Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.
I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT. The few things that they do put up are often so mind expanding whether it's Berty Russel, The Beatles, or some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.
Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date
The non exhaustive thing is annoying as hell. You might as well delete old videos because there’s no way to get to them if you don’t remember the link. I used to be able to find this video I took in college 20 years ago. There’s just no way for me to get to it anymore.
I don’t know. All I know is the video I’m looking for has a very unique title and used to come up as the main search result less than 3 years ago and it’s unfindable now. It’s from 2006.
I've noticed that the search is especially bad on the history tab, where even searching the exact title of a video I've seen before doesn't always display it. I've found that the best search for old or niche videos is to ask Gemini with a description of the video (I found it gives better results than GPT 5.1) but it's really unfortunate that the native search isn't more useful.
Grady Smith published an investigative video titled "This TikTok Girl Band Ruined My Life" on October 18, 2022. The project focuses on Taylor Red, a group of triplet sisters with red hair who originally started as a traditional country band. Smith's video explores their transition from serious musicians to creators of surreal, fast-paced TikTok and YouTube content that appears specifically designed to capture the attention of toddlers and children.
It was in pre-tiktok world(push to regular content update) & before the purge. A lot of content is now gone. Its a great resource but very loosely coupled with humanity/human knowledge (and arguably a pretty poor resource for it, both theoretically (linear information with contant velocity such as video) and practically (the content just isn't there on youtube, search is truncated etc.)).
> I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.
Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.
Somewhere during the 2010s YouTube became completely sanitized. It went from a general video platform for adults to some dumbed down media company that wouldn't offend negligent mothers in Idaho that gave their kids an ipad rather than parent them
Barely literate workers in 3rd world countries then went on a mass "moderation" spree deleting anything that might even remotely be considered controversial
Videos with millions of views were delisted overnight and the associated channels received community standards violation strikes
Apparently there was a purge of extremist content and another purge of AI slop? I wasn't aware of any major publicised purges, though I do remember Google saying a few years ago that they'd be deleting inactive Google accounts (with the exception of accounts with public Youtube videos I think).
(Edit: found a link that covers the first half of what I'm talking about. It took some digging. There is no way you'd have found it with the little info you had)
I have de-lurked because I can actually contribute to this. I am almost positive that what this is referring to is the time ISIS/ISIL (as it was still sometimes referred to then) uploaded the first video of one of their hostages (a kidnapped journalist?) being beheaded on YouTube. It would have been between 2013 and 2017 inclusive.
Advertising was in full swing on youtube with household names like Pepsi and McDonalds advertising regularly on youtube. BUT ads weren't restricted to certain types of videos then... i don't know if you were paying attention to world events then but ISIS was always in the news and when they released the beheading video it was linked EVERYWHERE. so of course when people went to go and watch a gruesome beheading, before or after it played they would see "da da da da da, I'm loving it".
There was a brief but MASSIVE public outrage against any company whose advertisements were involved, because people thought these companies were endorsing ISIS and beheadings. They didn't understand that the advertisers were paying Youtube for coverage but had no say in exactly what videos recevied what ads. They just blamed the companies they saw in connection with the video. As damage control, these major companies of course instantly pulled all ads from running on youtube and pointed the finger at YouTube, LOUDLY. Youtube lost a substantial amount of revenue and reputation pretty much overnight. Probably in less than 24 hrs.
To repair their own reputation and become an attractive and reliable investment for advertisers asap, YouTube immediately took measures to prevent this occurring again. Thus was the first purge.
I do not remember what other measures or standards were originally but they've changed over the years since. Most of the people talking about its rollon effects were youtubers talking about how it affected them personally in youtube videos, with vague or dramatic titles, which is why you would not find many results on google. They didnt want google to find them and see them criticising them and take their videos down too. I do not think the cottage industry we now have around influencers and content creation, including networking and news, had really gotten off the ground then, so nobody that i can think of would have been systematically documenting it in a written text-searchable form. Thus, no google presence.
It's really scary to me that such a major shaping event in our online lives and thus our culture has gone largely undocumented except through videos which people delist, delete, or get copyright struck down, all the time.
Tldr: Isis has a substantial share in the blame for ruining youtube. Isis is still going.
> Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube,
Did you ever try? There are experts in many fields posting about all kinds of stuff in there, from professional knowledge, to the most mainstream of hobbies, to very obscure stuff.
> Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.
I suspect you are not looking very hard. I have learned a tremendous amount about everything from stone cutting to metalworking to welding to Kalman filters to linear algebra. There is a lot out there. The main annoyance I have is keeping AI slop out of my feed so that I can instead learn from genuine experts. There is a huge amount out there.
It's one of the US's (or some future world government) greatest future public utilities for sure.
Right now it's ruining it's own content by overoptimizing for engagement slop. Making the creators dumber and consumers poorer, limiting ad growth in the long term.
Lowkey one the best things about LLMs, finally we have truly indexed YouTube which made up a massive amount of knowledge consumable and searchable in text format. I hate watching YouTube videos but like the information they provide between Youtube’s AI feature and Perplexitiy etc. Video indexing, it’s been a life saver.
Agreed - I've never followed YouTube that closely but apparently there was a time where everyone thought that YouTube favoured videos that were around 10 minutes in length... so everyone padded their short videos to 10 minutes.
An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data.
Invidious is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith.
At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious.
Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly?
I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently.
photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.
Try dragging a youtube video URL onto an MPV window. I believe that should use yt-dlp under the hood. Not that much privacy since they still get your IP and you have to browse for the videos somewhere else as well, but great for minimal ad-free playback. Haven't tried this in a while though, but last time I did it worked perfectly.
Invidious' docs recommend restarting the service regularly[1]. I can only imagine that this means there is a serious memory leak somewhere. I notice the hardware requirements specifically note: '2GB of free RAM, as long as it is restarted regularly'
After hopping between several in the past, I've learned to avoid services that blatantly violate TOS for their existence, since they rarely last long, usually going private once the cease and desist letters start coming.
I ended up just going with the non-music youtube premium "lite" for $8/month.
My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.
I suspect they're going to soon do what Amazon did as well, where they start putting ads into the regular YouTube Premium service, and charge an extra $3 a month for a completely ad free experience.
I have the family plan shared across six accounts, and it went to $26, which really isn't that much but I'm not entirely sure why they're doing it.
Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads. There are a few other benefits, but being ad-free is the big one. If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers. It makes more sense to just increase the price, as they do.
It is not like Amazon. Most people get Amazon Prime for the "free" shipping, and Prime with ads is a good value proposition, you get shipping but get a discount on the part that doesn't interest you. I don't get why tying a shipping to a streaming service isn't more controversial by the way, it is borderline illegal.
Oh, and by the way, ad-free is not really ad-free, you still have sponsored segments, but these are not under YouTube control.
>Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads.
You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.
>If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers.
Doing this successfully on your smart TV is a barrier that most non-techy folk aren't going to climb over. In the case of Hulu, most people just... accepted it. Same with the Amazon Prime ads you mentioned.
> You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.
The main point of paying for Hulu was to be able to watch the shows. Youtube doesn't have that. (They tried to have premium-only shows but it was never much and as far as I can tell they stopped a long time ago.) So while youtube could obviously increase the price another $3, I don't see how they could split off a viable premium-with-ads plan. The premium features outside of ad removal are close to worthless.
At least the sponsored segments can almost automatically be skipped now. If you press forward on the remote it will jump ahead of the sponsored bit. A little annoying that I have to actively skip it but still better than watching them.
Dunno, big corporations really like showing ads for some reason. I think Google, whose main business is ads, will try to shove them in more peoples' faces, and claim that YouTube Premium will be "reduced ads" and then there will be YouTube Premium+ that has no ads, for a nominal fee, of course.
Queuing is pretty handy a feature. Long click then "add to queue" while clicking around in the app while something else is playing. Smart downloading means there's something to watch while offline without having to explicitly pre-downloaded something. If you're a video quality aficionado, there's better picture quality available. An in-app sponsorblock equivalent was being beta tested but I think it went away. YouTube music except that not all the videos are licensed. There's a couple others. But yeah, ad-free viewing is the primary reason I pay for Premium. Supporting creators is another.
The question is how annoying the ads are. One 15 second ad before an hour long video, I'm annoyed but I'm not going to flip the table over. 5 minutes of ads every 30 mins? At some point I'm getting annoyed enough to cancel my subscription.
Price discrimination. They currently divide users into two groups: people not willing to pay anything to remove any ads, and people willing to pay the current price to remove all the ads.
As the number of users and the price go up, it may make sense to add a middle group: people who are willing to pay some smaller amount to remove (or otherwise reduce the impact) some of the ads.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very strong, borderline-irrational distaste for ads. I hate advertising, I hate having to watch advertisements, I will go out of my way considerably to avoid ads. I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media.
I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube; there's always been adblock but I always felt bad depriving creators of their revenue; most of them (at least at the time) weren't big heartless corporations, they were individuals creating stuff.
If I start seeing ads unless I'm extorted for more money, that might end up being a final straw for me.
I gave up ~2021. Bought one of the 10tb 5200rpm disks and just started yt-dlping entire channels when I found something good. With mixed 360p/480p/720p backups, I've used ~1/5th of the disc across nearly 50,000 files.
This does make me the unethical bad-guy, but my aversion to advertisement is so strong that I can't feel any remorse. AdSense is a scourge on the internet, and once Google is held accountable for it they'll immediately try to extort their licensed library of millions of videos to make a living. And they'll have to try a lot harder than that if they want to deprive me of a daily Tom Scott video with my morning coffee.
Right now it's pocket money, but the content could very easily (and legally) be turned into a different business model if Google's de-facto ad monopoly falls through.
> I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube
Why would you behave ethically towards a company that is anything but?
The slight remorse I feel by not using official YT frontends is towards creators I enjoy watching, who I try to support via other means, if possible. But then again, any creator or business who chooses advertising as their only business model doesn't deserve my support.
Advertising is a scourge on humanity. It corrupts every medium of information by allowing sleazy middlemen to psychologically manipulate one party not just into buying products out of manufactured desire, but into thinking and behaving in ways that serve someone's agenda. It is weaponized via platforms built by adtech companies, which have played a major role in the current sociopolitical instability in the world. It is so insidious that even though it has concentrated incredible amounts of wealth into the hands of a few, most people see it as harmless because they get products and services for "free". To hell with all of that.
What I was doing, was use YouTube Premium registered via a VPN. I was paying equivalent to 2 EUR in Indian Rupees. And I did not feel bad about it because the main users were my kids on our TV. Now my kid uses SmartTube on TV, and YouTube ReVanced on a smartphone (with NewPipe as backup, sometimes or the other is broken). So they lost money.
I do believe the better solution is to go to DIY channel, but yeah. I got Amazon Prime, which gives me free shipping on Amazon. Add on top of that, I can freely support one Twitch stream. So I am going with Critical Role. They also sell their own platform, but it is more expensive than Bezos' deal. It is hard to compete with big tech...
I got a hunch feeling my IPv4 is shitlisted here and there though, but it could also be Linux + Firefox + plethora of extensions. I'll get a new IPv4 soon, so a good time to also clear all my cookies and part with some extensions.
> The slight remorse I feel by not using official YT frontends is towards creators I enjoy watching
That's what I felt bad about. I didn't care if I was depriving Google of money, but I was watching a lot of videos of relatively small channels, and I was watching them with ad block, and I wasn't compensating them otherwise. In a bit of fairness (though not much) I was not making much money at the time.
I agree that advertising is bad for humanity. I hate ads. I don't like the idea that a corporation is weaponizing my psychology to sell me crap I don't need. For the most part I would rather pay for things, but of course I make a lot more money now than I did back in 2015.
I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think it speaks to the shittiness of the platforms that people will only use stuff like Facebook and YouTube if they're "free".
Yeah I have literally spent tens of thousands to host media that I could technically have access to for a handful of $10/month subscriptions, but I can't stand ads and cross promotion. A nice bonus is that a movie or TV show can't just randomly leave licensing window and disappear from my catalog.
>If I start seeing ads unless I'm extorted for more money, that might end up being a final straw for me.
How is it any different than the price increases that have happened up until now? Or do you mean $27 per month for up to 6 accounts is the most you will ever be willing to pay?
I'm not a huge fan of the current price increase, but what I was referring to was what Amazon Prime did about a year ago.
Amazon Prime has ads by default now, or you can get rid of the ads if you pay an additional $3 a month.
If they start showing some amount of ads on my YouTube Premium, and start charging a fee to get rid of all of them, I think it will just piss me off; I already pay for YouTube Premium, I am not going to pay extra for extra ad free.
I think it is best not to get emotional over a business' marketing decisions.
It is simply a change in price, dressed up to be more palatable for people who are not as discerning.
Before, Amazon Prime Video without ads was the price of Amazon Prime. Then it became the price of Amazon Prime plus $3 per month. Now it's the price of Amazon Prime plus $5 per month or $46 per year.
Same thing with Youtube, or any other product/service, price changes happen all the time. Pay if it is worth it, or don't if it's no longer worth it.
I guess I'm just saying I'm not sure I'm going to put up with another price hike.
I've grown kind of tired of YouTube as of late anyway, and it's not like I get a lot out of it in any kind of deep meaningful sense. I probably could fairly easily justify canceling it and surviving on my blu-rays.
