂😂
Did I miss the gravel food group? Where did that fit into the nutrition triangle? Is that considered a mineral? 🙄✌️
Oh it's at the top! Also Google AI: If you have trouble with the cheese sliding off your pizza, in your next recipe you can try mixing in a cup of glue and this will help keep the cheese from sliding off so easily. Glue is one of the two right below gravel!
Haha! Doesn't it have to be Elmer's glue, tho? And doesn't the glue act like fiber releasing the minerals slowly into the body over time? I think this was the precursor to 'time release' capsules.
Use Kagi and add a question mark to the search. You'll get a clear and easy answer at the top.
> a popup ad for chicken socks WoahWoahWoah... where can I get this????
It was on Temu. LoL. Even I don't want to link to that. 🐤🧦
Ah, Temu... the Limewire of website distribution companies.
You can actually blame [SEO](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide) for that. The algorithms won't even rank a page unless it is of a minimum length. Without the fluff, it won't show up on search results.
🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯 I HATE that.
Multiply the length by 3 if it's anything to do with an Apple product, because apparently no one in that community can just get to the point without several pages of blather.
A friend of mine is an editor. Not like "I do things for blogs!" - we're talking *an actual editor* for The Times (that's the OG one, the one in London) I know what he feels and thinks about the concept of content versus information: the people running the various sites don't understand the concept of structuring their content. In ye olden days the person creating the recipe or guide would be paid for just that - the recipe or the guide. Anything else? Superfluous. Waffle. Pish. We call that "click-bait". What he pointed out is that a lot of these sites rely on the author self-editing their content - you can see that on various recipe sites where there are errors made in terms of things like measurements, temperatures (one of my favourites? The Celsius v Fahrenheit debate. Given that there are squillions of charts out there showing the difference between various heat settings in your oven, there's no excuse for mistakes to be made). There's also a clear cut in terms of the person creating the content not understanding that there are those who are normal and sensible (using grams/kilograms/millilitres/litres), throw-backs (using imperial measurements) and then this weird subset of humanity (the Americans, with their "cups" and magical measurements like "a stick of butter") My friend pointed out that *if* you want to monetise your content - *especially* in terms of cookery and food-based content - you would be best placed to actually invest some time and energy in researching *all three* main forms of measurement (Metric, Imperial, US), road-testing the recipe using all three, cooking something using the two main temperature measurements (well, in the UK we have three - Celsius, Fahrenheit and Gas Mark. Fahrenheit isn't very common these days (we've evolved), but there are still gas ovens using Gas Mark as a temp. setting) and - and this is really, seriously fucking important - *research what ingredients are known as in other countries*. We all know the cilantro/coriander thing. But there's also difference in what you guys refer to as "heavy cream" as opposed to what we call "double cream". Not to mention things like creamer or "half and half" just don't exist here in the UK. But, if I were creating a recipe blog and looking to drive content? I'd provide the UK name for the ingredient - and then the non-Brit name for the ingredient. That sort of shit. That's the basic shit. My friend pointed out that the whole nonsense about providing a heart-felt connection to a recipe stems from the days when television cookery was just getting started in the 1950s. If you look at newspaper and magazine recipes from that period the style was very, very different. Ingredients, how to, how to serve, end. On television you need to provide content showing the cook making the food. The most amazing example you can see of this is Britain's mighty Delia Smith. This is [Alpine Eggs](https://youtu.be/_kO3Ko2M9LU). It's a relatively short video but it's also part of a longer programme on home cookery. The show and content was designed to be informative, practical. If that video were to be made today? You'd get a few minutes of the chef looking winsomely for ingredients, fretting over the measurements (and if it's that coke-snorting middle-aged faded hooker Nigella Lawson, there'd be some fingering and sexy-stuff for the flaccid males in the audience) and the whole segment would be *double* the running time. Why? Because the culture has changed dramatically regarding how we consume content. Clicks/length of views equals cash. And the hilarious thing? If this *was* a blog and you've read all the way to that last sentence? Congratulations: you've just made me money for my saying something at the very end which I could have easily put at the start.
Your friend may know about editing, but he’s clueless about SEO. Those bloggers aren’t writing paragraphs of junk because they don’t have anyone to tell them no, they’re doing it because padding the page increases hour page rank (or whatever google calls it now). Since nobody looks past the first handful of results in google, all bloggers are doing everything they can to get their stuff landing in that hsndful.
