Hot Take: Youtube is terrible. It's a time sink that's filled with billions of videos that take 15-20 minutes to talk about a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time. Text is skimmable and easily absorbable, Video is not.

> ... a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time

It's even worse sometimes, googling some "how to" queries returns links to yt-videos. Even if the video is 5 minutes, it's a waste of time, because I'm usually in the middle of an ongoing process when dozens variants are evaluated and an average dedicated time for a single one is much shorter.

Transcripts sometimes help. But not the native (no diarization as long as I remember). An example, Lex Fridman podcast is a good source of anecdata from famous science/tech/non-tech people and provides good transcripts on the site (but only starting some point in the past). For transcripts before this point v1.transcript.lol covered many, but amongst other glitches no names for diarization (Speaker 1/ Speaker 2).

Out of the box, I agree. I've got my feed well-curated at this point such that I get very little of that type of garbage pushed my way. I recently viewed the YouTube main page in an incognito window and, good lord, the default experience is an absolute cesspool of AI-generated nonsense, ragebait, and straight-up spam.

I'm not sure it's a hot take. I don't learn as easily from video as I do from text, but I seem to have curated my video recommendations to videos that I do like to watch as 'infotainment'.

e.g, Veritasium is a channel I quite like for their longer 'mini-documentary' like videos. And then there are just entertainment channels like Linus Tech Tips.

Not _everything_ has to be micro-optimized in my life, so I don't mind occasionally just sitting in the sofa watching a video that could have been a 3 minute blog :)