Backward prognosticators
When a new communication technology appears, the Science Experts and Social Prognosticators always gravely rumble: This new medium will be Educational and Cultural. It will Serve The Public Interest.

They're always wrong. At the start each new medium does carry some Heavy Content, some Great Philosophy or Great Classics, but each new medium really gets moving with Unseemly Hoi-Polloi. Sports and Porn.

An odd thing has happened, gradually and quietly, in the last two years or so.

Television, in the form of VHF broadcasting, was supposed to be The Conveyor Of Classrooms, The Library Of The Air. As usual it got moving with pro wrestling and soap operas.

But now Youtube, which explicitly and openly began as porn, has ACTUALLY become The Conveyor Of Classrooms, The Library Of The Air.

When I want classical music, I find it on Youtube. Not just the famous stuff; I learn more every day about obscure composers of equal quality with Bach and Mozart. The public library NEVER had these works.

When I want to know HOW to do something, I find it on Youtube, not through Google or books.

Two examples in the last few days:

(1) My computer was being monopolized by Windows Update. Five or six times a day, it was spending a half hour doing something that used half the CPU, and I couldn't get my own stuff done. This made no sense because I had turned off the ALLEGED choice of auto-update in the Control Panel. I never accept any of the updates because they're more harm than good. AVG takes care of my virus security without using up the computer, and each actual Win update breaks my existing programs. So why was Windows churning my disk half the time when I wasn't "asking" it to? Google found no useful answers in text-based sites about Windows.

The answer appeared in a short Youtube how-to. Windows Update is wasting hours each day checking and re-organizing the parts of Windows that would be updated if I chose to update, even though I never choose to update. Turning off auto update isn't enough; you need to stop the update service itself. Presto! Computer is all mine again. This howto didn't really require video; it could have been written in three lines of text; but the text-based forums are monopolized by tech-tyrants whose job is to punish unfortunate questioners, not to answer questions.

(2) With windy season resuming**, I'm checking my power-outage preparedness. I bought a Coleman lantern 15 years ago, along with the stove. The stove has served beautifully, but I hadn't used the lantern because I couldn't figure out how to "pre-burn" the mantles. Tried it when I first bought it, did something wrong that burned up the mantles entirely. Bought new mantles but never got around to trying the process again.

Now that we have The Library Of The Air, is there a video howto? Yup. In this case the video was truly needed because the process is tricky. You have to hold and move the match properly. Followed the video, and it worked. Now I've got a good source of light and heat.

Archive.org intended to become the Library Of The Air but failed for a simple reason. No librarians. No card catalogue. Items are posted with a wild variety of keywords and rarely with meaningful titles. Keywords are rarely appropriate. Either the OP's peculiar trademark keys or misspelled or pointlessly general like "audio". Nobody gathers up the individual postings into groups, nobody adds usable keywords. Youtube's algorithm does all the librarian things automatically, and usually gets close enough.

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** Footnote on resumption of windy season: One of the commenters on the Spokane-News facebook page, the ONLY source of LOCAL news, said it perfectly.

Super windy by Audubon park! Makes me so nervous. Wind storm ptsd.

ON. THE. DOT. Two big disasters in the last two years, with major power outages both times, left a lot of people stunned and ... winded. Hundreds of houses are still waiting for repairs, and people are running on emotional empty.
  ¶ 5:02 PM