I'm fine with using youtubes platform to browse creators and then supporting independently those I watch/want to.
No one demanded anything! I'm not certain that the firehose of "content" that youtube is creating is all that valuable to humanity, and I won't subject myself to ads to support it's existence.
This isn't about you, it's about people who make videos for you.
YouTube's competitive advantage is their ability to pay video makers, not their video playback tech. And to make a competitor that has any kind of traction, this problem needs to be solved in a more reasonable way than "I'll somehow find a way to pay someone maybe".
of course it is relevant, more relevant than just about anything else. if you are a parent or have GenA family members you know it is youtube and nothing else precisely because of user-uploaded content. tt, insta etc are severely lagging behind and are not competitors to youtube in this regard.
> They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.
The above is from the comment I replied to. Netflix, Prime, Disney, cable TV, satellite TV, etc are without any kind of doubt competitors to YouTube within video entertainment.
Just because companies have different ways of doing business doesn't mean they're not competitors.
If your kids won't eat any fast food except McDonalds, it doesn't mean that there are no fast food competitors. The same for video entertainment.
In your analogy, McDonalds is the only restaurant serving fast food. All others are sit-down cafes. The closest thing to a youtube competitor is Twitch and TikTok. The traditional media companies are not competing in the same field.
All restaurants compete for the bellies of the customers, so the analogy holds very well. Competing streamers like Netflix and traditional streamers like cable TV are very much competitors to YouTube.
The barrier to entry seems pretty low, technically at least. Maybe someone will create something with a different twist that will catch on. TikTok was able to carve out a niche after all.
Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago.
Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result.
If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creators that I am not subbed to and whose content I will never watch.
Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).
The worst is that if you're someone who enjoys multiple niche things and who also interacts with the algorithm (like - dislike - not interested) your account gets marked as content discovery vanguard and it will endlessly feed you videos with <1000 views just so they can get more feelers on if the content is actually good.
Even if you consistently "not interested", the algorithm never ever figures out the overlapping theme is that you (generally) don't like low view count low subscriber count content.
- Of the topmost 4 videos I would consider watching one because I am already subscribed to the channel and even have the particular video in Watch Later (so what's the point?)
- Shorts appearing again and again after I explicitly remove them, taking up valuable space
- Below some random videos half of which I am already subscribed to so I can see them in Subscriptions - no need for duplicates
- The other half in large part is of doomerism, although I don't watch that content
Their last video search changes have been the worst thing they've ever done, I can never find anything I actually search for, its pretty obvious its to shove ad stuffed videos in your face, and hide old videos they cannot monetize, but holy crap. There's even some youtube channels where both the video and audio I used to listen to is completely FUBAR'd so somewhere in YouTubes infra, old videos are hinging on a hard drive that's dying in production.
The videos in question are niche as heck, maybe 400 people would recognize them, if even, old 2000s forum parody song of other forum members, out of how many billions online? So yeah, ultra random channel from 2009.
The recommended videos next to the current video and generally awful now. But my YouTube usage almost exclusively starts on the first row of videos they show when I'm logged in. They're almost entirely recent uploads from the channels I subscribe to and what most often. I subscribe to too many channels to keep up on the full feed of uploaded, but YouTube seems to do a good job highlighting the subscriptions I'm most interested in.
Admittedly, I rarely "browse" YouTube looking for new things. I typically find new channels either from other sources (reddit, Twitter, etc.) or because one channel mentions another channel.
Now that you mention it. First row is usually best for new interesting videos. After that, I usually click on the subscriptions page and discover some new interesting stuff from the last couple of days.
It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.
> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
Either I'm doing something very right, or everyone else is doing something very wrong, because my front page of YouTube is fine.
Most of my front page is videos about games I play or have played (Factorio, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Cities: Skylines, and more), dash cam compilations (Which I watch a lot of), and various videos from channels I'm subscribed to such as Kurzgesagt, Chubbyemu, ElectroBOOM, LockPickingLawyer, Engineering Explained, Veritasium (Just discovered Newcomb's Problem and I'm a solid one-boxer) and more.
I never see Mr Beast or any of the other channels people complain about recommended to me. Every recommendation is relevant. YouTube knows me well.
Somehow, it just seems some people use YouTube in such a way that YouTube can't figure out what you like, and so you just get a default recommendation.
> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”
I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.
Yup, that's exactly the youtube problem. It's really terrible for finding new interesting things. If you don't already know exactly what you want to watch, you'll never discover something new you might like.
Spotify sucks too with this. Theres certain artists where if I create a radio station from a song/album or whatever, I will know what like 20 of those songs in that generated station will be. Maybe 8-15 artists and the same 1-3 songs they pick from that artist for that given sort of radio generated call. The feature is good for a toe dip into discovery but you hit the bottom of its depth almost immediately. Sometimes it changes the generated playlist, but hardly. Feels way more siloed than actual FM radio. I might have to start building my own playlists again and do old fashioned discovery, which was almost a part time job evaluating discographies and studying genre history.
>Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”
Worse than that, at times my home page feed has been 5-10% "Here's a video you've already watched all the way through. Want to watch it again?" recommendations. Like YT can see I've watched the video - why are so many videos I've watched being "recommended" for me?
It optimizes for binging. Most people watch one channels content as a single session letting autoplay take over. So if they think you are now on a new channel, they will show that channels videos.
If you scroll down on suggested videos after watching something, it is pretty easy to see how it works. Just keep scrolling and eventually it does start to cycle in a loop of only a few unique options.
* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps
I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.
My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
Thanks!
I know a couple of 'em, will check the rest.
Indeed not hard to surface, but a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative. Sometimes I get these rare gems inside my recommendations; a small channel with a couple of very interesting videos, maybe not the best or slickest productions, but definitely of interest. I guess the algo strongly favors a regular upload rhythm.
I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview, and sometimes I subscribe to channels that I know I already subscribed to (the channels themselves also experienced this unsubscribing behavior and made this known in their videos).
> My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
> I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview
You can just click "subscriptions" on the left to only show videos from channels you are subscribed to, and then there's another button somewhere to show a list of your subscriptions.
> a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative
The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.
At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.
I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.
I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.
Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.
> The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a
> horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's
> collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better -
> sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched,
> but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.
I stopped having that issue when I was subscribed to the pages I enjoyed watching and watched that content. Without that its just going to throw you random popular content.
my personal recommendation is to browse from new personality (aka, log out and clean cookies or privite session I guess)
you'd be surprised both how different recommendations can be, and how fast algorithm recognizes that it is you and starts giving all the same stuff again
but still, that's the best way of discovering new things that I've found
> all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike)
What is with the thumbnails?!? I mean, I know what's with them- content makers have found a technique that works, and are beating that dead horse until it stops coughing up money. [1]
I guess my question is- what is with the median Youtube viewer? Are they just completely governed by their id? Does it not register that they're falling for the same bait every single time? That would bother me, but if people realize they're being manipulated and are fine with it, I guess that makes me the old man yelling at clouds. Oh well, I've been called worse.
I noticed that the Shorts pedaling is causing a major deterioration of the service and it started a few years ago.
At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.
How do I turn on my brain and find a video of an up and coming DJ that makes all their music in another language but mixes it with music that I really like without a recommendation engine showing that people who like similar music to me enjoy them as well?
There's a lot of content on YouTube besides just how to videos and often times top results from a direct search are not always teaching styles that I like.
Don't talk to me like that. My post does not invite this kind of reaction.
> Turn off the feed and turn on your brain.
Don't suggest I don't use my brain, please. For this purpose I built my own feed reader (as part of all kinds of social functions for my website system, link in bio), which I also use to scan for new videos on Youtube's channels that I follow. It works great. Sometimes I want to discover new channels and go directly to Youtube.
> Think about what you want to learn and search for it.
This is exactly what I said in my OP. I searched for topics on Youtube to discover new videos and channels, it's hard and doesn't work.
Then... why are you using it? I used to get some degree of infotainment out of it but then it became this. Here's an idea: I had a need for some custom metal machining (aluminum). I just looked up some local companies and found a guy who was happy to work it into his shop. I've had some other needs, and just wound up hiring some guys to teach me (stick welding). It's not free, but there is incredible value doing it the old way.
I use it as tv, but then topics I like that are not on tv.
You must be reading my mind, because I recently let some lasercutting shop make some aluminum for a hardware project that I'm doing. I have all kinds of projects on https://www.theredpanther.org - partly (or should I say mostly) inspired by Youtube.
So for me it works both ways, I get inspired, make something of my own, share it on Youtube. That's why it is such a nice platform. I even meet people through Youtube (fawowa scene is big in neighbouring Germany, for example) and I regularly leave comments and get comments.
On the other hand, the algorithm pushes me certain ways that I don't like. And it makes me sad knowing there are thousands of people making nice videos that I want to see but will never see, because Youtube's algorithm favors what they want to show, not what I want to watch (although their algo must be more than smart enough to give me hours and hours of good content). I have to take the bad with the good, I think.
The home page isn’t great. I think what he ment was use the subscription feature, which you seem to do.
I sometime forget that feature exists, but I have channels I like that seem to only show up when I pull up subscriptions and never make it to the “home page suggestions” (I guess my own personal algorithm?).
This doesnt help. Youtube is weird. On one hand, the majority of watch time is Beast brain rot like content but on the other hand, there is genuinely amazing creativity happening. The issue is discovery.
Youtube cannot help with discovery because it does not increase watch time. It is far more likely that an autoplay of a “safe known” video will be watched then something new.
What is shocking about youtube's advertising is just how bad the supposedly "targeted" aspect of it is.
The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way.
Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media!
The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.
The ads are garbage because Google didn’t want the ads to be hyper optimized and hyper targeted to you. It gives people an uncanny valley feeling. Meta takes a different approach and people often accuse Instagram to snoop on their conversations, even if Instagram is not doing that and is merely good at optimizing the ads. And given that both companies are successful at ads, I’d say both approaches are commercially successful.
But the interesting thing is that, statistically what they are serving maximizes their revenue. So they have the best version of what they want to do, and it keeps maximizing their objectives (profit).
The problem is that such objective became somewhat perpendicular to what some people like. It's funny but maybe watching that stupid Ad, somehow makes you do something that in the end makes them profit.
I'd say fully 25% of the ads I see on YouTube are for the Baerskin "tactical" hoodie. I'm pretty sure it's just generic dropshipped Chinese junk but the advertising is relentless. And how the hell is it possible for a hoodie to be "tactical"?
> I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related
If I had to guess, niche products for niche interests have small ad budgets, but the random detergent ad buyer is happy to bid on anyone's eyeballs. You can't target ad buys that don't exist!
On the other hand, before I bought YT premium I was regularly getting ads for Chevron gas in Spanish (which I don't speak), and would be unsurprised if YT ad enshittification drove premium sales.
> remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install
Which is it? Does YouTube respect your time and attention as a user or does it prey on them? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
The fact that you can pay to opt out of ads has always seemed like a weird business decision to me. Sabotage your ad viewership by siphoning off users with spending money for things like an ad-free subscription. I suppose it prevents losing users to paid platforms or those who just wouldn't tolerate ads at all, and gives an out for users who would otherwise contribute to the ads vs ad blockers arms race.
Well, it respects my time and I respect my time. Youtube wants me (its idea of me) to have a bright, colorful, exciting experience; I want a dreary and focused one. That's not disrespect, it's just different expectations.
I'd like Youtube to one day enable me to disable the fun colors in-app, but that's not a requirement. At the end of the day, the onus is on me, first, to number my days. (Psalm 90:12)
I'm sympathetic to the idea that most internet websites are addicting and bad for society, but I think the blame-game obscures our own agency, which we pretend not to have, and overemphasizes the platform's power, which isn't as strong as we pretend. We're not victims, they're not Gods.
>> I think the blame-game obscures our own agency, which we pretend not to have, and overemphasizes the platform's power, which isn't as strong as we pretend
Yes we do have agency. Also the platforms employ psychologists and designers and run experiments specifically to engagement hack human brains to increase ad watch time. That's a really tough opponent for individual humans.
Radically different sorts of business. Youtube's income comes from engagement, and it's value comes from its network effects. Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform, and you could replace every video on Youtube and it wouldn't matter so long as it remains the place people post videos. Youtube's survival is about gaining and keeping eyeballs, its competitors are other sites that people may spend their time on. The social media features - the comments, the likes - may not matter to you or most anyone else, but Youtube is thoroughly a social media business. Indeed for Youtube most content is an ongoing cost - they must pay to store billions of videos most people will never watch, and certainly which won't generate ad revenue to cover their hosting expenses, so that they can host the thing which actually does pull a sizeable audience, most of which is ephemeral.
Disney on the other hand is an IP curation firm. Sure they make money on movie tickets and subscriptions and merchandise, but they create value by creating and maintaining a litany of characters, stories, and settings which are priced based on the idea they can be milked essentially forever. Disney could pump out flop after flop after flop, but so long as those flops keep Disney owned characters alive in the zeitgeist, it's a financial win. Obviously Disney needs revenue, but it's valuation is only loosely related to its current revenue.
>Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform
What additional benefits would ownership grand Youtube? It seems like they have everything worth having (under “License to Youtube, Duration of License, and Right to Monetize”).
