YouTube Needs Editors ASAP

YouTube is a treasure trove of entertainment, clips, news items, oddities, bloopers and—above all—informative do-it-yourself videos. Do you want to change a windshield wiper blade on a 1953 Borgward? There is a video for that. In fact, there are probably 10 videos for that. Which is exactly the problem.

Whatever it is you want to do, there are numerous videos explaining how to do it. Some are professionals promoting services, some are amateurs showing off their skills, but far too many are boneheads who have no clue what they are doing.

I was curious how many tutorials explained how to properly cook real basmati rice. The proper way was perfected in Iran, where they eat this rice and package a variety of basmati rices.

Let's start with the premise that basmati rice is dirty and needs a minimum of five rinses. In the case of the worst basmati, it may need 10. If you do not rinse it, it literally smells bad. So at least half of the experts cooking basmati fail to rinse and then proceed to cook it like Chinese rice. Unlike Chinese, basmati is a boiled rice that is cooked in copious amounts of water then drained.

I did not find one adequate tutorial I could send to someone wanting to see how it is done. I noticed a trend of more and more bad recipes accumulating over time. This is true for all how-to videos.

If a video exists already to instruct you how to swap out a car headlight or refinish a cabinet, then why are others duplicating the process and posting another? People don't bother to check if the videos are already posted and create ridiculously inadequate duplicates that clog YouTube with junk.

It's getting harder and harder to find definitive advice. I've been unable to find videos I know exist as they get lost under a pile of dreck videos.

The same can be said for the internet at leart, which becomes less and less useful as it gets clogged with junk. I've moaned about review sites that tend to be fronts for e-commerce sites,but since this phenomenon has crept onto YouTube, something needs to be done to stop it. I propose something that's a mix between the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and Twitter's "verified" badges.

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This means spending some of the billions of dollars of profits Google sees every year and putting together a politburo, for want of a better term, of experts who get paid to watch and approve videos insofar as their content is concerned. Approved videos should be given a special status for search results, so if I want to know about deboning a chicken I can quickly find the videos that show me the best way to do it and don't have to sit through a video of a teenager doing it with a pocket knife.

Unlike the fake news initiative at Facebook, this would highlight what the experts like and wouldn't remove anything. The junk can stay as alternatives, easily ignored.