youtube algorithm

A short comedic complaint by ProZD about YouTube search failing to surface his own video even when searching its exact title. It illustrates how poor search results have become.

A Technology Connections video essay arguing that algorithmic feeds make people passive about finding content, leading to complacency in how they seek information. It urges people to actively choose what they consume.

Tom Scott's long explainer on YouTube's copyright system, Content ID and the DMCA. He argues the platform's system is a workaround for a broader copyright system that does not fit the modern world.

Tom Nicholas critiques Veritasium's sponsored video on driverless cars, using it to examine YouTube sponsorships, science-channel credibility and how statistics and misinformation can be used in branded content.

A guide to using YouTube's Content ID by claiming your own videos through a distributor, so the claims share revenue with the creator and monetize re-uploads. It credits another creator who pioneered the method.

Veritasium explains why clickbait titles and thumbnails work, how he tests them, and why educational creators feel pushed to use them. He classifies types of clickbait and discusses the trade-offs.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.

AlphaPhoenix uses Monte Carlo simulation and annealing-style methods to draw North Carolina congressional district maps, both gerrymandered and fair. He focuses on the fascinating computational problem rather than the politics.

Peter Shor tells the story of how he discovered Shor's Algorithm, from his early mathematics days to the quantum factoring breakthrough. It was recorded at MIT at the Physics of Computation conference.

Linus Tech Tips breaks down the company's income streams, including sponsors, YouTube Premium, merch and other products. It gives percentages for each revenue source.

Chess YouTuber agadmator reports that YouTube took down his podcast with Hikaru Nakamura as harmful or dangerous content. It was later restored.

Music YouTuber Rick Beato describes confronting the people behind copyright blocks on one of his videos. The video is a rant about how takedowns and demonetization hit music education channels.

Highlight clip from the 2021 Free Expression Awards honoring YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. The video became notable for its overwhelmingly negative like/dislike ratio.

Dan Olson's 76-minute essay on flat earth belief, built around a hike to a lake to test earth's curvature. It examines the community, how YouTube promoted it, and how it connects to wider conspiracy thinking and QAnon.

Reducible's visual walkthrough of the Fast Fourier Transform, motivated by polynomial multiplication. It shows how the FFT's key ideas can be discovered by asking the right questions.

Linus Tech Tips gives its 2020 breakdown of how the company earns money, including ads, sponsors, merch and affiliate links. It includes a pie chart of revenue sources.

A nearly four-hour video essay by hbomberguy on plagiarism on YouTube, centered on specific creators who copied other people's work. It examines what plagiarism is and how it went unaddressed.

Tom Scott examines why YouTubers must declare paid endorsements while TV, film and other media face no such rule, comparing regulations in the UK and US.

A walkthrough of the Quake III fast inverse square root, explaining where the constant 0x5f3759df comes from. It covers IEEE 754 floats, the bit hack that approximates a logarithm, and a Newton's method refinement.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG explains why people feel unmotivated and unable to start tasks after hours of YouTube or similar distractions. He frames it as a result of how social media is designed to capture attention, and says not to blame yourself.

Veritasium tells the story of the Fast Fourier Transform, from its use in detecting nuclear tests to Cold War politics, and how it could have changed the arms race. It includes a short, intuitive explanation of what the Fourier transform does.

An update from the Strange Parts YouTuber on his recovery from a brain injury caused by a metal pipe while filming, and his plans for the channel.

William Osman describes helping build parts of the MrBeast Squid Game event, including hacking together hundreds of wifi-controlled blood packs in about three weeks. He covers the chaos and near-failures along the way.

Hank Green, a TikTok creator with millions of followers, explains why he thinks TikTok underpays creators. He compares its fixed-pot creator fund with YouTube's revenue sharing.

Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster. He walks through the techniques contributors used.

A video debunking popular primitive-building YouTube channels, arguing that their digging, concrete and construction are staged. It uses the Primitive Technology channel as a baseline for what is plausible in a natural setting.

Adam Neely explains that Warner Music claimed his video, which defended their copyright in a lawsuit, over a work whose copyright they had lost. He calls it an ironic and absurd claim, and the claim was later released.

Scam-baiter Jim Browning explains how he fell for a phishing email and ended up deleting his own YouTube channel. He walks through the circumstances and prior incidents that made the scam convincing.

Adam Neely interviews Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin about their project to generate and copyright every possible melody as MIDI. The video explains their reasoning and how it bears on music copyright lawsuits.

MegaLag investigates PayPal's Honey browser extension, showing how it swaps affiliate attribution and was promoted by large YouTube influencers. It includes technical demonstrations of the affiliate tag replacement in browser dev tools.

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

The Hated One argues that Kurzgesagt acts as a propaganda vehicle for its billionaire-linked sponsors, citing funding it received. The video prompted a response from Kurzgesagt.

PewDiePie describes switching to Linux and encourages viewers to do the same. It is a casual, enthusiastic video aimed at a mainstream audience.

Lawyer and musician Damien Riehl argues that music is math with a finite number of melodies, and describes how he and programmer Noah Rubin generated every possible melody and released them under CC0 to avoid accidental infringement claims.

Professor Dave critiques science communicator Sabine Hossenfelder, arguing that her content has drifted toward anti-establishment rhetoric. He frames it as commentary rather than a hit piece.

A DevOps YouTuber tests GitHub Copilot on a range of Leetcode problems and finds it solves most immediately, with a few needing tweaks and some far off. He concludes it would outperform him in a FAANG-style interview.

A 54-minute video by a former MrBeast worker alleging that MrBeast's operation is fraudulent, including claims that some contests are staged or manipulated.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

Sebastian Lague explores an ant-inspired algorithm and simulates ant and slime mold behavior, using compute shaders. Source code for both simulations is available.

Polylog explains how algorithms can be turned into circuits and encoded as satisfiability problems, which lets you effectively run them backwards. It uses this to motivate breaking RSA, general reductions to SAT, and what P vs NP is really asking.