I'm not saying Youtube ought to own it, I'm just contrasting youtube and disney's business models. Youtube doesn't have any equivalent to Mickey Mouse. Mr. Beast may generate tremendous ad revenue for Youtube, but Youtube can't sell Mr. Beast. Youtube is a machine made of steel that you need to operate to generate profit; it is valuable only for what it does. Disney is a machine made of gold that you can operate to generate profit, but which you could also sell for parts to make immense and instant sums of cash; and critically the operation of this golden machine adds more gold to itself, it is valuable for what it is.
Mandatory PSA for Android users because people tend to have similar complaints each time in popular threads: ReVanced allows you to have YouTube with Sponsorblock, background play, no ads, Shorts completely hidden, (estimated) dislike counter brought back etc.
Couldn't imagine using YouTube on my phone without it, it's night and day difference – that's despite being a premium subscriber anyway.
> MoffettNathanson runs the numbers and comes to the conclusion that YouTube’s estimated $62 billion in 2025 will have allowed it to pass The Walt Disney Co.’s media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year (excluding Disney’s lucrative experiences division).
Just for reference in 2025 annual year, the experiences division generated just a casual $36 billion with a pretty high profit margin.
This really doesn't seem like an apples to apple comparision. Youtube is nothing like Disney fundamentally
Also pretty sure Disney generates more revenue from merchandise and other licensing agreements to use its media in derivative products than it does from the media itself.
I don’t agree at all. This was true a decade ago, but today YouTube comments are almost all positive, and you’ll often get some really insightful ones too.
Channels can moderate their comments too. So channels run by thoughtful, community-oriented people will zap trash comments. The music production sphere is especially good.
Maybe I’m just really lucky, but I feel like almost all the channels I watch have supportive, normal comments at the top. Especially on music related videos. Maybe that’s just moderation, but I feel like it could just be self-selection.
> but today YouTube comments are almost all positive
Yeah, exactly. I believe this is the main reason the quality is so bad. Comments with any negative language get pushed down, creating an empty (sometimes toxic), artificial positive atmosphere.
To be fair, Youtube isn't about the comments and the discussion. The comments are sort of there just to give feedback to the creators and serve as a signal to the YouTube algorithm.
Their algorithm has a toxic positivity problem where they weight positivity so much the most moronic, saccharine crap sits at the top and you'd be hard pressed to distinguish the comments from LLM slop.
I went to see if I had any replies to a comment I left on a video for the first time today and it's really hidden to get back to them if you don't remember the exact video. I wonder if it's purposeful friction or just not a priority.
In my case I have almost all notifications disabled so maybe there's an option somewhere. Generally find those notification badges too powerful for me to not check and then get waylaid doom scrolling/watching, so I've made it a habit to always disable them everywhere.
Somewhat tempted to re-enable it as I only really comment on videos that are for very very niche communities and I'm usually answering or asking questions.
If you watch Shorts, maybe. If you watch normal videos, the comments are pretty much an afterthought.
But even shorts, assuming they're like reels/stories, the "social" aspect is very minimal compared with, say, Facebook posts back in the day, where your friends would see and comment and reply to each other.
The Algorithm doesn't really want that anymore; it wants to feed you content from arbitrary people to keep you passively engaged, not to foster conversation/active engagement.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised. In many ways, YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.
The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc.
So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with.
Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it.
Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't.
The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.
It's a cool argument, but I don't think it's how YouTube is being used or how it makes money. Most views go to a relatively small number of mainstream content creators who converge on more or less the same sanitized format, down to the same style of video thumbnails.
Sure, there's a long tail of people who do free labor for YouTube by publishing niche reviews or science lectures and never seeing a penny, but if they disappeared overnight, I don't think that YT viewership or revenue would budge.
YT might have gained steam as a video equivalent of the old Reddit, but it converged on mass-consumption of professionally-produced, focus-group-tested content.
> The majority of views goes toward a relatively small number of mainstream content creators
By any precedent YouTube is radically decentralized. Yes, the view concentration follows a power law, and the power law beats the long tail, but you have to add up thousands of channels to get a majority of YouTube views. Think about how that compares to the overall media landscape. Any two TV channels would yield a majority of viewers. The diversity and decentralization on YouTube is much greater.
> YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.
I think a big factor is that it's low friction. Just open the link or search whatever you want and it plays. It's not like cable where you need to sign up for a service, or Netflix where you need to scroll around in previews selecting for your next show, it's always on your phone, laptop or TV fast and free.
It's successful because it's mindless, people can just pull something up and consume content. If they start pushing more unskippable ads, or requiring subscriptions or accounts to view, their viewership would go way down and people would move on to next easier thing.
Oh this is definitely another big part of it. Signing up for any streaming service is a complete pain, especially if you're trying to set it up on a TV or something. Every time someone non-technical has tried to set up Disney+ or HBO or Netflix, they've ended up asking for help due to stuff like having to type in codes via a TV remote or access the same page across multiple devices just to get started.
And that's not even getting into the content part, where the stuff you want is probably on like 15 different services and you're either gonna pay through the nose for something you barely need or you'll have to miss a whole bunch of things because it's less of a hassle that way.
Yeah, it's a lot easier when almost everything can be found on a couple of sites for free, where you don't need an account to view most videos and where everything is about as predictable as it can be.
Imagine if it was owned by a government, such as China. What do you think would happen? Even if it was owned by US government, how much content do you think would get purged from the library when someone like Trump got elected? See what happened to NPR or PBS.
Love it or hate, it is better than what traditional broadcast television has become. Cannot even watch a TV channel on the television nowadays. It is all just advertisements, sometimes stretching past 5 minutes. Even with youtube advertising more, it is not as painful as watching any kind of show or movie on a television.
The ad frequency and lack of variety is bad enough, but streaming services have gotten very lazy with choosing when to play them. Sometimes an entire show plays them 5 seconds ahead of the clear fade to black for the break, then plays the fade as soon as the commercials are over. Yarr.
I think the lesson for other media companies is to get all their content into a single online "property" or are their anti-trust issues involved?
There's a very low bar for anyone in the world to watch YouTube with a handheld device and an internet connection. What am I missing?
I suppose it's their ad program and fast-acting content ID system that juice it - that'd be the hard part to get right.
X has a lot of video content too - why not present it better in a video-focused version? Get rid of the "X" branding though - it's not a rating. Maybe "Y"?
Micropayments should be tied into all compensation now. x402 as well for monetization.
Perhaps if Soundcloud did video it'd be a challenger and there's one area Soundcloud lacks but should be able to capitalize on - music videos as uploaded by artists themselves.
- i am amazed i dont see a single person complaining about this at any conference, at any google IO event, i live 10000 miles away from california but if I could barge in on a Google IO with Sundar Pichai giving a keynote, I would totally ask him why they broke search
YouTube is very frustrating because it might be the greatest store of human information but has no decent search function. I would pay $20 a month for the best search functionality Google could create, with the transcript of every video fully indexed in BM25 and vector indexes and the videos in a vector index. So you could search for "All videos of pewdiepie wearing a blue shirt talking about bitcoin"
I subscribe to YouTube Premium Family (and yes, they raised my monthly rate too.)
YT's search functions are nerfed very deliberately. YouTube's main purpose is to shove content at the user that we don't want. Ads or no ads, we're supposed to consume unwanted content at a far higher volume than the stuff we actually sought out.
This is the same no matter what the platform or the medium. It's long been a paradigm for scheduling television shows, that the viewers are too lazy to switch channels away from that great show they loved, and so they can "tailgate" a really awful show after a highly-rated one. Radio stations aren't playing what the listeners want to hear, they're shoving sounds into our ears as dictated by the labels and the media companies, and so forth.
YouTube (and YouTube Music, especially with its extremely sticky "AutoPlay" switch) are shoveling suggestions at us, and counting on our laziness, to just mindlessly click the first thing that comes under our mouse.
I'm obviously all-in on YT and Music as media players, and I use their Playlist features extensively, but it is completely impossible to organize Playlists in a way that will help me find content again! It is completely impossible for me to create a nice, uniform set of Playlists across the months and years. I often create time-and-date sensitive playlists, i.e. I want to find it again in mid-April next year, but that all basically falls by the wayside. I often impulsively create a Playlist based on some theme I envision in the moment, abandon it, and I never find it again. YouTube and Music count on that behavior and they will never show us our own Playlists in suggested stuff, or in searches unless we deliberately hammer on it. YouTube wants us to find "Community Playlists" and stuff that you don't want, but is otherwise hyped or algorithm'd to appear in front of our eyeballs.
As a creator and founder, i've observed that having an established long-form video presence (on YT) is literally the greatest distribution channel. if someone's willing to sit through a 15-60 min video of yours, they're probably willing to at least check out whatever product/service you may be selling in your videos.
Something interesting to me is that YouTube doesn't even capture the majority of the value stream. They allow content creators to use things like Patreon and their own ad reads to capture their own value.
Of course, the preceding paragraph could be re-written in many different ways.
I wish the audio quality of youtube videos matched other streaming services. Bandwidth-wise it's pretty minimal, but the audio quality isn't quite as good as competitors like Spotify (and the longer they take to upgrade audio bitrate, the longer the problem persists and uploaded content has lower audio fidelity)
Only streaming app I use and always have used. I have subscribe to the others yet always canceled even at $3 a month. They are not worth it compared to YouTube that's free and for me the best using my Mac Mini connected to my TV (wireless mouse as remote).
Is it? I've heard YouTubers make snide comments about subscribing "as if that has any bearing on whether you see my videos", implying that it has minimal impact on the algo.
Many YouTubers claim that some of their subscribers do not get notified when they release new videos (the "hit the bell icon" portion). They've also been claims of users being silently unsubscribed from channels. That is probably what they're referring to in your paraphrased quote.
Because it would be shocking to me if there were Youtubers who truly believed that having (or not having) new subscribers had no impact on the algorithm.
My understanding is that the percentage of viewers that are actually coming from subscriptions has gone down significantly. The recommendations drive everything, and they don't really care if you're subscribed for what videos they offer.
That makes sense -- yeah, that if you go to the Subscribed page, you still see all that content, but the algorithm is de-prioritizing subscribed channels in the recommended feed.
And it's seemingly the only large platform where you have some control over the 'algorithm' - meaning if I tell it I'm not interested in something, or not to show me content from a creator, it actually works. On Facebook or Instagram the "not interested" button doesn't seem to do anything and it takes several clicks and a wait to block an account.
I’ve disabled YouTube recommendations does anyone have a good resource for discovering things based on interest or even better a one time dump of some form of my recent watch history?
Disney is not a platform while YouTube is, they can afford more distribution and so experiment more and have faster gtm, while Disney has to struggle more for gtm while testing new ideas.
I'm just under 40 and thought it was super weird when they bought YouTube. They already had Google Videos, which offered higher quality and was more reliable for me than YouTube, DailyMotion, or Vimeo at the time. Why they didn't just improve the discoverability and UX of what they already had was completely beyond me.
I was working at a crawling-based business around that time, and we thought it was because bandwidth contracts at that scale were symmetric, so the idea was that Google could serve video for ~free because they were crawling the whole Internet constantly and serving extremely light weight pages of ten blue links.
It genuinely disgusts me that the world's largest media company shoves addictive, short form content down users throats (especially young people). Anyone working on it at Google should be ashamed of what they're doing.
I actually currently run youtube out of firefox in mobile and web, and its pretty much amazing in both and doesn't feel janky.
The upside of that is that if you add the correct script to the ad blocker extension, you'll never see a youtube reel for the rest of your life, which HEAVILY improves the experience on youtube.
The social media companies got so large because they optimized for engagement over all else. If they were any less addictive, they'd have way fewer users, and we wouldn't be talking about them now. This can probably only be addressed with regulation
Yes, you can be the guy at a social media company who says "perhaps earning a few extra billion in revenue this way is bad for children," but the executives are just going to replace you.
YouTube is actually the least engagement-driven/addition-maxing social video provider, by far. Meta and TikTok are famous for discouraging external linking, limiting reach to non-targetted users, heavily moderating content to match engagement metrics, disguising advertisement as content, etc...
YouTube for the most part just serves what you post, does minimal content moderation, stuff a dumb insurance ad on the front (of the long-form content) that looks like a dumb insurance ad, and then does it for everyone else. I mean, sure, they could do better. But really if the world of amateur video content was all YouTube it would be a better place.
Sure it is Sundar. When I go to youtube i see a few videos in the top half. The bottom half of screen is a row of Shorts that I don't want and have to scroll past. In a normal world there'd be a profile setting that lets you opt-out of Shorts being shown. In a normal world there wouldn't be a fake 'show fewer shorts' button that does absolutely nothing.
In a normal world people just scroll past the things they aren’t looking for without even processing the stuff they don’t want.
It’s extremely easy to never click on a Short. I don’t understand the emotional response to these things at all. I’m sure there’s tons of normal videos you don’t want to watch that’s you simply scroll past that don’t elicit emotion whatsoever.
Ehhhh not recently. They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now, and shorts are _heavily_ pushed on my home page feed despite me trying to dismiss them multiple times.
Like yes I can hide them all using ublock on desktop and morphe on Android, but that the fact I have to do it to avoid them is because they're pushing shorts harder as of late, it used to also be pushed but not as much from my personal experience.
>They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now
Because the people you subscribe to are making those shorts.
Your subscription page shows you all the most recent videos from the channels you’re subscribed to.
That in no way is shoving anything down your throat. You’re just supposed to watch what you want to watch. You’re not expected to click and watch every video in your subscription feed.
Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shorts lol. It's near the very top too, so I literally could not avoid seeing it. If they treated it as a normal video I wouldn't care as much.
And unfortunately many YouTubers who do make normal, good content also make shorts because it's incredibly algorithm-friendly, so there's no avoiding it unless you blacklist every creator that dares make shorts.
It's also near the very top of the home feed too - it's even above videos for me, the only thing on top of it is ongoing livestreams. So if I want to use the feed, I have to scroll through a giant shorts section. Then its a row of videos, and then it's another row of just shorts. Again, I DO NOT WATCH SHORTS, but YT really wants me to watch them from the looks of it.
Of course, I then see one row of videos and then the damn "YouTube Playable" section so maybe the moral of the story is that the main page is unusable outright.
>Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shorts
An “entire section” isn’t “shoving” something down your throat. You literally don’t even have to process that part of the site with your brain.
When you go to Amazon are you just completely overwhelmed by all the stuff they’re “shoving down your throat”? I mean they have tons of sections on the home page. Are you actually bothered by that or are do you simply search for what you want like everyone else?
When will Youtube
- Block "unverified" browsers?
- Force KYC or Youtube premium to watch videos?
In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs.
Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.
you know what... besides everything, good for them.
I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation.
Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that supports them financially, well good for them. I still remember the 2018 fiasco when the Ads bubble burst because of the bridge incident, and lots of them didn't know what to do cause the revenue was very shit for years and the future looked bleak.
My favorite channels thread:
- Watch Wes Work: Car Mechanic but super funny
- Super EyePatch Wolf and Worm Girl: Niche Horror Video Games and Topics.
- Lots of Japanese Drawing Channels
- Devaslife: Japanese Developer and Creator of Inkdrop
- Miziziziz and countless game developers that want to show their games and tutorials.
- Acerola: Best Youtube Content on Graphics Development
- jdh: game development in C and super amazing content truly
- Ethoslab: He'll always have a spot on my youtube world
I've been getting off of YouTube more because now creators censor themselves even more than network TV does.
You can't say "kill", you have to say "unalive" or "took their life" or shit like that. You can't say "rape", you have to say "SA". You can't say "porn", everyone called it "corn". Apparently you can't even say 16, because I saw a YouTuber say "61 backwards" when talking about a creep on the internet. I remember one YouTuber censored "damn". It's one thing when it's like a comedy video, but what bothers is when you have "true crime" YouTubers who end up censoring half the video because it turns out that you really can't talk about murder without saying the word "murder", or "killed", and in the case of serial killers "rape".
I can watch Law and Order: SVU that uses all those words, and that was on network TV, the one where the FCC could actively block bad stuff.
So at this point, YouTube has become a pretty sanitized place filled with sanitized content, even more sanitized than network TV, which is fine, but it's sort of the opposite of what I liked about it from the get-go, and it has gradually become less appealing to me. I understand why these creators are afraid to use the actual words (advertisers and the like), but I have found a lot of content to be pretty bland as a result.
Part of why I got into YouTube as a teenager and onward was specifically because creators were allowed to act candidly. They would say curse words and talk about things that interested them. It was cool.
Yeah but then discoverability becomes an issue, I think. YouTube obviously wants to push things that will make them more money, and I suspect popular channels that can have regular ads are more profitable, so they are incentivized to push those.
I grew up as a guy with stairs in my house and part of why I got into the internet pretty early is because I found the fact that people were willing to express themselves using non-sanitized language to be appealing. I liked Something Awful, I liked Newgrounds, I liked YTMND, and I liked them specifically because they weren't safe for TV.
Different time I suppose. At least Something Awful is still around.
This just highlights how YouTube is a different thing for all users. One person's experience can be radically different from another's. I wouldn't even know someone like MrBeast exists if Hacker News hadn't told me about it. Most of what I watch on YouTube is regular media that would otherwise only be available on obsure local networks or DVDs that I don't have, like Thrasher's skateboarding videos, broadcasts of the X-Games and Red Bull action sports events, ESPN/CBS/NBC highlights of yesterday's major pro sports events I didn't watch because they're on too late for me, or music videos via YouTube music. None of these are YouTube "creators." They're just normal media that uses YouTube as an additional distribution channel.
Honestly, my favorite channel is probably BBC to watch snippets of classic BBC Earth series narrated by David Attenborough. I'm pretty sure I could get them through HBO Max, which I believe is the US streaming that has distribution rights for BBC Earth, but it's convenient to get stuff like this all from one place and pretty much everything has a YouTube channel.
I watch more YouTube anything else combined by a pretty significant margin. I'm sure there's a lot of crap, but it doesn't show me too much of it. It has learned my preferences well enough to know that it should show me chess, Mario Maker, Australian machine shops specializing in resource extraction industries (a very specific genre to be sure, but I'm subscribed to two separate channels here) and various other things of that nature.
Things don't sound completely rosy for creators who want to actually make money from it, but it does seem like they manage to get by. From the perspective of a viewer, they absolutely deserve this.
The thing that makes me a little sad about Youtube's dominance is we haven't gotten to a place where you can easily host video on an RSS feed like podcasts, and distribute discovery across many platforms. Paying YouTube so I don't have to suffer their egregiously bad ads feels like a shakedown more than a valuable service.
I'm happy to pay for YouTube since it's so good, but otherwise I totally agree. It's a bit odd, audio in the form of both podcasts and music seems to have settled on a model where creators and distributors are separated and pretty much everything is available on pretty much every platform, whereas video (both amateur and professional) has settled on a model where any given piece of media is typically available from just one place, at least when talking about subscriptions rather than "purchases." I wonder if there's something about the format that prompted this or if it just happened to work out that way.
Me too. Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality from one day to the other a couple of years ago.
Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.
I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT. The few things that they do put up are often so mind expanding whether it's Berty Russel, The Beatles, or some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.
Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date
Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727
Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video or the channel, and the algorithm doesn't recommend it
The non exhaustive thing is annoying as hell. You might as well delete old videos because there’s no way to get to them if you don’t remember the link. I used to be able to find this video I took in college 20 years ago. There’s just no way for me to get to it anymore.
Sounds like a good opportunity for a big indexing company to add some value by using thei-
Wait...
Is that related to freetube removing the video tab (of a channel), sort by age dropdown menu?
I don’t know. All I know is the video I’m looking for has a very unique title and used to come up as the main search result less than 3 years ago and it’s unfindable now. It’s from 2006.
I've noticed that the search is especially bad on the history tab, where even searching the exact title of a video I've seen before doesn't always display it. I've found that the best search for old or niche videos is to ask Gemini with a description of the video (I found it gives better results than GPT 5.1) but it's really unfortunate that the native search isn't more useful.
Realistically you cannot make every video discoverable given the massive ever growing amount of content.
Wikipedia says there's 14.8 billion videos currently uploaded to YouTube, it seems technically easy to index that amount of title+description?
The more likely explanation is that Google doesn't want YouTube to be crawled, which gives them a massive moat for AI training
you can add search filters to the search bar in youtube.
e.g this will return videos published in that time range with a duration longer than 2m
cat videos after:2014-01-01 before:2014-12-31 >2m
[edit] - the duration doesn't remove shorts I think there's just no shorts published in that time range.
> some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.
I've seen that one!
Here it is for those who haven't: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZk2jV5gJbM
When I looked it up, turns out I've seen it too!
I hope he is doing well, or at least had a great ride through life.
One really stunning deep dive into the bowels of weird YT content: https://youtu.be/JAALDob9Ev0?si=vooePQoQM0TURpNK
There is a subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepIntoYouTube/ which brings up channels and videos with negligible number of views usually in range of 100 or less.
This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3emFAf3jqQQ for example is from 15 years ago with 102 views right now.
It was in pre-tiktok world(push to regular content update) & before the purge. A lot of content is now gone. Its a great resource but very loosely coupled with humanity/human knowledge (and arguably a pretty poor resource for it, both theoretically (linear information with contant velocity such as video) and practically (the content just isn't there on youtube, search is truncated etc.)).
> I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily.
Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.
What purge?
I'm searching Google trying to figure out what you're talking about but not getting any meaningful results.
Somewhere during the 2010s YouTube became completely sanitized. It went from a general video platform for adults to some dumbed down media company that wouldn't offend negligent mothers in Idaho that gave their kids an ipad rather than parent them
Barely literate workers in 3rd world countries then went on a mass "moderation" spree deleting anything that might even remotely be considered controversial
Videos with millions of views were delisted overnight and the associated channels received community standards violation strikes
Apparently there was a purge of extremist content and another purge of AI slop? I wasn't aware of any major publicised purges, though I do remember Google saying a few years ago that they'd be deleting inactive Google accounts (with the exception of accounts with public Youtube videos I think).
(Edit: found a link that covers the first half of what I'm talking about. It took some digging. There is no way you'd have found it with the little info you had)
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/ads-shown-isis... )
I have de-lurked because I can actually contribute to this. I am almost positive that what this is referring to is the time ISIS/ISIL (as it was still sometimes referred to then) uploaded the first video of one of their hostages (a kidnapped journalist?) being beheaded on YouTube. It would have been between 2013 and 2017 inclusive.
Advertising was in full swing on youtube with household names like Pepsi and McDonalds advertising regularly on youtube. BUT ads weren't restricted to certain types of videos then... i don't know if you were paying attention to world events then but ISIS was always in the news and when they released the beheading video it was linked EVERYWHERE. so of course when people went to go and watch a gruesome beheading, before or after it played they would see "da da da da da, I'm loving it".
There was a brief but MASSIVE public outrage against any company whose advertisements were involved, because people thought these companies were endorsing ISIS and beheadings. They didn't understand that the advertisers were paying Youtube for coverage but had no say in exactly what videos recevied what ads. They just blamed the companies they saw in connection with the video. As damage control, these major companies of course instantly pulled all ads from running on youtube and pointed the finger at YouTube, LOUDLY. Youtube lost a substantial amount of revenue and reputation pretty much overnight. Probably in less than 24 hrs. To repair their own reputation and become an attractive and reliable investment for advertisers asap, YouTube immediately took measures to prevent this occurring again. Thus was the first purge.
I do not remember what other measures or standards were originally but they've changed over the years since. Most of the people talking about its rollon effects were youtubers talking about how it affected them personally in youtube videos, with vague or dramatic titles, which is why you would not find many results on google. They didnt want google to find them and see them criticising them and take their videos down too. I do not think the cottage industry we now have around influencers and content creation, including networking and news, had really gotten off the ground then, so nobody that i can think of would have been systematically documenting it in a written text-searchable form. Thus, no google presence.
It's really scary to me that such a major shaping event in our online lives and thus our culture has gone largely undocumented except through videos which people delist, delete, or get copyright struck down, all the time.
Tldr: Isis has a substantial share in the blame for ruining youtube. Isis is still going.
> Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube,
Did you ever try? There are experts in many fields posting about all kinds of stuff in there, from professional knowledge, to the most mainstream of hobbies, to very obscure stuff.
> Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.
I suspect you are not looking very hard. I have learned a tremendous amount about everything from stone cutting to metalworking to welding to Kalman filters to linear algebra. There is a lot out there. The main annoyance I have is keeping AI slop out of my feed so that I can instead learn from genuine experts. There is a huge amount out there.
Appending 'before:2024' to your search term works on YouTube and gives results from the pre-slopocine era.
Quite a lot of stuff is on iPlayer. But as always, licensing is the killer.
(Not to mention reputational risk, which is why so many episodes of Top Of The Pops are hidden)
It's one of the US's (or some future world government) greatest future public utilities for sure.
Right now it's ruining it's own content by overoptimizing for engagement slop. Making the creators dumber and consumers poorer, limiting ad growth in the long term.
"Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources."
The content is one of humani .... oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts.
Is there not a better place for human creativity than ... Google? Should my TV license fee fund Google?
Fuck off (hyperbolically)!
> oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts.
As opposed to governments renowned for colonizing half the world, destroying countless cultures, committing genocide in living memory?
> As opposed to governments renowned for colonizing half the world, destroying countless cultures, committing genocide in living memory?
Yes. Private companies are capable of the same, with addition of having profit as a sole purpose of existence.
Lowkey one the best things about LLMs, finally we have truly indexed YouTube which made up a massive amount of knowledge consumable and searchable in text format. I hate watching YouTube videos but like the information they provide between Youtube’s AI feature and Perplexitiy etc. Video indexing, it’s been a life saver.
Agreed - I've never followed YouTube that closely but apparently there was a time where everyone thought that YouTube favoured videos that were around 10 minutes in length... so everyone padded their short videos to 10 minutes.
It wasn't about favoring them. Videos needed to be 10 minutes long to get mid-roll ads.
Mandatory shoutout to Invidious:
https://invidious.io https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data.
[EDIT]
Also Yattee doing the Lord's work:
https://github.com/yattee/yattee
Privacy oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS with Invidious support.
Invidious is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith.
At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious.
Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly?
I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently.
photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.
Try dragging a youtube video URL onto an MPV window. I believe that should use yt-dlp under the hood. Not that much privacy since they still get your IP and you have to browse for the videos somewhere else as well, but great for minimal ad-free playback. Haven't tried this in a while though, but last time I did it worked perfectly.
yt-dlp is essential for gathering what you really value. Even under stable URLs, videos can be changed.