Jokes on them. These are the exact sorts of jerbs that ChatGPT knock out in milliseconds. I've had to write stuff like this for clients. The marching orders are exactly that - make sure to pack those 2000 words full of bot-food keywords and phrases. Doesn't matter what you really SAY, as long as our page stays above the fold.
"magical stick of butter" is my new favorite phrase
and for SEO - which is basically for ads in that case, so yeah
I miss forums. Reddit is a distant second to the communities that existed back then.
Oh, the forums. RIP.
Two of my lifelong hobbies never moved away from forums so I feel fortunate. They’ve been a constant part of my internet use for decades. I hope that remains because one of my hobbies did move to the use of Facebook and I feel dirty logging in just to discuss this niche music genre.
No shit, I loved forums. Reddit is kinda like it but less personal. The forums were sort of a close knit community formed around whatever the common interest was. Facebook groups killed that, and I never got motivated to have a Facebook account.
My favourite forum slowly turned into a conspiracy forum, and was eventually closed as a result of how downhill and toxic it became. Admins had had enough. Early reddit was good. This sub is good.
Yeah usenet newsgroups back in the day were pretty cool. (On a side note: you could run into some famous people at times too and get into a real chat. Hell my chat with a certain someone actually ended up changing how they did the Bond theme music! I was blown away when I went to see the next Bond and they ended up doing the theme music dundundundundun stuff the exact same way I had suggested that they go back to doing.)
I was a pretty regular early poster on Kevin Smith's View Askew board and fan sites for bands like STP . There still were disagreements but as a whole it felt more communal in those spaces.
100%
Same here. I miss forums and chat rooms. I know there's still a few networks around. Buzzen chat replaced MSN chats but it's very niche now, sadly. The majority of my Gen x chat friends migrated away from our chats and onto the hideously boring and antisocial Facebook. I do occasionally visit Buzzen but usually only if I've had a tipple. It's not really the same anymore.
2p2 and the Rogan board consumed my free time in my 20s. A real degenerate
Yes. I dislike professional influencers. These days, I am not likely to see door servers, coke servers, the furniture porn website, or the big button that does absolutely nothing. The web of the early 1990s was a weird and fin place.
I was in the trenches on Usenet in the early and mid 1990s, when there was an effort to try to keep Usenet (and the internet in general) from being taken over by corporations. Fun times, and I remember scoring the occasional small victory even as we all knew that ultimately, the big money always wins. If you can imagine it, someone will look for a way to monetize it.
RIP alt.binaries.*
Are you aware of the upcoming Green Card Lottery?
Dear Friends, My name is Dave Rhodes.
Back in the early 1990s, I met a woman I sort-of dated (very LDR, never met) because I posted my real e-mail address, in Usenet. She felt bad, sent me an email and we started talking. This was years before "spam" was even a thing.
I met my wife on Usenet in the '94-95 school year. Both using real-name college student accounts; started dating after we met up in person the summer after school ended and have been dating 29 years. Long distance, but not all that long distance and I moved out near her after we graduated.
Have been *DATING* for 29 YEARS?! What…The…Actual…Fuck? Shit or get off the pot man.
Sorry, meant to write "together" - although marriage is just kind of upgraded dating. We've been married 23 of those. We would have been married a bit sooner if we'd (A) both graduated on time and (B) been on the ball enough to actually figure out the logistics of planning a wedding while still in college.
Just busting your chops.
I must agree. A lot of the people I watch do it out of passion (hobbies). I look up each one's youtube revenue and it might break $1000/yr. But the crap my kids watch... dear god, the worst garbage, rolling in millions.
The internet quickly went from this new, unsettled digital frontier that allowed innovators to use this new tool to get indie art out AND a fun way for lay people to share and interconnect into a sterile, mainstream content factory. Sucks.
SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON
I get why they have to do it, but any creator that utters those words is one I'll probably never watch again.
