I feel the same about TED

Have I just been doing it wrong? are there any decent presentations out there?

They spread because they make you feel smart. Books don’t make you feel smart as quickly or as easily. People are very bad at estimating how much they learn from a particular source… instead, when you ask someone “How much did you learn from watching a TED talk?” They answer the question as if you had asked, “How good did you feel watching a TED talk?”

The same problem pervades research into teaching. You can’t use student surveys to evaluate teacher performance.

Are you sure you are thinking about TED talks (or perhaps they've changed the format)? Because the selling point of TED talks (not TEDx Talks, which is something different) is that they are 10-12 minutes and to the point. And no matter what you might think of the subject most of them are great masterclasses of clear and precis presentation techniques. You can learn a lot about public speaking and presentation from them.

All that being said TED has gone massively downhill over past few years. When they first started TED really did manage to get some of the biggest names in their fields to give really unique talks. However as they've massively expanded the number of shows they do they've become less and less picky as to who they let on stage. This has led to their 'brand' declining and fewer and fewer prestigious people want to be associated with TED.

any decent book written by an actual scientist will serve you much better.

The whole point of TED talks was never to replace that book. Rather to get you excited enough to pick up that book, especially in a subject you initially had no interest in. In fact most scientists with books use TED as a platform to convince you to read that book.

Back in 2012 I watched my first TED video about a guy teaching how to use a paper towel. I didn't realize that was TEDx and not TED, so I avoided all TED videos for several years, and surely missed worthwhile content.

If a sentence is expressed incorrectly the speaker will repeat it again and again until it's perfect. It makes for a high quality video, but the live audience has to suffer through it.

The only kind of presentations I like are the ones at hacker conferences. They tend to be for a highly technical audience and very non-commercial. Just about the tech, not trying to sell anything.

You can find recordings on https://media.ccc.de for example. They have a lot of German content but most of the event presentations are in English.

Although most conferences are about as shallow as TED talks. TED's been portrayed to me as some kind of a revelation, that's why I'm asking. Maybe they just got worse with time, like almost anything tends to do.

Also worth learning English for