Invidious' docs recommend restarting the service regularly[1]. I can only imagine that this means there is a serious memory leak somewhere. I notice the hardware requirements specifically note: '2GB of free RAM, as long as it is restarted regularly'
It has been this way for years. Seems odd.
[1] https://docs.invidious.io/community-installation-guide/#crea...
Have a look at Odysee, it is a decentralized alternative to YouTube, not just a frontend, and some YouTube channels are mirrored there already.
And Morphe (https://morphe.software) on Android.
I prefer Grayjay (https://grayjay.app). Hacking existing apps is super weird to me.
> that scrape
After hopping between several in the past, I've learned to avoid services that blatantly violate TOS for their existence, since they rarely last long, usually going private once the cease and desist letters start coming.
I ended up just going with the non-music youtube premium "lite" for $8/month.
My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.
I suspect they're going to soon do what Amazon did as well, where they start putting ads into the regular YouTube Premium service, and charge an extra $3 a month for a completely ad free experience.
I have the family plan shared across six accounts, and it went to $26, which really isn't that much but I'm not entirely sure why they're doing it.
Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads. There are a few other benefits, but being ad-free is the big one. If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers. It makes more sense to just increase the price, as they do.
It is not like Amazon. Most people get Amazon Prime for the "free" shipping, and Prime with ads is a good value proposition, you get shipping but get a discount on the part that doesn't interest you. I don't get why tying a shipping to a streaming service isn't more controversial by the way, it is borderline illegal.
Oh, and by the way, ad-free is not really ad-free, you still have sponsored segments, but these are not under YouTube control.
> Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads
The entire point is to find more ways to make money. They will try new ways as longs as there is too big drop in the users.
>Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads.
You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.
>If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers.
Doing this successfully on your smart TV is a barrier that most non-techy folk aren't going to climb over. In the case of Hulu, most people just... accepted it. Same with the Amazon Prime ads you mentioned.
> You could've easily made this argument about Hulu right before it did the exact same thing being described here.
The main point of paying for Hulu was to be able to watch the shows. Youtube doesn't have that. (They tried to have premium-only shows but it was never much and as far as I can tell they stopped a long time ago.) So while youtube could obviously increase the price another $3, I don't see how they could split off a viable premium-with-ads plan. The premium features outside of ad removal are close to worthless.
This was true of Cable as well.
At least the sponsored segments can almost automatically be skipped now. If you press forward on the remote it will jump ahead of the sponsored bit. A little annoying that I have to actively skip it but still better than watching them.
Dunno, big corporations really like showing ads for some reason. I think Google, whose main business is ads, will try to shove them in more peoples' faces, and claim that YouTube Premium will be "reduced ads" and then there will be YouTube Premium+ that has no ads, for a nominal fee, of course.
I don't buy that there's a segment of customers willing to pay to get rid of some but not all ads.
The entire point of premium as it already stands is ad removal. None of the other features are relevant (I don't even know what they are)
Queuing is pretty handy a feature. Long click then "add to queue" while clicking around in the app while something else is playing. Smart downloading means there's something to watch while offline without having to explicitly pre-downloaded something. If you're a video quality aficionado, there's better picture quality available. An in-app sponsorblock equivalent was being beta tested but I think it went away. YouTube music except that not all the videos are licensed. There's a couple others. But yeah, ad-free viewing is the primary reason I pay for Premium. Supporting creators is another.
The question is how annoying the ads are. One 15 second ad before an hour long video, I'm annoyed but I'm not going to flip the table over. 5 minutes of ads every 30 mins? At some point I'm getting annoyed enough to cancel my subscription.
Price discrimination. They currently divide users into two groups: people not willing to pay anything to remove any ads, and people willing to pay the current price to remove all the ads.
As the number of users and the price go up, it may make sense to add a middle group: people who are willing to pay some smaller amount to remove (or otherwise reduce the impact) some of the ads.
By the way, one of the Premium features is to be able to skip over in-video sponsored segments.
SponsorBlock already does this.
The family plan is brutal. They know you can either pay the price increase or explain to 5 people why your love for them does not amount to $3.
This has happened to me btw. I can only suspect they are "testing" the reception.
Ugh.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very strong, borderline-irrational distaste for ads. I hate advertising, I hate having to watch advertisements, I will go out of my way considerably to avoid ads. I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media.
I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube; there's always been adblock but I always felt bad depriving creators of their revenue; most of them (at least at the time) weren't big heartless corporations, they were individuals creating stuff.
If I start seeing ads unless I'm extorted for more money, that might end up being a final straw for me.
I gave up ~2021. Bought one of the 10tb 5200rpm disks and just started yt-dlping entire channels when I found something good. With mixed 360p/480p/720p backups, I've used ~1/5th of the disc across nearly 50,000 files.
This does make me the unethical bad-guy, but my aversion to advertisement is so strong that I can't feel any remorse. AdSense is a scourge on the internet, and once Google is held accountable for it they'll immediately try to extort their licensed library of millions of videos to make a living. And they'll have to try a lot harder than that if they want to deprive me of a daily Tom Scott video with my morning coffee.
Not really. Youtube is just pocket money for Google. It's not like they're ethical themselves.
Right now it's pocket money, but the content could very easily (and legally) be turned into a different business model if Google's de-facto ad monopoly falls through.
> I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube
Why would you behave ethically towards a company that is anything but?
The slight remorse I feel by not using official YT frontends is towards creators I enjoy watching, who I try to support via other means, if possible. But then again, any creator or business who chooses advertising as their only business model doesn't deserve my support.
Advertising is a scourge on humanity. It corrupts every medium of information by allowing sleazy middlemen to psychologically manipulate one party not just into buying products out of manufactured desire, but into thinking and behaving in ways that serve someone's agenda. It is weaponized via platforms built by adtech companies, which have played a major role in the current sociopolitical instability in the world. It is so insidious that even though it has concentrated incredible amounts of wealth into the hands of a few, most people see it as harmless because they get products and services for "free". To hell with all of that.
What I was doing, was use YouTube Premium registered via a VPN. I was paying equivalent to 2 EUR in Indian Rupees. And I did not feel bad about it because the main users were my kids on our TV. Now my kid uses SmartTube on TV, and YouTube ReVanced on a smartphone (with NewPipe as backup, sometimes or the other is broken). So they lost money.
I do believe the better solution is to go to DIY channel, but yeah. I got Amazon Prime, which gives me free shipping on Amazon. Add on top of that, I can freely support one Twitch stream. So I am going with Critical Role. They also sell their own platform, but it is more expensive than Bezos' deal. It is hard to compete with big tech...
I got a hunch feeling my IPv4 is shitlisted here and there though, but it could also be Linux + Firefox + plethora of extensions. I'll get a new IPv4 soon, so a good time to also clear all my cookies and part with some extensions.
> The slight remorse I feel by not using official YT frontends is towards creators I enjoy watching
That's what I felt bad about. I didn't care if I was depriving Google of money, but I was watching a lot of videos of relatively small channels, and I was watching them with ad block, and I wasn't compensating them otherwise. In a bit of fairness (though not much) I was not making much money at the time.
I agree that advertising is bad for humanity. I hate ads. I don't like the idea that a corporation is weaponizing my psychology to sell me crap I don't need. For the most part I would rather pay for things, but of course I make a lot more money now than I did back in 2015.
I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: people will pay for things if those things don't suck. I think it speaks to the shittiness of the platforms that people will only use stuff like Facebook and YouTube if they're "free".
Yeah I have literally spent tens of thousands to host media that I could technically have access to for a handful of $10/month subscriptions, but I can't stand ads and cross promotion. A nice bonus is that a movie or TV show can't just randomly leave licensing window and disappear from my catalog.
>If I start seeing ads unless I'm extorted for more money, that might end up being a final straw for me.
How is it any different than the price increases that have happened up until now? Or do you mean $27 per month for up to 6 accounts is the most you will ever be willing to pay?
I'm not a huge fan of the current price increase, but what I was referring to was what Amazon Prime did about a year ago.
Amazon Prime has ads by default now, or you can get rid of the ads if you pay an additional $3 a month.
If they start showing some amount of ads on my YouTube Premium, and start charging a fee to get rid of all of them, I think it will just piss me off; I already pay for YouTube Premium, I am not going to pay extra for extra ad free.
I think it is best not to get emotional over a business' marketing decisions.
It is simply a change in price, dressed up to be more palatable for people who are not as discerning.
Before, Amazon Prime Video without ads was the price of Amazon Prime. Then it became the price of Amazon Prime plus $3 per month. Now it's the price of Amazon Prime plus $5 per month or $46 per year.
Same thing with Youtube, or any other product/service, price changes happen all the time. Pay if it is worth it, or don't if it's no longer worth it.
I guess I'm just saying I'm not sure I'm going to put up with another price hike.
I've grown kind of tired of YouTube as of late anyway, and it's not like I get a lot out of it in any kind of deep meaningful sense. I probably could fairly easily justify canceling it and surviving on my blu-rays.
This isn't entirely unlike how a candy bar a year ago was larger than today, having the same price.
You can either reduce the product or increase prices, or both if you're really going for it.
>I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media.
Don't Blu-Rays and DVDs have unskippable ads built in, including the FBI notice?
Not if you rip them :)
Firefox and uBlock Origin lets you watch YouTube without ads.
Newpipe and freepipe!
Exactly. Isn't this supposed to be Hacker news? I find it hard to believe that there are people on this site without an adblocker.
Believe it. I'm one.
I'm curious, care to elaborate on why?
Or Grayjay. I find it crashes a lot less than the *pipe apps. https://grayjay.app
A competitor to YouTube needs to support paying the creators not demand content for free.
I'm fine with using youtubes platform to browse creators and then supporting independently those I watch/want to.
No one demanded anything! I'm not certain that the firehose of "content" that youtube is creating is all that valuable to humanity, and I won't subject myself to ads to support it's existence.
This isn't about you, it's about people who make videos for you.
YouTube's competitive advantage is their ability to pay video makers, not their video playback tech. And to make a competitor that has any kind of traction, this problem needs to be solved in a more reasonable way than "I'll somehow find a way to pay someone maybe".
Or smart tube and revanced.
Netflix, Disney, Paramount, cable TV, satellite TV, Twitch, etc etc
It's like saying McDonalds doesn't have any competitor.
Those aren't competitors to YouTube for the sole reason that nearly anybody can upload to YouTube.
That is of no relevance to the customer/consumer. All of these companies are competing for customers of video entertainment.
My son (5) is interested in marble race videos. None of the platforms you mentioned have marble races like The Black Cat Gear or Moreballs.
ok well my daughter is interested in horror movies.
of course it is relevant, more relevant than just about anything else. if you are a parent or have GenA family members you know it is youtube and nothing else precisely because of user-uploaded content. tt, insta etc are severely lagging behind and are not competitors to youtube in this regard.
> They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.
The above is from the comment I replied to. Netflix, Prime, Disney, cable TV, satellite TV, etc are without any kind of doubt competitors to YouTube within video entertainment.
Just because companies have different ways of doing business doesn't mean they're not competitors.
If your kids won't eat any fast food except McDonalds, it doesn't mean that there are no fast food competitors. The same for video entertainment.
In your analogy, McDonalds is the only restaurant serving fast food. All others are sit-down cafes. The closest thing to a youtube competitor is Twitch and TikTok. The traditional media companies are not competing in the same field.
All restaurants compete for the bellies of the customers, so the analogy holds very well. Competing streamers like Netflix and traditional streamers like cable TV are very much competitors to YouTube.
they're competing against themselves to essentially not screw up.
The barrier to entry seems pretty low, technically at least. Maybe someone will create something with a different twist that will catch on. TikTok was able to carve out a niche after all.
Hosting cost and the network effects are the barriers
There is no barrier, only a moat. The moat is enforced by copyright.
Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike), channels that I would never watch being presented... I should have noted the exact date, but I didn't. I guess it was around two years ago.
Even searching for specific topics is hard. I just know there's enough material on the platform, but in my search results I get so many doubles and channels that I already know. I can keep scrolling, but to no result.
If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creators that I am not subbed to and whose content I will never watch.
Of the 30 videos currently proposed to be on front page I'd consider watching maybe 4 of them. To be honest I'm a big fan of the change they made to occasionally show new content because it actually provides some novelty (one of those 4 is of a video from a creator with only 19 subscribers).
The worst is that if you're someone who enjoys multiple niche things and who also interacts with the algorithm (like - dislike - not interested) your account gets marked as content discovery vanguard and it will endlessly feed you videos with <1000 views just so they can get more feelers on if the content is actually good.
Even if you consistently "not interested", the algorithm never ever figures out the overlapping theme is that you (generally) don't like low view count low subscriber count content.
As a fellow uThermal enjoyer, I have to admit the algorithm knew enough to suggest him to me if I was watching battlecruiser cheese.
I just wish they'd recognize that the fifty-first time I don't watch a video they should find something else to show me.
Ahh a fellow Mr Guy <3.
(I just wanted to use Mr Guy in a sentence once in my life)
I find it painfully overfits time of day. I get the same investment themed videos late at night on autoplay.
Youtube's front page is terrible:
- Of the topmost 4 videos I would consider watching one because I am already subscribed to the channel and even have the particular video in Watch Later (so what's the point?)
