YouTube has been a huge benefit to humanity, helping bring people together and helping billions of do-it-yourself-ers learn from each others mistakes and make life better for everyone along the way. But just like TV being sold as a teaching tool bringing news and information into every home being taken over by 200 channels of sports and “reality” programming, YouTube has fallen far and fast…. and made a butt-load of money in the process. As such, they have negative incentive to improve their product and every incentive to get worse.
- While YouTube still has an impressively huge content library of useful stuff, it is overwhelmingly dominated by crap. Crap, I say. At this point, Everyone in Europe, Asia, and Africa should be banned from posting to YouTube. They are filling up the servers with absolute trash content. you know what I’m talking about:
- The videos that have no narration, just a euro-pop soundtrack and a collection of other people’s content, clipped from You-Tube without attribution and repackaged to farm free click income. There are Billions of these. The problem is that there are now so many that it becomes harder and harder to find the video that you really want to see because the trash content takes up all the ad-generating revenue “suggestions” on the search results.
- Anything that uses the words, “…On a new level”.
- Anything that uses a thumbnail that is in no way related to the video, but it’s really what you wanted to see.
Anything that uses a photoshopped thumbnail.
Hyper injecting ads. It used to be maybe one ad at the beginning, now there is one every 4 minutes. And it’s not as if they are even playing the full add. They will randomly cut off their own ads in the middle of dialog and switch to a different ad. Depending on the money they generate, some ads don’t let you “skip ad”.
Inappropriate search content: Country of origin. I am an English speaking American. When I want to see good ideas for wiring my hot tub, I don’t want to see someone wiring according to European codes. I would LOVE to have a search option that permanently excludes all content from outside the lower 48 states. ALL of it.
Random playback speeds. For no reason I can observe, some videos will initiate at a 2x playback speed.
All fake, trash content that makes the internet less useful, less entertaining, and more of a Pain in the back.
genericviews.wordpress.com 
The only way it works, imo, is to find someone who has lots of useful content in the area you are interested in, then subscribe. Unfortunately this doesn’t help for a one off project like wiring a hot-tub, only for an ongoing hobby or major restoration and repair.
Otherwise couldn’t agree more. The ad thing is driving me crazy especially since they seem to have programmed in different volume levels for their advertising as compared to uploaded content.
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Thanks for commenting
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There’s actually a fair bit of good content from Europe – Maker vids (projects and tools), historical and geographical curiosities, Novosibirsk rednecks bodging cars, and so on.
There’s also a vast amount of trash from everywhere, and it somehow ends up turning up in all the recommendation lists. Apparently there are Asian content farms churning out short, nonsensical videos (often on craft & cooking topics) that turn up on multiple channels (all of which have the same owners) with the titles changed and gather lots of views and likes. (If memory serves, some of these have a distinct pædogrooming vibe alongside the clickbaitiness.)
The recommendation algorithms lately seem to be putting a lot of trash in my feed, but at least it’s not the Asian-content-farm trash. Yet.
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Thanks for commenting. Im willing to lose Europe to shut off asia
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