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Comment by ccppurcell | Hacker News Reader

It's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I don't know what the right metaphor is. Throwing the scrap of edible meat out with the ton of rotten flesh? YouTube has got really bad in recent years. There are channels deliberately trying to get through to kids with horrific content. And of course the tobacco, gambling and sugar industries trying to turn our kids into addicts. They are often only one or two clicks away from extremely inappropriate content.

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This is probably why I havent seen YouTube as being a big issue. The algorithm on my account is so tightened up that non of that stuff bleeds through. So while I don't see the issues directly it is because they are kept away from me.

I do get the very occastionally glimpse when I have to log in fresh and the recommendations on the front page are not great.

This whole situation leaves me very torn. Great arguments on both sides. I just hope it isnt a trogan horse to online digital IDs being linked to all content access.

That edible meat is close to being the only edible thing around though. Can you really name anything on the level of 3Blue1Brown available for free?

Hopefully this forces Youtube to set up a limited educational version that the Australian government would be ok with.

Most (all?) top universities have free educational content, often including entire courses, available. For instance here [1] is MIT's open courseware site where you can download all the required media, including lecture video/notes/problem sets/exams/etc, for courses - completely for free.

Things like this are generally going to be orders of magnitude better than any YouTube video.

[1] - https://ocw.mit.edu/

Sadly I disagree. Those resources are great but they don't come close to the visualization work 3Blue1Brown makes. Many subjects only clicked for me after watching his videos.

1. Welch Labs (Complex Numbers, AI)

2. Mathologer (Various maths-related theorems and properties)

3. Simon Roper, Colin Gorrie (Old English)

4. Jackson Crawford (Norse)

5. Doctor Mix (Synthesizers; Recreating classic songs)

6. Numberphile / Computerphile / Sixty Symbols / etc.

7. NativLang

8. Artifexian, Biblaridion, etc. -- ConLang and Speculative Biology, but also cover linguistic, geographical, and biological topics where relevant

Besides content harmful to kids, there's a ton that's harmful to just about any human psyche from a social or personal perspective. I wasn't aware of how bad it was until I recently browsed Youtube.com from an incognito window and saw the default experience- it's rage bait, misinformation, and just straight mental junk food. My logged-in experience is nothing like that, thankfully, but I can't imagine throwing a kid into a fresh YouTube account and them needing to pare that down (or even having the critical thinking skills to do so).

+100 here. I think everyone should try this exercise– browse outside your algorithm. It's a sea of garbage to sort through.

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