- Shorts appearing again and again after I explicitly remove them, taking up valuable space
- Below some random videos half of which I am already subscribed to so I can see them in Subscriptions - no need for duplicates
- The other half in large part is of doomerism, although I don't watch that content
Isn't your first parapraph an example of YouTube's algorithm underfitting though?
Their last video search changes have been the worst thing they've ever done, I can never find anything I actually search for, its pretty obvious its to shove ad stuffed videos in your face, and hide old videos they cannot monetize, but holy crap. There's even some youtube channels where both the video and audio I used to listen to is completely FUBAR'd so somewhere in YouTubes infra, old videos are hinging on a hard drive that's dying in production.
>hide old videos they cannot monetize
All videos are monetized. Some videos don't do rev share with the author, but YouTube still gets the ad rev.
Demonetized videos show fewer or no ads. It's something they implemented because advertisers don't want to be associated with some kinds of content.
I think at this point all videos have ads. Demonized videos not having ads hasn't been a thing for what feels like years.
Demonetized
Big brands don't pay the big bucks to buy placements on run-of-network channels (ie. small random channels).
The videos in question are niche as heck, maybe 400 people would recognize them, if even, old 2000s forum parody song of other forum members, out of how many billions online? So yeah, ultra random channel from 2009.
The recommended videos next to the current video and generally awful now. But my YouTube usage almost exclusively starts on the first row of videos they show when I'm logged in. They're almost entirely recent uploads from the channels I subscribe to and what most often. I subscribe to too many channels to keep up on the full feed of uploaded, but YouTube seems to do a good job highlighting the subscriptions I'm most interested in.
Admittedly, I rarely "browse" YouTube looking for new things. I typically find new channels either from other sources (reddit, Twitter, etc.) or because one channel mentions another channel.
Now that you mention it. First row is usually best for new interesting videos. After that, I usually click on the subscriptions page and discover some new interesting stuff from the last couple of days.
> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
A woodworker and former RIM engineer -- if you don't already know his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Matthiaswandel
They're hard to find! Typically you get either:
- Some screwing into end grain. Looks good on camera but it's complete junk.
- A 'hobbyist' with a commercial workshop worth tens of thousands of dollars making it look easy.
Thanks! Familiar face, I have seen videos from him.
Now I have to give one back... Maybe you don't know Marius Hornberger, I really enjoy his maker videos.
>Even searching for specific topics is hard.
It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.
> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
Either I'm doing something very right, or everyone else is doing something very wrong, because my front page of YouTube is fine.
Most of my front page is videos about games I play or have played (Factorio, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Cities: Skylines, and more), dash cam compilations (Which I watch a lot of), and various videos from channels I'm subscribed to such as Kurzgesagt, Chubbyemu, ElectroBOOM, LockPickingLawyer, Engineering Explained, Veritasium (Just discovered Newcomb's Problem and I'm a solid one-boxer) and more.
I never see Mr Beast or any of the other channels people complain about recommended to me. Every recommendation is relevant. YouTube knows me well.
Somehow, it just seems some people use YouTube in such a way that YouTube can't figure out what you like, and so you just get a default recommendation.
> Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”
I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.
Youtube records hovering over their stupid Tiktoks as a view - if you go into view history you can delete all of them and get better recommends.
Yup, that's exactly the youtube problem. It's really terrible for finding new interesting things. If you don't already know exactly what you want to watch, you'll never discover something new you might like.
Spotify sucks too with this. Theres certain artists where if I create a radio station from a song/album or whatever, I will know what like 20 of those songs in that generated station will be. Maybe 8-15 artists and the same 1-3 songs they pick from that artist for that given sort of radio generated call. The feature is good for a toe dip into discovery but you hit the bottom of its depth almost immediately. Sometimes it changes the generated playlist, but hardly. Feels way more siloed than actual FM radio. I might have to start building my own playlists again and do old fashioned discovery, which was almost a part time job evaluating discographies and studying genre history.
>Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want”
Worse than that, at times my home page feed has been 5-10% "Here's a video you've already watched all the way through. Want to watch it again?" recommendations. Like YT can see I've watched the video - why are so many videos I've watched being "recommended" for me?
Oh man, I think I had a subscription to HBO through YouTube
Then HBO did a machine gun fire of price increases so I cancelled.
For the next few weeks every single YouTube recommended video was an HBO show/movie.
It optimizes for binging. Most people watch one channels content as a single session letting autoplay take over. So if they think you are now on a new channel, they will show that channels videos.
If you scroll down on suggested videos after watching something, it is pretty easy to see how it works. Just keep scrolling and eventually it does start to cycle in a loop of only a few unique options.
It's a constant job on my side, but asking the algorithm to not show me this trash channel seems to be working for me.
As soon as I see a clickbait thumbnail/title, I ask to not show it anymore.
On a daily basis I get 90% of interesting content on the home page.
It particularly works great for music; now I get better recommendations from YouTube than from Spotify (which is my main music platform).
> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
There are dozens of great channels in those spaces. Here are some I remember just off the top of my head.
* Cars: Watch Wes Work (need 1.5x speed here!), Prop Department, Mat Armstrong, Chris Fix
* Woodworking: Frank Howarth, Matthias Wandel, The Wood Whisperer, John Heisz, Steve Ramsey
* Metalworking: Clickspring, Cronova Engineering, Tubal Cain
* General DIY/inventions: DIY Perks, Uri Tuchman, Stuff Made Here, Colin Furze, Applied Science, Breaking Taps
I think it's actually not too bad at surfacing this stuff. They also have a "New to You" button you can click.
My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
Thanks! I know a couple of 'em, will check the rest.
Indeed not hard to surface, but a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative. Sometimes I get these rare gems inside my recommendations; a small channel with a couple of very interesting videos, maybe not the best or slickest productions, but definitely of interest. I guess the algo strongly favors a regular upload rhythm.
I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview, and sometimes I subscribe to channels that I know I already subscribed to (the channels themselves also experienced this unsubscribing behavior and made this known in their videos).
> My main complaint is it will recommend a specific video to you for aaaages without you clicking on it before it finally realises you aren't interested. You can manually say you aren't interested, but it's two clicks and you shouldn't need to do that anyway.
Completely agree!
> I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview
You can just click "subscriptions" on the left to only show videos from channels you are subscribed to, and then there's another button somewhere to show a list of your subscriptions.
> a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative
It wasn't an exhaustive list!
> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
Check out Peter Millard.
The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.
At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.
I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.
I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.
Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.
Check out the Unhook extension (available in various browsers), it can turn YT into search box + video player.
That's perfect and it doesn't request unnecessary permissions - it only wants access to youtube.com. Thanks!
> The YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a > horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's > collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - > sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, > but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.
I rarely ever open anything else but https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
I stopped having that issue when I was subscribed to the pages I enjoyed watching and watched that content. Without that its just going to throw you random popular content.
my personal recommendation is to browse from new personality (aka, log out and clean cookies or privite session I guess)
you'd be surprised both how different recommendations can be, and how fast algorithm recognizes that it is you and starts giving all the same stuff again
but still, that's the best way of discovering new things that I've found
> all kinds of thumbnails with people with their mouth open, very 'colory' thumbnails (more childlike)
What is with the thumbnails?!? I mean, I know what's with them- content makers have found a technique that works, and are beating that dead horse until it stops coughing up money. [1]
I guess my question is- what is with the median Youtube viewer? Are they just completely governed by their id? Does it not register that they're falling for the same bait every single time? That would bother me, but if people realize they're being manipulated and are fine with it, I guess that makes me the old man yelling at clouds. Oh well, I've been called worse.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVGpvzcHko
I noticed that the Shorts pedaling is causing a major deterioration of the service and it started a few years ago.
At some point I looked too long at a thirst trap and now all I get is OF girls jumping on trampolines and stuff like that, despite spending literal days of time on longer form content for every second I've glanced at that stuff. They just really want me to interact with their Shorts doomscroll. It certainly has the scent of enshitification since Shorts.
I can't use YT without anti shorts:
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441709-youtube-anti-shorts
ishitani
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How do I turn on my brain and find a video of an up and coming DJ that makes all their music in another language but mixes it with music that I really like without a recommendation engine showing that people who like similar music to me enjoy them as well?
There's a lot of content on YouTube besides just how to videos and often times top results from a direct search are not always teaching styles that I like.
Don't talk to me like that. My post does not invite this kind of reaction.
> Turn off the feed and turn on your brain.
Don't suggest I don't use my brain, please. For this purpose I built my own feed reader (as part of all kinds of social functions for my website system, link in bio), which I also use to scan for new videos on Youtube's channels that I follow. It works great. Sometimes I want to discover new channels and go directly to Youtube.
> Think about what you want to learn and search for it.
This is exactly what I said in my OP. I searched for topics on Youtube to discover new videos and channels, it's hard and doesn't work.
Then... why are you using it? I used to get some degree of infotainment out of it but then it became this. Here's an idea: I had a need for some custom metal machining (aluminum). I just looked up some local companies and found a guy who was happy to work it into his shop. I've had some other needs, and just wound up hiring some guys to teach me (stick welding). It's not free, but there is incredible value doing it the old way.
I use it as tv, but then topics I like that are not on tv.
You must be reading my mind, because I recently let some lasercutting shop make some aluminum for a hardware project that I'm doing. I have all kinds of projects on https://www.theredpanther.org - partly (or should I say mostly) inspired by Youtube.
So for me it works both ways, I get inspired, make something of my own, share it on Youtube. That's why it is such a nice platform. I even meet people through Youtube (fawowa scene is big in neighbouring Germany, for example) and I regularly leave comments and get comments.
On the other hand, the algorithm pushes me certain ways that I don't like. And it makes me sad knowing there are thousands of people making nice videos that I want to see but will never see, because Youtube's algorithm favors what they want to show, not what I want to watch (although their algo must be more than smart enough to give me hours and hours of good content). I have to take the bad with the good, I think.
The home page isn’t great. I think what he ment was use the subscription feature, which you seem to do.
I sometime forget that feature exists, but I have channels I like that seem to only show up when I pull up subscriptions and never make it to the “home page suggestions” (I guess my own personal algorithm?).
curate your watch history a little bit
This doesnt help. Youtube is weird. On one hand, the majority of watch time is Beast brain rot like content but on the other hand, there is genuinely amazing creativity happening. The issue is discovery.
Youtube cannot help with discovery because it does not increase watch time. It is far more likely that an autoplay of a “safe known” video will be watched then something new.
I pay for YouTube Premium. No ads; I feel like it respects my time. Algorithm is well tailored too.
The “remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install though.
What is shocking about youtube's advertising is just how bad the supposedly "targeted" aspect of it is.
The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way.
Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media!
The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.
The ads are garbage because Google didn’t want the ads to be hyper optimized and hyper targeted to you. It gives people an uncanny valley feeling. Meta takes a different approach and people often accuse Instagram to snoop on their conversations, even if Instagram is not doing that and is merely good at optimizing the ads. And given that both companies are successful at ads, I’d say both approaches are commercially successful.
Can't they at least target the ads to the specific content they're played on?
"The ads are just garbage"
But the interesting thing is that, statistically what they are serving maximizes their revenue. So they have the best version of what they want to do, and it keeps maximizing their objectives (profit).
The problem is that such objective became somewhat perpendicular to what some people like. It's funny but maybe watching that stupid Ad, somehow makes you do something that in the end makes them profit.
I'd say fully 25% of the ads I see on YouTube are for the Baerskin "tactical" hoodie. I'm pretty sure it's just generic dropshipped Chinese junk but the advertising is relentless. And how the hell is it possible for a hoodie to be "tactical"?
> I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related
If I had to guess, niche products for niche interests have small ad budgets, but the random detergent ad buyer is happy to bid on anyone's eyeballs. You can't target ad buys that don't exist!
On the other hand, before I bought YT premium I was regularly getting ads for Chevron gas in Spanish (which I don't speak), and would be unsurprised if YT ad enshittification drove premium sales.
> it respects my time
> remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install
Which is it? Does YouTube respect your time and attention as a user or does it prey on them? I'm pretty sure it's the latter.
The fact that you can pay to opt out of ads has always seemed like a weird business decision to me. Sabotage your ad viewership by siphoning off users with spending money for things like an ad-free subscription. I suppose it prevents losing users to paid platforms or those who just wouldn't tolerate ads at all, and gives an out for users who would otherwise contribute to the ads vs ad blockers arms race.
Well, it respects my time and I respect my time. Youtube wants me (its idea of me) to have a bright, colorful, exciting experience; I want a dreary and focused one. That's not disrespect, it's just different expectations.
I'd like Youtube to one day enable me to disable the fun colors in-app, but that's not a requirement. At the end of the day, the onus is on me, first, to number my days. (Psalm 90:12)
I'm sympathetic to the idea that most internet websites are addicting and bad for society, but I think the blame-game obscures our own agency, which we pretend not to have, and overemphasizes the platform's power, which isn't as strong as we pretend. We're not victims, they're not Gods.
>> I think the blame-game obscures our own agency, which we pretend not to have, and overemphasizes the platform's power, which isn't as strong as we pretend
Yes we do have agency. Also the platforms employ psychologists and designers and run experiments specifically to engagement hack human brains to increase ad watch time. That's a really tough opponent for individual humans.
Good to know. I disabled watch history just so YouTube wouldn't recommend any shorts.
They increased the price recently, but I personally just use UBlock.
