Comradeship // Freechat

little me used to turn the tv on when home alone while playing on the computer so that he won't feel lonely. i think he knew something because this is how youtube is used now. just slap an hour long video and autoplay in the background, and bam. you tricked yourself. used to genuinely watch youtube for the videos to the point of remembering most of the amateurish junk from most of the world that i used to watch. la caida de edgar for instance. that kid is still doing good, i heard. nothing has changed... actually, it's changed but it rhymes. y'know.

i am guilty of doing this at times because the tv is no longer fun to watch but i use it for music as i have little to no storage

youtube is an entertainment platform first and foremost. movies but small and made by regular folk... even if now it's almost the opposite. it was still not good back in the day cause you couldn't put hour long videos or advanced captions or whatever but hey we got "luigi sucks at brawl" where luigi says his favorite president is george bush even if he never looked into american politics and thought his name was funny. that kind of shit. you can tell from my shitposts i've been influenced by so much shit online from the late 2000s

Two things:

Firstly, youtube videos are meant to entertain and drive engagement. They aren't there to teach you anything.

Secondly, how much "burnout" can be ascribed to already knowing most of this information? Or just getting bored? Most of these videos are not going in depth, like you said. They are there for people who don't want to spend time or money on learning something. A lot of them probably riff off of each other.

Along with comments from others, people learn in different ways. Video form may not be for you in this moment.

At some point, Youtube changed to where it was more beneficial to do videos that are 10+ minutes, I think cause of number of ad rolls or something. It's been a while since I heard it talked about, but I remember some creators bringing it up. Naturally, this is going to contribute to stuff where people pad out video length just to have more ads, but it doesn't actually have more substance to it than it would if it was shorter. That is probably some of what you're noticing. There's also the fact that youtube's ads are not the most reliable way of income, so some people do sponsorships within a video or have a product to sell. It's a very capitalist problem I suppose, but whatever the cause, I don't think you're imagining it if you find a lot of videos to be rather shallow trails toward ads and products.

In particular, those infotainment style videos with cutesy animations, reek of content mill to me. I'm sure there is some genuinely informative stuff, but it may not be as easy to find sometimes, as the flashy millions of views most popular videos.

One thing that I do with ASMR videos is I'll search for some kind of ASMR and I'll change the date range, so it's searching for like, video that came out within a month. Not quite the same kind of video as education, but the general idea here, is it allows me to find stuff the algorithm may not prioritize as popular but that is still enjoyable to watch.

If you want to learn something, you will do better if you learn systematically. Youtube will just show you whatever will keep you on and watching ads for the longest, but you need to figure out how to pick the most relevant source for learning about something, ideally conduct a prestudy session so you have a schema that you can fit the new knowledge into, create notes with some imagery and spatial relationships to help you conceptualize that schema and integrate the new information, and finally use spacing and interleaving to prevent yourself from forgetting what you learned. All this while staying on an appropriately difficult level of complexity of worked exercises and cognitive load. Most of the time Youtube is not good for any of this except maybe as an introduction.

Honestly, I even feel a bit embarrassed typing all this because I'm obviously burnt out on this stuff; during the height of my depression, it was how I kept my mind quiet. Now that may be wearing off, though my depression is not as bad as it used to be.

What say you all?

Pick a youtube video where you think you are learning something... and then write a bullet point essay on it by hand from the perspective of things you are interested in (or even just general critique), with further questions for research in the margins or in parantheses.

If you wanted to make a regular thing about this then get a blank/lined/square (squared is sometimes better for diagrams and what not) notebook, leave the first two pages blank for the contents section. Every page gets a number and you title the essays - write that title in the contents page with with its corresponding page number so you have a reference - and as you write your essay you can reference other essays you have done.

This will slow down how much youtube you watch, you will be more selective about what you watch, and you will find learning/retention accelerate. And hopefully get rid of the burn out feeling.

Then you can write essays on your essays (say a theme or a new idea or analysis you have picked from parts of other essays). And if you feel any of them are good enough then upload them to say substack or medium etc. Then critique those essays you have written, let's say in 6 months time.

With stock footage and videos, and even AI (or personally shoot videos/animate), you could turn the essays into youtube videos yourself.

Or you know... don't watch youtube :)