Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date

Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727

Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video or the channel, and the algorithm doesn't recommend it

> some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.

I've seen that one!

"Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources."

The content is one of humani .... oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts.

Is there not a better place for human creativity than ... Google? Should my TV license fee fund Google?

Fuck off (hyperbolically)!

It was in pre-tiktok world(push to regular content update) & before the purge. A lot of content is now gone. Its a great resource but very loosely coupled with humanity/human knowledge (and arguably a pretty poor resource for it, both theoretically (linear information with contant velocity such as video) and practically (the content just isn't there on youtube, search is truncated etc.)).

> I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.

Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.

Quite a lot of stuff is on iPlayer. But as always, licensing is the killer.

(Not to mention reputational risk, which is why so many episodes of Top Of The Pops are hidden)

Lowkey one the best things about LLMs, finally we have truly indexed YouTube which made up a massive amount of knowledge consumable and searchable in text format. I hate watching YouTube videos but like the information they provide between Youtube’s AI feature and Perplexitiy etc. Video indexing, it’s been a life saver.