Radically different sorts of business. Youtube's income comes from engagement, and it's value comes from its network effects. Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform, and you could replace every video on Youtube and it wouldn't matter so long as it remains the place people post videos. Youtube's survival is about gaining and keeping eyeballs, its competitors are other sites that people may spend their time on. The social media features - the comments, the likes - may not matter to you or most anyone else, but Youtube is thoroughly a social media business. Indeed for Youtube most content is an ongoing cost - they must pay to store billions of videos most people will never watch, and certainly which won't generate ad revenue to cover their hosting expenses, so that they can host the thing which actually does pull a sizeable audience, most of which is ephemeral.
Disney on the other hand is an IP curation firm. Sure they make money on movie tickets and subscriptions and merchandise, but they create value by creating and maintaining a litany of characters, stories, and settings which are priced based on the idea they can be milked essentially forever. Disney could pump out flop after flop after flop, but so long as those flops keep Disney owned characters alive in the zeitgeist, it's a financial win. Obviously Disney needs revenue, but it's valuation is only loosely related to its current revenue.
>Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platform
What additional benefits would ownership grand Youtube? It seems like they have everything worth having (under “License to Youtube, Duration of License, and Right to Monetize”).
https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=US&template=terms
I'm not saying Youtube ought to own it, I'm just contrasting youtube and disney's business models. Youtube doesn't have any equivalent to Mickey Mouse. Mr. Beast may generate tremendous ad revenue for Youtube, but Youtube can't sell Mr. Beast. Youtube is a machine made of steel that you need to operate to generate profit; it is valuable only for what it does. Disney is a machine made of gold that you can operate to generate profit, but which you could also sell for parts to make immense and instant sums of cash; and critically the operation of this golden machine adds more gold to itself, it is valuable for what it is.
Mandatory PSA for Android users because people tend to have similar complaints each time in popular threads: ReVanced allows you to have YouTube with Sponsorblock, background play, no ads, Shorts completely hidden, (estimated) dislike counter brought back etc.
Couldn't imagine using YouTube on my phone without it, it's night and day difference – that's despite being a premium subscriber anyway.
It's wild to me that only 3 years ago there were still people on HN arguing that Youtube can't be profitable[1].
11 years ago it was already clear there was a great path to profits, even if they weren't profitable at that point.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268272
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9215164
> MoffettNathanson runs the numbers and comes to the conclusion that YouTube’s estimated $62 billion in 2025 will have allowed it to pass The Walt Disney Co.’s media business, which generated $60.9 billion last year (excluding Disney’s lucrative experiences division).
Just for reference in 2025 annual year, the experiences division generated just a casual $36 billion with a pretty high profit margin.
This really doesn't seem like an apples to apple comparision. Youtube is nothing like Disney fundamentally
Also pretty sure Disney generates more revenue from merchandise and other licensing agreements to use its media in derivative products than it does from the media itself.
I always see it as more of a social media company rather than a media co.
Just anecdotes, but I feel YouTube comments are the bottom of social media. Even Twitter and Reddit are better.
But if the 99% garbage is the price of the emerging of channels like 3B1B, I think it's still a pretty good deal.
I don’t agree at all. This was true a decade ago, but today YouTube comments are almost all positive, and you’ll often get some really insightful ones too.
Channels can moderate their comments too. So channels run by thoughtful, community-oriented people will zap trash comments. The music production sphere is especially good.
Maybe I’m just really lucky, but I feel like almost all the channels I watch have supportive, normal comments at the top. Especially on music related videos. Maybe that’s just moderation, but I feel like it could just be self-selection.
> but today YouTube comments are almost all positive
Yeah, exactly. I believe this is the main reason the quality is so bad. Comments with any negative language get pushed down, creating an empty (sometimes toxic), artificial positive atmosphere.
To be fair, Youtube isn't about the comments and the discussion. The comments are sort of there just to give feedback to the creators and serve as a signal to the YouTube algorithm.
Their algorithm has a toxic positivity problem where they weight positivity so much the most moronic, saccharine crap sits at the top and you'd be hard pressed to distinguish the comments from LLM slop.
"Epic refresh pull" is my personal pet hate right now. Although "like if you are watching this in <year>" on older videos is close behind.
The comments pretending Marvel actors (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch) are their Marvel characters in other movies (e.g. Sam Mendes' 1917) kill me.
I often comment on videos but never do I check replies to my comments there.
I went to see if I had any replies to a comment I left on a video for the first time today and it's really hidden to get back to them if you don't remember the exact video. I wonder if it's purposeful friction or just not a priority.
Click History on the homepage left sidebar > Comments on right side of History page
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
And now try to find the comment someone replied to
I agree. I wonder how people are motivated to comment if they can't even track replies or check likes. It certainly completely kills motivation for me
Do you and GP not get notifications for replies and (at least some) likes?
In my case I have almost all notifications disabled so maybe there's an option somewhere. Generally find those notification badges too powerful for me to not check and then get waylaid doom scrolling/watching, so I've made it a habit to always disable them everywhere.
Somewhat tempted to re-enable it as I only really comment on videos that are for very very niche communities and I'm usually answering or asking questions.
I get the notifications but it’s sometimes hard to know for which comment if it’s more than one in a discussion.
I don't think I get notified but maybe it's because my replies are unpopular
Oh, fair enough. That is indeed not shown anywhere it seems.
And so many comments may aswell be bots.
>anyone here in CURRENTYEAR
>This is scene is so [adjective]
Not exactly a forum, more like a concert crowd
"Who's here from Hacker News??"
I tried to one time, but I couldn't even figure it out so I gave up.
how do you resist the urge to click on the red notification icon?
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If you watch Shorts, maybe. If you watch normal videos, the comments are pretty much an afterthought.
But even shorts, assuming they're like reels/stories, the "social" aspect is very minimal compared with, say, Facebook posts back in the day, where your friends would see and comment and reply to each other.
The Algorithm doesn't really want that anymore; it wants to feed you content from arbitrary people to keep you passively engaged, not to foster conversation/active engagement.
There's nothing social about it. You don't add your friends and chat with your friends on YouTube.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised. In many ways, YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.
The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited. Shops selling books are limited. Etc.
So what you get is very generic and milquetoast. It's bland content aimed at a large audience that (presumably) doesn't want to think too hard or leave their comfort zone, which is designed to appeal to every possible region on Earth at the same time and which doesn't scare away corporate types that see anything outside of a few specific genres as too risky to deal with.
Much of what's on YouTube isn't like that. Yeah, there are censorship issues and other such problems, but many of the videos and channels there are as niche as niche can be, and all the better because of it. You don't need to care if your videos appeal to 300 million people in the US or are understandable to a few billion worldwide, you just need to care that an audience that wants that sort of content can discover them and find value from it.
Almost every commenter on this site watches something different on YouTube, often about topics that appeal to only a tiny percentage of the population. Platforms like YouTube can support that, traditional media companies can't.
The cumulative impact of all those different channels and creators is bigger than any small library of mass market works could ever be.
It's a cool argument, but I don't think it's how YouTube is being used or how it makes money. Most views go to a relatively small number of mainstream content creators who converge on more or less the same sanitized format, down to the same style of video thumbnails.
Sure, there's a long tail of people who do free labor for YouTube by publishing niche reviews or science lectures and never seeing a penny, but if they disappeared overnight, I don't think that YT viewership or revenue would budge.
YT might have gained steam as a video equivalent of the old Reddit, but it converged on mass-consumption of professionally-produced, focus-group-tested content.
> The majority of views goes toward a relatively small number of mainstream content creators
By any precedent YouTube is radically decentralized. Yes, the view concentration follows a power law, and the power law beats the long tail, but you have to add up thousands of channels to get a majority of YouTube views. Think about how that compares to the overall media landscape. Any two TV channels would yield a majority of viewers. The diversity and decentralization on YouTube is much greater.
> YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment.
I think a big factor is that it's low friction. Just open the link or search whatever you want and it plays. It's not like cable where you need to sign up for a service, or Netflix where you need to scroll around in previews selecting for your next show, it's always on your phone, laptop or TV fast and free.
It's successful because it's mindless, people can just pull something up and consume content. If they start pushing more unskippable ads, or requiring subscriptions or accounts to view, their viewership would go way down and people would move on to next easier thing.
Oh this is definitely another big part of it. Signing up for any streaming service is a complete pain, especially if you're trying to set it up on a TV or something. Every time someone non-technical has tried to set up Disney+ or HBO or Netflix, they've ended up asking for help due to stuff like having to type in codes via a TV remote or access the same page across multiple devices just to get started.
And that's not even getting into the content part, where the stuff you want is probably on like 15 different services and you're either gonna pay through the nose for something you barely need or you'll have to miss a whole bunch of things because it's less of a hassle that way.
Yeah, it's a lot easier when almost everything can be found on a couple of sites for free, where you don't need an account to view most videos and where everything is about as predictable as it can be.
The world's greatest library of knowledge is owned by a private US company. For some reason I am reminded of this more often than I care to admit.
Imagine if it was owned by a government, such as China. What do you think would happen? Even if it was owned by US government, how much content do you think would get purged from the library when someone like Trump got elected? See what happened to NPR or PBS.
Love it or hate, it is better than what traditional broadcast television has become. Cannot even watch a TV channel on the television nowadays. It is all just advertisements, sometimes stretching past 5 minutes. Even with youtube advertising more, it is not as painful as watching any kind of show or movie on a television.
The ad frequency and lack of variety is bad enough, but streaming services have gotten very lazy with choosing when to play them. Sometimes an entire show plays them 5 seconds ahead of the clear fade to black for the break, then plays the fade as soon as the commercials are over. Yarr.
I think the lesson for other media companies is to get all their content into a single online "property" or are their anti-trust issues involved?
There's a very low bar for anyone in the world to watch YouTube with a handheld device and an internet connection. What am I missing?
I suppose it's their ad program and fast-acting content ID system that juice it - that'd be the hard part to get right.
X has a lot of video content too - why not present it better in a video-focused version? Get rid of the "X" branding though - it's not a rating. Maybe "Y"?
Micropayments should be tied into all compensation now. x402 as well for monetization.
Perhaps if Soundcloud did video it'd be a challenger and there's one area Soundcloud lacks but should be able to capitalize on - music videos as uploaded by artists themselves.
- with a search bar that absolutely refuses to do what it was intended to do for the point where
- a third person had to step in and create a search bar for it right here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47655392
- i am amazed i dont see a single person complaining about this at any conference, at any google IO event, i live 10000 miles away from california but if I could barge in on a Google IO with Sundar Pichai giving a keynote, I would totally ask him why they broke search
YouTube is very frustrating because it might be the greatest store of human information but has no decent search function. I would pay $20 a month for the best search functionality Google could create, with the transcript of every video fully indexed in BM25 and vector indexes and the videos in a vector index. So you could search for "All videos of pewdiepie wearing a blue shirt talking about bitcoin"
I subscribe to YouTube Premium Family (and yes, they raised my monthly rate too.)
YT's search functions are nerfed very deliberately. YouTube's main purpose is to shove content at the user that we don't want. Ads or no ads, we're supposed to consume unwanted content at a far higher volume than the stuff we actually sought out.
This is the same no matter what the platform or the medium. It's long been a paradigm for scheduling television shows, that the viewers are too lazy to switch channels away from that great show they loved, and so they can "tailgate" a really awful show after a highly-rated one. Radio stations aren't playing what the listeners want to hear, they're shoving sounds into our ears as dictated by the labels and the media companies, and so forth.
YouTube (and YouTube Music, especially with its extremely sticky "AutoPlay" switch) are shoveling suggestions at us, and counting on our laziness, to just mindlessly click the first thing that comes under our mouse.
I'm obviously all-in on YT and Music as media players, and I use their Playlist features extensively, but it is completely impossible to organize Playlists in a way that will help me find content again! It is completely impossible for me to create a nice, uniform set of Playlists across the months and years. I often create time-and-date sensitive playlists, i.e. I want to find it again in mid-April next year, but that all basically falls by the wayside. I often impulsively create a Playlist based on some theme I envision in the moment, abandon it, and I never find it again. YouTube and Music count on that behavior and they will never show us our own Playlists in suggested stuff, or in searches unless we deliberately hammer on it. YouTube wants us to find "Community Playlists" and stuff that you don't want, but is otherwise hyped or algorithm'd to appear in front of our eyeballs.
As a creator and founder, i've observed that having an established long-form video presence (on YT) is literally the greatest distribution channel. if someone's willing to sit through a 15-60 min video of yours, they're probably willing to at least check out whatever product/service you may be selling in your videos.
Something interesting to me is that YouTube doesn't even capture the majority of the value stream. They allow content creators to use things like Patreon and their own ad reads to capture their own value.
Of course, the preceding paragraph could be re-written in many different ways.
Yet. I’m sure the relentless pressure to increase profits will force them to address that sooner or later.
Could as well eat Spotify in a snap, just has to comment out that stupid
That one is behind the `hasPremium` feature flag
Or just install Video Background Play Fix (which should just be the default, or at least in settings, but at least it seems to be a Mozilla repo).
I wish the audio quality of youtube videos matched other streaming services. Bandwidth-wise it's pretty minimal, but the audio quality isn't quite as good as competitors like Spotify (and the longer they take to upgrade audio bitrate, the longer the problem persists and uploaded content has lower audio fidelity)
Only streaming app I use and always have used. I have subscribe to the others yet always canceled even at $3 a month. They are not worth it compared to YouTube that's free and for me the best using my Mac Mini connected to my TV (wireless mouse as remote).
