Youtube Just Ate Tv. It's Only Getting Started

I have quite a bit of experience as an auto mechanic, and love using youtube to find footage of something I'm considering doing or some item I'm considering buying. Just the effort+time savings alone is a game changer. Previously I would download FSMs for something I was considering acquiring to see what it's really like to work on / maintain / something of the internals, to minimize risk of buyer's remorse.

However, most the videos I find of people DIYing things are utter trash when it comes to actual guidance. The readily available footage of internals and failure modes is super valuable, but most these videos will do more harm than good when actually listened to. It's a whole lot of the blind leading the deaf. And the youtubers generally speak authoritatively about things they're clearly doing incorrectly to anyone experienced.

We had the same problem in the web forums era, but the conveniently accessible instructional video format strikes me as far more problematic. At least in the web forums it was entirely a conversational text format, so you were already in the context of reading comments, and the discussion would usually call out idiots immediately front and center. In the youtube videos, especially viewed on mobile, the comments are something you must seek out past the ads, must mode switch from watching tv to reading something, and are usually filled with morons anyways.

Expect a full-on slop tsunami, with people running bots that first generate half facts and outright hallucinations from Gemini, and then generate a visual tutorial for it to post to YouTube.

"For the DIYer, a tutorial on strengthening beams. Step 1: rub glue on them."

'Ok lets install these parts from 123 parts'

I hate it. I refuse to volunteer to be subtly (or not so subtly) manipulated by Youtubers.

All the music production people are suddenly revealing tools they use, that oh wow, I'm so lucky, are going on sale for black friday. Weird that I've never seen them use these 'goto' tools ever before on their channels. Hmmm.

SmartTube can seamlessly delete that commercial?

I was pleasantly surprised YouTube came out with a first party tool to skip sponcon.

> https://dataconomy.com/2025/07/30/youtubes-ai-powered-jump-a...

Sponsorblock takes care of >95% of those.

The common right-wing conspiracy theories in the US are, like, one or two hops and skips away from "jews are running the world and we need to kill them".

Guys, why does everything come back to something hitler-y? Can we stop that please?

And it is indeed a business layer too. The people making the channel gets paid for their trouble per views. Each channel is a little brand with their own idea of what kind of content they will give to the viewers and in what shape and what kind of quality.

I’m sure what you describe is different from this in some way, but it is weird reading that you wish youtube had channels without mentioning that it already has them.

> because I lost so much time finding great content sometimes that it’s sad.

Idk if you are pickier than me, or have even more niche tastes than I do, because in my experience youtube is full of great content.

That's an oxymoron if you can't have a local copy

I paid many movies on iTunes, and there's no way to access that content anymore, certaily not from my Linux (main) machines.

Also, people who "bought" 1984 on Amazon only to see it disappear from their Kindle will not have been amused.

Nobody likes to have things they spend money on cluttered across 20+ services with changing subscription fees and licensing terms. It's a mess.

All my devices run Linux and apparently there is no amount of money that will let me stream paid content above 480p.

There's no reason Netflix and Hulu couldn't both have ALL media available. Then they could actually compete on features and capabilities, not on media catalog.

But the content issue is just so dumb (and I’m not blaming Netflix).

I suppose next we will have a new streaming service for each film and show.

And even if you could get all the video itself, it's not guaranteed you'd get the right video+audio+subtitles combination that you want, as everything seems to be negotiated separately.

So while one service could offer the right audio and the right video but not the subtitles you want, another service could have the right video and the right subtitles but instead be dubbed without original audio.

It became a whole mess for people and eventually it was again simpler to just resort to piracy for the even the slightly technical consumers.

Do you actually need everything, everywhere, all at once?

Do one at a time and then switch after you run out of shows or if another service has a "must-watch".

This was problematic too. Centralisation is never good in the long-term. Surely, we would have learned that from traditional media, AWS outages or autocratic structures. Humanity as so much to learn still

Unrelated, but fun example as South Park is probably the only show on TV that also let people watch the entire show (-latest seasons it seems) for free online! https://www.southparkstudios.com/seasons/south-park

Been like that (in many places) for many many years at this point too :)

Plex is a pretty light-weight system as long as transcoding is avoided or it has hardware transcoding available to use.

And wrangling Usenet is a fairly simple affair on vaguely modern PC hardware, too.

So all of that stuff runs in the background on the same desktop Linux box that I also use for everything else.

Am I doing it wrong?

For people not in the know, Linehan is nowadays a very outspoken voice against "transgenderism", specifically in regards to trans women, and is quite close to the J.K. Rowling sphere of influence. He seems to have given up a lot to end up where he's now.

Now with IT Crowd, it's fascinating that there are the typical early 2000s trans jokes, what with the trans woman getting into a relationship with Douglas because he misheard her saying "I used to be a man", for "I used to be from Iran", after which Douglas and the trans woman get into a fist fight together. This is the episode "The Speech" that the parent is referring to. It's pulled from circulations over allegations of transphobia, but really this wasn't at all abnormal for the time, and there were lots of shows with jokes that, although maybe less physical, were far more cruel to trans women (trans men of course, never really coming up at all, but that's another story). I remember a tweet that called out Linehan for this episode at the time, and he apologized with genuine understanding, no cruelty behind it. That's not something I could ever imagine him doing now. It's a shame in my opinion, I think IT Crowd is one of the better comedy shows of it's time and I don't know if he'll be able to write it now as he used to, as with any deeply held political belief it does seep into the work itself, sometimes making it better, sometimes ruining it, though I will probably not watch anything Linehan will create in the future, sadly.

https://calisphere.org/clip/500x500/26157/0c7951eaf2251821c1...

I watch all kinds of great stuff on youtube that I enjoy, over a pretty broad range that starts with building drag racing cars and ends with videos of quietly walking through Japanese cities at night.

Somewhere in between those points lies more-technical presenters with a knack for cleanly delivering the best technical explanations they know how to make -- people like Geerling, Lovett, Wendell, Hillhouse, Jones, and Black.

I learn a ton from these people, and I was first introduced to their youtube channels by The Algorithm.

Meanwhile: I never, ever get weird MAGA spam or political hate on YouTube -- and I never have.

Through years of mostly very passive training, the algorithm treats me pretty well, actually.

A browse through my youtube recommendations mostly shows a bunch of engineering, machining, and car topics. Stuff that is replete with general pleasantness, and that is devoid of politics.

Even the clickbait is dialed down nearly to zero.

And maybe that makes sense, for me, since nobody but me has ever used my youtube account for anything -- and therefore, nobody has ever had an opportunity to piss in my well.

I don't understand the goal of your post. What is the solution you're proposing for those things? That they don't use anonymization techniques? They kick out the other people from their home?

The OP is saying they don't watch that kind of content and they mark the videos as "not interested" and Youtube is still pushing the content. The onus is on Youtube to stop. Presumably OP is logged in, or if they're not, then Youtube still uses browser fingerprinting techniques. It seems simple on Youtube's side to fix the problem. Blaming the OP here doesn't make sense.

Personally drives me off the platform, but hard since my subs are so unique and great.

They did not ban it outright, so you cannot complain or rigorously prove their bias, but they algorithmically suppress dissenting content.