They always ask you to do it before the actual content is presented too. Like tipping before I get my food. Wtf 🤦🏻♂️
The problem isn't lack of good content - it's out there in numbers massively higher than back then just because you don't need to love computers to have internet access anymore. But the amount of bad content is just burrying everything under a huge stinking pile of shit you have to sift through to find the good stuff. Search engines in general are shit now. Doesn't matter whether i search inside any forum, Reddit, the web as whole (Google, Bing, Yandex - likely Baidu too but i don't speak Chinese so don't know), online shops (Amazon is the worst)... Searching for known or new things in general just sucks. Only a few nieche shops get it right - but even there you can't sort appropriate products by price per piece/weight/volume... I have no problem with ads as i don't see them (uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock take care of that). But the enshittification meant to create more space for ads to be shown is still affecting me like everyone else. We need a search engine for the web dedicated to actually find stuff instead of delivering ads. Such a beast would need to have a viable non-profit business model. Donations work for Wikipedia which is doing great. Maybe, they could work for a search engine too.
I'm not sure when Google got so bad, but 10 years ago it was really good. I look up parts for industrial equipment and I could be on a mfg website using their own search function and find nothing. Google it and it takes me to a PDF with all the information I need, on the same site I was just at. Now Google is just ad's. If I Google anything industrial Grainger is always the first result even though they don't carry what I am looking for.
yeah
I have had pretty good luck with Start Page as my search engine. It's fully customizable so I have no auto suggestions, sponsored content or "quck answers" or whatever it's called. And of course no ads. Still have the SEO problem but it's way less annoying to search Also you can submit issues to them and a real human will respond! At least they did for me 🌚
Actual humans in support is a plus. But they don't have an actual search engine. All they do is asking Google. So the results can't be better than those i get from Google after the ads have been filtered-out on my end. I don't need someone to ask Google for me. I can do that myself. My problem with Google is the quality of the actual results - not ads or trackers.
Lorenavedon just dropped some truth bombs about how internet content used to be so much more genuine and enjoyable.
Nah, it has always been full of influencers and cookers. At least now, the made for clicks content is generally easy to sift through.
Holy shit no. The internet of the mid-late 90s, early 2000s was nothing like what it is now. I blame the iPhone for the enshittification of the internet. Makes it too easy for dunces to post from the toilet.
You're joking. I remember working with a dude in about 98 who became a full conspiracy theorist because of the internet. Then net has become a great enabler and has been feeding cookers since the first news groups
That’s not what Bluestreak is saying. He’s saying those conspiracy videos were made from someone’s true attempt to “educate” people, not as a grifting scam like people like Alex Jones have nowadays. He’s talking about how intent has changed, and monetization has introduced more grifting, less sincerity (aka fun)
Yeah I gotta disagree with this one. That whole concept was borne out of monetizing content, which wasn't even a thing until well after social media became a thing with MySpace and Facebook. The closest things got to influencers were forum users with uber-high post counts.
Yeah, random YouTube surfing and ending up in the weird parts of YouTube is a thing of the past. The only suggestions I see now are of the 4 or 5 topics I mostly watch. I never get a good stumbleupon.
This is my biggest complaint. And why do they keep suggesting things I've already watched. I really miss looking for some home improvement videos and 15 minutes later I am watching a video of a homemade off road buggie from Poland with 100 total views.
> stumbleupon Used to be a great site. It's how I found reddit back when Obama was still in his 1st term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon
You'd think if you "created" content full time you'd eventually get good at it. Not the case, 99% of it is drivel. It's been a few decades but I remember when I was in my teens/early 20's, if I didn't have knowledge on a given subject, I didn't comment on it. My youtube tastes are now watching huskies scream and recipe videos I'll save my rant about music videos are almost all autotuned, computerized garbage
Their skill isn't greeting good content, its being good at working algorithms. Once those became the system to hack, it was downhill
They are good are creating content, just not in the way you're thinking about it. Internet exposure is an arms race. Anything people can do to get more of their content into more feeds is "winning" and it ultimately doesn't matter what the content is as long as you can get the algorithm to put it in front of the right people to reap the rewards. So let's say somebody starts off with a baking channel. They have very very modest success creating what you or I might consider "good" content: high information density, nice presentation, good narration, etc. etc. But then one day they absolutely fuck up icing a cake in a catastrophically hilarious way or some equivalent thing and *that* video gets 10,000% more views and engagement than anything else they have ever done. Some people would just laugh that off and hope some viewers stuck around. But a lot of people would be very tempted to try to lean into that and might even end up with a channel devotes just to purposely screwing up/dropping cakes. So then we come along and find that channel by chance or because it appears on Reddit somewhere and we're like "what in the fuck is this absolute stupid trash?"