Youtube's the only social media left where subscribing to a channel actually means something
Is it? I've heard YouTubers make snide comments about subscribing "as if that has any bearing on whether you see my videos", implying that it has minimal impact on the algo.
Many YouTubers claim that some of their subscribers do not get notified when they release new videos (the "hit the bell icon" portion). They've also been claims of users being silently unsubscribed from channels. That is probably what they're referring to in your paraphrased quote.
Because it would be shocking to me if there were Youtubers who truly believed that having (or not having) new subscribers had no impact on the algorithm.
My understanding is that the percentage of viewers that are actually coming from subscriptions has gone down significantly. The recommendations drive everything, and they don't really care if you're subscribed for what videos they offer.
That makes sense -- yeah, that if you go to the Subscribed page, you still see all that content, but the algorithm is de-prioritizing subscribed channels in the recommended feed.
Well there's a dedicated subscriptions page which is nice.
On desktop, the homepage also has subscriptions on the side, with an indicator that someone has a new video.
Yeah, I still have to go to it, AND pass the recommended stuff at the top, and maybe shorts too (?), but at least I can see the stuff i want to see.
And it's seemingly the only large platform where you have some control over the 'algorithm' - meaning if I tell it I'm not interested in something, or not to show me content from a creator, it actually works. On Facebook or Instagram the "not interested" button doesn't seem to do anything and it takes several clicks and a wait to block an account.
There is a huge amount of amazing YouTube content. I just fear the company that owns it.
Its quite funny to me cus they are making money by showing ads to fake accounts and bots.
Eg. https://youtu.be/ucRTW4rgrbU?si=dfRIy76BM8ntNQph
Unrelated plug for a youtube channel:
Photonicinduction
The very best of what youtube can offer, to me. Pick any video.
I’ve disabled YouTube recommendations does anyone have a good resource for discovering things based on interest or even better a one time dump of some form of my recent watch history?
Get another browser and have recommendations enabled there on another account?
I get why you did it, but you sorta want the sweet cake without any carbs in it.
Disney is not a platform while YouTube is, they can afford more distribution and so experiment more and have faster gtm, while Disney has to struggle more for gtm while testing new ideas.
covered in terms of educational material,
covered in terms of conference videos,
then you can listen to dj mixes.
YouTube is simply goated - no other platform comes to the versatility you can consume in terms of long-form content.
40+ers Who here thought Google was nuts in 2006 for buying them?
(raises hand)
I'm just under 40 and thought it was super weird when they bought YouTube. They already had Google Videos, which offered higher quality and was more reliable for me than YouTube, DailyMotion, or Vimeo at the time. Why they didn't just improve the discoverability and UX of what they already had was completely beyond me.
I was working at a crawling-based business around that time, and we thought it was because bandwidth contracts at that scale were symmetric, so the idea was that Google could serve video for ~free because they were crawling the whole Internet constantly and serving extremely light weight pages of ten blue links.
Too big and too broken.
YT replaced TV channel for me, its recent push to force AI into everything, its broken copyright policy is destroying the same empire it created.
Disney seems played out. Still feels early for YouTube.
OK can they now stop forgetting my chosen settings on TV every time? It's a pain in the butt.
And stop recommending me the same videos over and over , gah
YouTube really is the best. It deserves it. It’s the vast majority of my video consumption and has been for many years.
can someone tell me why youtube music is so good at recommending me music i certainly won't like?
It genuinely disgusts me that the world's largest media company shoves addictive, short form content down users throats (especially young people). Anyone working on it at Google should be ashamed of what they're doing.
I actually currently run youtube out of firefox in mobile and web, and its pretty much amazing in both and doesn't feel janky.
The upside of that is that if you add the correct script to the ad blocker extension, you'll never see a youtube reel for the rest of your life, which HEAVILY improves the experience on youtube.
this is the filter list I use: https://github.com/i5heu/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
The social media companies got so large because they optimized for engagement over all else. If they were any less addictive, they'd have way fewer users, and we wouldn't be talking about them now. This can probably only be addressed with regulation
Yes, you can be the guy at a social media company who says "perhaps earning a few extra billion in revenue this way is bad for children," but the executives are just going to replace you.
YouTube is actually the least engagement-driven/addition-maxing social video provider, by far. Meta and TikTok are famous for discouraging external linking, limiting reach to non-targetted users, heavily moderating content to match engagement metrics, disguising advertisement as content, etc...
YouTube for the most part just serves what you post, does minimal content moderation, stuff a dumb insurance ad on the front (of the long-form content) that looks like a dumb insurance ad, and then does it for everyone else. I mean, sure, they could do better. But really if the world of amateur video content was all YouTube it would be a better place.
Its what people want.
Time to stop thinking corporations will suddenly start policing themsleves.
Where is it being shoved down anyone’s throat?
You literally have to intentionally click a short video or use the shorts tab to see any YouTube short.
Shorts are pushed on the homepage and in the sidebar. At least in the UI that I see in Firefox desktop.
I sometimes wonder if other people get other UIs than I do. There's technically nothing stopping them from 'tailoring' the UI for different people.
You click the button to hide the card of Shorts on the home page and it just says
We'll show you fewer Shorts on Home
Not "no more", but "fewer". Which means you don't get a choice, YouTube will still shove them down your throat.
That’s not shoving them down anyone’s throats.
If you don’t want to watch a short, don’t click on it. Just like if you don’t want to watch a video about a certain topic, you don’t click on it.
Seeing that they exist is in no way an inconvenience or annoyance. You’re supposed to just watch what you want.
Sure it is Sundar. When I go to youtube i see a few videos in the top half. The bottom half of screen is a row of Shorts that I don't want and have to scroll past. In a normal world there'd be a profile setting that lets you opt-out of Shorts being shown. In a normal world there wouldn't be a fake 'show fewer shorts' button that does absolutely nothing.
In a normal world people just scroll past the things they aren’t looking for without even processing the stuff they don’t want.
It’s extremely easy to never click on a Short. I don’t understand the emotional response to these things at all. I’m sure there’s tons of normal videos you don’t want to watch that’s you simply scroll past that don’t elicit emotion whatsoever.
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Ehhhh not recently. They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now, and shorts are _heavily_ pushed on my home page feed despite me trying to dismiss them multiple times.
Like yes I can hide them all using ublock on desktop and morphe on Android, but that the fact I have to do it to avoid them is because they're pushing shorts harder as of late, it used to also be pushed but not as much from my personal experience.
>They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now
Because the people you subscribe to are making those shorts.
Your subscription page shows you all the most recent videos from the channels you’re subscribed to.
That in no way is shoving anything down your throat. You’re just supposed to watch what you want to watch. You’re not expected to click and watch every video in your subscription feed.
Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shorts lol. It's near the very top too, so I literally could not avoid seeing it. If they treated it as a normal video I wouldn't care as much.
And unfortunately many YouTubers who do make normal, good content also make shorts because it's incredibly algorithm-friendly, so there's no avoiding it unless you blacklist every creator that dares make shorts.
It's also near the very top of the home feed too - it's even above videos for me, the only thing on top of it is ongoing livestreams. So if I want to use the feed, I have to scroll through a giant shorts section. Then its a row of videos, and then it's another row of just shorts. Again, I DO NOT WATCH SHORTS, but YT really wants me to watch them from the looks of it.
Of course, I then see one row of videos and then the damn "YouTube Playable" section so maybe the moral of the story is that the main page is unusable outright.
>Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shorts
An “entire section” isn’t “shoving” something down your throat. You literally don’t even have to process that part of the site with your brain.
When you go to Amazon are you just completely overwhelmed by all the stuff they’re “shoving down your throat”? I mean they have tons of sections on the home page. Are you actually bothered by that or are do you simply search for what you want like everyone else?
They play on app startup on the android app, at least for me.
That happens if you close the app while on a Short. Otherwise it opens to the homepage.
I don't watch shorts. I have them disabled via morphe.
When will Youtube - Block "unverified" browsers? - Force KYC or Youtube premium to watch videos?
In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs.
Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.
When the number of ad blocking and downloading extension users grows enough to make a dent in their revenue.
They're not in loss making business after all.
I'm surprised it wasn't.
you know what... besides everything, good for them.
I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation.
Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that supports them financially, well good for them. I still remember the 2018 fiasco when the Ads bubble burst because of the bridge incident, and lots of them didn't know what to do cause the revenue was very shit for years and the future looked bleak.
My favorite channels thread: - Watch Wes Work: Car Mechanic but super funny - Super EyePatch Wolf and Worm Girl: Niche Horror Video Games and Topics. - Lots of Japanese Drawing Channels - Devaslife: Japanese Developer and Creator of Inkdrop - Miziziziz and countless game developers that want to show their games and tutorials. - Acerola: Best Youtube Content on Graphics Development - jdh: game development in C and super amazing content truly - Ethoslab: He'll always have a spot on my youtube world
I've been getting off of YouTube more because now creators censor themselves even more than network TV does.
You can't say "kill", you have to say "unalive" or "took their life" or shit like that. You can't say "rape", you have to say "SA". You can't say "porn", everyone called it "corn". Apparently you can't even say 16, because I saw a YouTuber say "61 backwards" when talking about a creep on the internet. I remember one YouTuber censored "damn". It's one thing when it's like a comedy video, but what bothers is when you have "true crime" YouTubers who end up censoring half the video because it turns out that you really can't talk about murder without saying the word "murder", or "killed", and in the case of serial killers "rape".
I can watch Law and Order: SVU that uses all those words, and that was on network TV, the one where the FCC could actively block bad stuff.
So at this point, YouTube has become a pretty sanitized place filled with sanitized content, even more sanitized than network TV, which is fine, but it's sort of the opposite of what I liked about it from the get-go, and it has gradually become less appealing to me. I understand why these creators are afraid to use the actual words (advertisers and the like), but I have found a lot of content to be pretty bland as a result.
Part of why I got into YouTube as a teenager and onward was specifically because creators were allowed to act candidly. They would say curse words and talk about things that interested them. It was cool.
the problem is these "creators" want to get paid by generic advertisers, so they have to conform to the clean standard.
if they just wanted to express themselves, they could.
Yeah but then discoverability becomes an issue, I think. YouTube obviously wants to push things that will make them more money, and I suspect popular channels that can have regular ads are more profitable, so they are incentivized to push those.
I grew up as a guy with stairs in my house and part of why I got into the internet pretty early is because I found the fact that people were willing to express themselves using non-sanitized language to be appealing. I liked Something Awful, I liked Newgrounds, I liked YTMND, and I liked them specifically because they weren't safe for TV.
Different time I suppose. At least Something Awful is still around.
This just highlights how YouTube is a different thing for all users. One person's experience can be radically different from another's. I wouldn't even know someone like MrBeast exists if Hacker News hadn't told me about it. Most of what I watch on YouTube is regular media that would otherwise only be available on obsure local networks or DVDs that I don't have, like Thrasher's skateboarding videos, broadcasts of the X-Games and Red Bull action sports events, ESPN/CBS/NBC highlights of yesterday's major pro sports events I didn't watch because they're on too late for me, or music videos via YouTube music. None of these are YouTube "creators." They're just normal media that uses YouTube as an additional distribution channel.
Honestly, my favorite channel is probably BBC to watch snippets of classic BBC Earth series narrated by David Attenborough. I'm pretty sure I could get them through HBO Max, which I believe is the US streaming that has distribution rights for BBC Earth, but it's convenient to get stuff like this all from one place and pretty much everything has a YouTube channel.
I watch more YouTube anything else combined by a pretty significant margin. I'm sure there's a lot of crap, but it doesn't show me too much of it. It has learned my preferences well enough to know that it should show me chess, Mario Maker, Australian machine shops specializing in resource extraction industries (a very specific genre to be sure, but I'm subscribed to two separate channels here) and various other things of that nature.
Things don't sound completely rosy for creators who want to actually make money from it, but it does seem like they manage to get by. From the perspective of a viewer, they absolutely deserve this.
The thing that makes me a little sad about Youtube's dominance is we haven't gotten to a place where you can easily host video on an RSS feed like podcasts, and distribute discovery across many platforms. Paying YouTube so I don't have to suffer their egregiously bad ads feels like a shakedown more than a valuable service.
I'm happy to pay for YouTube since it's so good, but otherwise I totally agree. It's a bit odd, audio in the form of both podcasts and music seems to have settled on a model where creators and distributors are separated and pretty much everything is available on pretty much every platform, whereas video (both amateur and professional) has settled on a model where any given piece of media is typically available from just one place, at least when talking about subscriptions rather than "purchases." I wonder if there's something about the format that prompted this or if it just happened to work out that way.
the fact that I'm into a lot of the topics that you've listed but have never heard of these creators simply underscores the sheer scale of youtube
Me too. Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.
To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality from one day to the other a couple of years ago.
Thanks for your favourites/recommendations! I'm definitely gonna check them out, already watching Acerola's "Why I'm Moving To Godot In 2025".
what happened to the YouTube suggestions in the last quarter? it went from simply annoying, to "yell and close the page fast" here in California
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proportionally the same as everywhere else, so insignificant for comparison
Proportionally to the content or proportionality to the viewed content?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12169571/
I personally have never seen the same BS on a Disney site that I have seen on Youtube