Comment by imiric
2 years ago
> But making a video takes time and effort, so has a much higher barrier to use as a click farm.
> The mainstream channels aren't all that useful, but there's a ton of "old web" style videos (some even recent) passionately providing details for almost anything you'd think to search. And they're a gold mine.
This won't be the case for long. YT is already starting to be polluted with spam and AI generated content, which will get more and more common. The same thing that happened to the web in text form, will happen to videos.
I think the only solutions are using allowlists for specific domains, and ironically enough more AI to filter specific results. Or just straight up LLMs instead of web search, assuming they're not trained on spam data themselves.
Yeah. I was recently looking for videos comparing two smartphones and among top ranked videos there were videos that just show the phones side by side and the video consists of showing specs side by side and videos that just have LLM-generated text, added to the video with TTS.
One critical difference is the date attached to youtube videos. It's easy to verify that a video was made before this tech was available, but you can't do that with websites, or search engine result pages.
It does limit utility for more modern needs, unfortunately.
Note that the problem of filtering bad data out of learning material isn’t inherently easier than filtering same out of search results.