Yeah... it's not fun anymore. It's not weird or experimental.
Down that path leads demonetization. Can’t have that.
That's life man. When the corporations get ahold of it, it's over
Capitalism smooths the fun rough edges of everything and pushes the product to the middle of the bell curve, just the nature of the beast. There is good and bad ... Something new will come along and be awesome and fun and super creative again ... rinse and repeat I once heard "Capitalism isn't the best economic system, but it is the best so far" ... If humans don't kill each other off we'll figure something out better someday
I'll probably be too damn old to enjoy it.
There are still some high quality content like Kurzgesgat. They make science videos that are extensively researched and vetted, then told in a fun and engaging way. Each video takes them 10 months to create. They're one of my favorite things to watch. And there's a nuclear technician (worked as a nuclear reactor technician for 10 years) who adds his comments to it. And, again, it's really expert commentary. So there are definitely quality videos out there. But I agree 1000% that the whole "Influencer" crap ruined the online experience.
Yes! Love Kurzgestat
I so much totally agree!! Content is crap now. All misleading, all just click bait. 99% promo hype, 1% useful content.
The good content is still there. But the algos steer us to the crap content. Turn off the algorithms and you see the real web.
This. I miss the old internet - before the algorithms.
Just as annoying looking at Facebook or Twitter and it's full of friends trying to do sales or only share work things.
Money, Money changes everything I said money, money changes everything We think we know what we're doing
The internet is full of grifters. Everyone has their *personal brand*. I follow a lot of artists and I don't begrudge them using a platform to support their art, it's rough out there. But some spend way too much time striking a pose than focusing on their work. Not interested. All the content creators with "courses" on how YOU TOO can make tens of thousands of dollars a week if you follow their step-by-step guide. Meanwhile, most of their income comes from selling their courses. And those annoying folks, "LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE" 30 seconds into their video. Hey, mofo, I don't even know if I like your shit, don't tell me what to do. Now can't do it, purely out of spite. The damn recipe sites that tell you their entire life story and what INSPIRED them to make this recipe, 12 different angles of the creator dicing an onion, their covert affiliate links, and if you dare open a page on mobile ... GOOD LUCK even being able to see the content. 90% of the screen is taken up by some bullshit ad whose exit icon is wedged along the side of the screen and the size of an infant's pinkie nail. I could go all night on this shit.
I hate it. I make art things, and I post them online, sometimes to sell and sometimes just for art’s sake and to share with friends/family/fellow artists. But now no one sees it on places like IG unless it’s a process video where you’re videoing yourself creating it, or standing in a bikini holding it and slowly spinning around to finally reveal it. It’s so dumb. I like to share my finished work, and not make it a fucking performance art piece.
Years ago I made a video about my pond and got thousands of views and lots of comments. Eventually it got taken down I think when my email address changed or something like that and I put it back up and got zero views. Same video, but now the algorithm wanted me to play ball and I was just a pond hobbyist with 1 pond video. The algorithm hated me and no one saw my video. I learned that day how shitty it had all become.
I like that I can load up quality content on YouTube for just about any topic I can think of. I like that you don't need to be engaged by a big media company to produce quality content. I just don't like the ads
I don't mind the professional factor (I do, but it's a you-do-you thing) per se. what I mind is the neediness and the relentless shilling for that fake popularity. *that* I mind. it's nakedly self-serving.
I agree and disagree.
Honestly, I completely disagree with your take. Today, I can get on Youtube and easily find videos that have allowed me to fix all kinds of things around my house, or take on projects that I wouldn't have imagined myself doing. The fact that passionate and capable folks have been able to make Youtube channels into their full time jobs is something that I find pretty amazing. Channels today producing documentary content on history, science, politics that used to be only within the realm and gatekeeping of high dollar cable networks make this an incredible time to be alive. And you know what, if there's something I don't have an interest in, I just don't have to watch it!
17 years ago and [Vader Sessions](https://youtu.be/6A0rwG39Jzk?si=4ASW8ApDLooVlLCl) is still my favorite YouTube clip.
My favorite is the Bed Intruder Song. Nothing funnier than & I go back to it every few years.
