Mr Beast and similar viral videos are hardly the outliers given that their traffic absolutely dwarfs the best educational videos. There is a lot of useful and interesting content on Youtube, but that's very much a niche use. The vast majority of watched hours are on content much closer to Mr Beast than learning how to code or a diy woodworking project.
This is not how YouTube, or people, or virality work though.
The fact there is some useful educational content is a byproduct of the machine of lucrative trash of the capitalist hellhole spiral, and the written word will always prevail comparatively. You can always bet on text. https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html
Also, as you likely know, YouTube is owned by Google so it’s very silly to say it’s “more important.”
It does make it net-bad because the educational content should exist without the trash, which is far more prevalent. It forces the positive stuff to comply with the trash algorithms that make them worse and also forces them to comply with the monopoly of one of the largest, most monolithic corporations in the world that can do whatever the fuck they want with the content. Of course it's not surprising! It's just shitty and needs to be different.
But the educational content DOESNT exist without the trash and you cannot make a case that it just would, that’s unlikely and impossible to prove.
“Net bad” means the world would be absolutely and inarguably better without YouTube. This is so outlandish, honestly; YouTube at its core is an information sharing platform and a lot of useful things have come out of it. Immense amounts even.
Disagree. The outliers don’t determine the value of the platform.
The videos of people creating, fixing, coding, diagnosing, doing every day random things - those are a gift to humanity.
Those visual demonstrations transcend language. Because of this, YouTube is more important than Google or any written word website.
Knowledge share is finally global.