I spend a lot of time on YouTube. Google services have become an integral part of my life. If we go to the official website of the company and study what products it offers to its consumers, you might be surprised at how much has been developed by the guys at Google. And it will be really difficult for me to replace some of them with something from other companies.
Which YouTube service am I missing?
Not long ago, Google released a TikTok analog called Tangi. This application is intended for training videos lasting one minute, it seemed to me, of course, quite good, but so far in Russia, unfortunately, is not available. And you won't be able to use it in the near future. And that's all cool, but what about something more serious?
It's about YouTube. If we look at alternatives to YouTube, the only viable option is probably Vimeo is a high quality video publishing platform. It offers in-house tools for video editing, inserting various texts, and so on. This is a really good service, but let's be honest, there are simply no alternatives to YouTube on the market today when it comes to video hosting. I spend 1 to 2 hours a day watching videos on YouTube, and, as a rule, they relate to educational topics. Very often I try to find something related to programming, solving various problems with operating systems, I am interested in videos about evolution and science.
For example, not so long ago I tried to find a video on how to install Hackintosh on a Windows – laptop, also just yesterday I watched a video on algorithms and graph theory, which is quite useful and interesting, it is also very useful to watch videos, related to smartphones. They help to learn something new about the devices, and this is important – it is important for me to get something new, to learn something new through YouTube, because sometimes it is much easier to watch a video than to try to understand how a particular program works or application based on its documentation.
We need YouTube Education!
Or, if we are talking about programming, it’s much easier to watch a video than trying to do something yourself using the official documentation of a particular library. Although, of course, it all depends on how well the documentation is made, and, probably, in this case, reading various articles on the Internet – including on Medium – would be a good option, but this is still not the easiest way and not the only one in the issue of obtaining new knowledge.
YouTube is a unique platform in this regard, but there is one big problem – it's hard for me to control myself and not be distracted by other videos that come across in the recommendations. I love to look through the recommendations, and it is difficult to refuse this activity for one simple reason – very often there are training videos there that would be useful. Meanwhile, sometimes on YouTube I watch various entertaining videos to somehow relax. And the problem is that YouTube does not differentiate educational content from entertainment in any way.
Not so long ago, Google released YouTube Music. I wrote about it not so long ago and called the service the best of its kind. He works for YouTube video hosting facilities. I got the idea that Google still needs to release an app – a separate service – for learning from YouTube videos. You can come up with absolutely any name for it, it does not matter. It could be YouTube Education or something similar to YouTube Kids. This would allow me – as a user – to differentiate entertainment content from educational content.
The director of i10.ru Mikhail Korolev recently shared an interesting thought in our Telegram chat. He stated that he stopped using YouTube simply because the service offers him videos that distract him from his work and do not allow him to study. He also noted that YouTube has a lot of educational content, but in the meantime, the number of other videos that YouTube shoves on the home screen and in the recommendation makes users lose concentration.
I cannot but agree with this, which is why we just need a separate service for training videos. The topics can be completely different, but the main point should be precisely that these videos allow people to learn quickly, without being distracted by unnecessary content published by popular bloggers or anyone else. I wonder what you think about this. Share your opinion in the comments.