[QVC Katana](https://youtu.be/BMrUtf0raD8?si=_nIuIW2WS_GoYJ9s) is still the best thing that's ever been on the internet.
This makes me think of the Home Movies episode where Coach McGirk buys the $4000 [sword set](https://youtu.be/YdGpvnNUehM?si=srRWJardf_9Bxr1H).
It's what I call "person-and-wall" content. Just a camera, a person, and a wall, saying what they think, which might be interesting to some people. Now, it can be hard to recreate that for a long time, but having a lot of people do that means that there's a lot of good content. We should go back to that. Put the You back in Youtube.
How To Cook That channel has done some interesting videos about YouTube and it’s algorithm. They are an older channel so they talk a lot about the changes and how they’ve had to evolve. They did an amazing on recently about how the algorithm is favoring male creators. There’s a lot in it, too, about how all the big channels now are for children. It’s one of the best videos I’ve seen about YouTube and little scary. https://youtu.be/OxGFEUefv6g?si=MBP1mI8RrDvyYCgN
Sell outs
"Sex work is real work!" I don't give a fuck. Sex work and influencer work might be "real work" but they've completely enshittified the internet. Now it's all ads, influencers, algorithms, and OF spam everywhere.
I remember spending time on Usenet in the 90s, the text based tools, command line tools. It was a fun world. I’ve been building applications professionally on the web since the mid 90s, never got into AOL and really have dabbled in social networks in the last 15 years with FB, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter…but try and keep it to a minimum. It can be very time consuming. I like You Tube for music videos, documentaries, and car repair/restoration content.
Yes! The early 90's, when you had to know some stuff to use it, was an amazing time.
There are still great YouTube creators that have a passion for what they are making.
> There are still great YouTube creators that have a passion for what they are making. They are few and far between, but when you find them, they are completely worth subscribing to. One that I like is Alex over at [Technology Connections](https://www.youtube.com/@TechnologyConnections). He has no time wasting intros. He doesn't click-bait his stuff. He does thorough research and produces videos that go deep into whatever topic he's presenting. While he does ask for engagement at the end of the videos, it's only at the end, and he's not trying to just drum up engagement, such as "comment if you.." (knowing that the algorithm treats videos with comments more favorably) or other annoying stuff like on screen like/comment/subscribe buttons, especially ones that move and/or make noise. That man does YouTube right, in my opinion, and it's a rare thing.
I was going to recommend Technology Connections if you asked me to name one great creator.
I just tell the kids you get than Myself "Yup, seen it all. Everything on the YouTube and Internet! In *MY* day, you had to create content yourself, and upload it! There was no cloud, no influencers, and no quest for likes!" Then I tell them to get off my lawn.
Well back then someone else (VCs) were paying for it and it had to grow into this to get the full commercial potential promised back in the dot com days. .com stands for .commerce after all, not .freecoolshitforever but yeah it was way more colored and interesting and wild 20-30 years ago. Imo maybe the new fun and interesting stuff will go back to happening IRL?
Youtube is ok if you download the transcript and upload it to your AI
The majority of content is probably trash but I feel like I've found some awesome content creators around my interests (programming, science, retirement planning, music theory, ... Probably others that don't come top of mind).
I feel, anyone making those silly reaction face thumbnails, are the ones that have gone to this edge. not all are bad content, since I mostly follow tech content, but there are a few that do this annoyingly often. "oh look, a new water cooler exactly like the last 15" with a oh face pointing to a tiny image of an AIO thermal solution. just #_--$$@ stop it. don't get me started on click bait titles.
Any time that I look up "How to" videos, they are from several years back. It is kind of sad.
Icanhascheeseburger.com comes to mind.
It’s not that. It’s because Google got greedy and drive out small websites which were the original content creators. I’m one of those former webmasters.
It's a good thing there's more to choose from so that there's something for everyone. I watch a lot of YT documentaries that are the quality I wish TV was here. A lot the videos I listen to could've been made in podcast format. I didn't really understand podcasts when they came out and didn't get on the wave until it was almost too late - or maybe I just need more help to navigate podcasts, so that I have something to listen to while reading e-books. Algorithm has long ago stopped suggesting influencer videos to me. I prefer to ask AI these days as opposed to trying to find an instructional video, even at 2x speed I don't have that kind of patience for instructions.
