This is only me describing my personal taste, but:

Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.

I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you're saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.

Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.

To me YouTube is an untrustworthy platform owned by one of the worse mega corps. But also I just don't enjoy video as a medium

the more pressing thing is the AI propaganda thats being posted as well, all those anti-woke videos with cut scenes, plus the "pro-hypermasculinity/toxic masculinity shorts too), complaining women for not going for certain kinds of men.

plus there are ton of those bizarre animals in distress videos as well, its strange asf.

Yes and old people. I work with a guy who is 66 years old and I’ve seen him on multiple occasions watching YT videos of girls dancing that is AI.

They started to auto translate comments based on your one(!) language setting, completely destroying nuance in the process. Oh, you're multilingual? TOO BAD! A lot of the translations don't even make sense. It's just word salad a lot of the time and they don't even give you an option to see the original comment, title or video description! And of course there is no way to give Youtube feedback about it. They're cooked. Their service is shit and the platform is suffocating from slop in more ways than I ever imagined. Like, I knew it would be bad but you even get bombarded with it when users aren't even involved.

You were watching an AI video of him watching YT videos of girls dancing? Talk about AI-ception!

Yeah, I don't think YouTube believes I can speak both English and polish, because it translates titles into polish and completely ruins them, I've seen some that are so nonsensical I had to open the video in a browser (on my phone) to see what it means

My mind has been AI blown!…

This is only me describing my personal taste, but:

Almost all video essays and podcasts I would rather just read. It takes half the time. Include pictures, diagrams, and animations if needed. But I can read much faster and retain much better reading than listening to someone talk. Listening at double speed is faster, but can be uncomfortable.

I can imagine some value in some other niches, like you're saying, but the amount of slop and trash out there is too high for me, and the companies selling it are the worst.

Every time I see some parasocial YouTuber making That Face I just get irritated.

I don't have facebook or anything like that, so i don't really see a lot of this slop. One day i thought: so okay, there is more social medias out there than facebook, twitter instagram or whatever, they are just not well known. I downloaded one, and looked at what people post there. The amount of AI slop was unbearable. They weren't boomers, but post the most obvious AI shit of like a kid in the desert of some african country making a horse out of coke can. The caption is then something inspiring like: you don't need money to make art or whatever. This shit is only getting worse

I don't have facebook or anything like that, so i don't really see a lot of this slop. One day i thought: so okay, there is more social medias out there than facebook, twitter instagram or whatever, they are just not well known. I downloaded one, and looked at what people post there. The amount of AI slop was unbearable. They weren't boomers, but post the most obvious AI shit of like a kid in the desert of some african country making a horse out of coke can. The caption is then something inspiring like: you don't need money to make art or whatever. This shit is only getting worse

I instantly skip anything AI that attempts legitimacy. I’m irritated at the attempt to grab my attention with complete fakery.

I do occasionally watch some of the disturbing fever-dream clips simply because they are hallucinatory and seem to flow the way a human mind might grasp facets of something and amplify or distort the flow.

I am convinced Youtube and many other platforms are dying right now because instead of protecting their assets, they double down on AI slop that nobody cares about. Of course traffic will keep increasing first but that's mostly from bot accounts spamming garbage and not actual users consuming content and ads. Server cost will explode while ad revenue will shrink. The corporations behind it have vast resources and will take down the Internet with them but their end is slowly approaching.

theres some that are even more bizarre, like certain animals in distress with some kind of unnatural wound, you see all these wierd critters come out of it for no reason.

Don't know why you'd get a downvote for personal preference. I would argue that a lot of the content I watch doesn't have a suitable book form, so even if I did prefer that method of osmosis, I'd be out of luck.

Got a recommendation for a book (or audiobook) for a nerd like me? I'd describe myself but the internet already knows too much so.... Conservation and technology (new or ancient)

Is that a fair ask?

Yeah I don't know about the down votes. I tried to be clear I was talking about a preference and personal experience, but I guess some people took offense.

The last non fiction book I read that was really interesting was "The Ghost Map". It's about when people figured out Cholera. That's kind of technology adjacent.