David Heinemeier Hansson

DHH reflects on YouTube's role as a reliable archive for technical content, contrasting it with Google's tendency to shut down other services. He highlights how YouTube has become his primary learning platform through tech creators and showcases his own channel featuring historical Rails content from 2006-2009. The post argues that YouTube deserves recognition as an international treasure for preserving educational content, despite broader criticisms of Google's business practices.

YouTube has earned its crown

I’ll stay “mixed” on YouTube… It is not safe for kids. But, as a responsible parent, my kids are not ever on YT, nor do they have devices that can access it whenever they want.

Not sure about technical content, however… I have the opposite experience when it comes to any other topic, even the most benign one.
Sometimes, even videos, which stayed for like 13 years straight - which should be an obvious keeper, right? - get taken down a week to a month after I’ve watched them.
My conspiracy theory about them tracking my watching behaviour and shutting down videos based on it grows and grows since years. :)

It would and it should if Google actually took care of it and didn’t transform it into a propaganda platform. All those value videos mostly do still exist, but they exist right next to endless waves of brainwash slop and to be quite honest if it has any opinion in it at all that Google’s current C-Suite thinks is wrongthink they will stealthily make people not find it.