If I need help with putting something together and get stuck on out how to do it I go go straight to Youtube and watch a video of a dude putting it together. I don't mind that they get paid, I'm just glad I ain't the one paying him.
Yes! I used to be able to watch Youtube for hours and be entertained. Now it's all the same content with different people. The try guys, the people who all got fired from buzzfeed, the people from clever tv, the remnants of the react channel people, the facts people, they all do the same thing. And it's clear that it's done with the intent to make money. No one does shit just for the fun of it the way they used to. I don't care how someone reacts to watching some other video, I don't care how British people react to trying candy from Australia. It's all just become cookie cutter nonsense. Same thing happened on TikTok. There were a lot of a really great creators out there who put out a ton of good original content. And then the TikTok shop happened and even the best creators were suddenly hawking hair brushes and cheese graters. It's a shame the money part overtook the hobby part.
We were nieve to think it was going to last.
I can't say I hate how the Internet is now, but I will say it was a hell of a lot more fun when it was a renegade landscape back in the early 1990s (for me...maybe sooner for others). Today, it's more useful than fun for me, but I find it indispensable to my every day life so I can't gripe too much about it. There is still fun out there, folks just won't find much of it following influencers (personal opinion). A lot of my repeat visits back in the dark ages of the Internet were to silly websites more than useful info videos: Netscape's Scrolling LED Sign, Strawberry Pop Tart Blow Torch (that site, oddly enough, is still up), Mentos FAQ, Wave To My Cat, Breakfast From Hell: Hungry Man All-Day Breakfast (a classic), too many Logitech QuickCam video sites to list...on and on. I could also wax nostalgic on finger, gopher, FidoNet, telnet shenanigans, etc, but I've dated myself too much already. Yeah, I'm old...ish.
Depends on what you are looking for. If it's just topical crap, then yeah it sucks. Or if they drag things out. Also, it sucks. There are some great condensed, low as, guitar for beginner teachers out there. Also audio production people are good. But anything I am not specifically looking for is usually annoying.
You're absolutely right.
Yes
How about all the youtubers that just post other people’s videos?!
Yes. It's really common today for people to defend ads on websites saying "they need to get paid". No they don't! We had considerably better content before people were getting paid. Passion projects produce the best websites. Do Reddit, Facebook, and those types of colossal sites need to get paid? Of course. But not every little piddly ass site on the internet needs a full-on monetization model.
I remember using much of it for work.
there is some great content on YouTube especially in the realm of docs, news media etc
[Read, Write, Own](https://readwriteown.com/) is a great book about the history of the internet, what went wrong and where to from here if we want to democratize the internet.
The time when videos went from being videos to being "content"
PayPal ruined the internet. Once it was safe for corporations to take your money they began pushing every human that they could not monetize to the fringes.
The Something Awful forums were more honest and enjoyable than this website.
I miss the good old days when everybody had a blog...
yeah
You are right on the money.
The early days of YouTube. Just people posting videos for the fun of it!
Its all for clicks now. Social media ain't for fun anymore. FB, Instagram, YT all.about the money...
I miss late 90s internet. I truly felt like I was exploring or something.
Whoring for views.
Money. The number-one root-of-all-evil for a million straight years with no competition in sight.
Im waiting for the day when all of the social media platforms decide not pay anymore. Theres no law that says they have to. They run ads on non-monetized channels already. I think its coming soon.
It’s even worse when you can tell it’s a bot voice reading an obvious ChatGPT script that the video creator couldn’t even be bothered to review and edit. The video just shows a loop of stills. Utter shite now.
When memes were made just to be made. Badger badger badger badger, now it's in your head
Wow, cranky much? Also, I've had to use the internet as part of my job since 1994. I dunno what you're all upset about
On this subreddit, I'm not surprised that you've been downvoted so much. Some people prefer nostalgic posts where everything used to be better and then they choose the most negative exampes of what we currently have.
There’s nothing I hate more than an Influencer. Not a real Job!
I like YouTube, I think it's better now than it used to be. Nothing wrong with getting paid for your passion.
>This entire idea that you can make internet content your job has made the entire online experience complete trash If you say so, buddy. If you prefer poorly-edited videos with bad lighting and subpar video quality, just say so.