Discussion
qweiopqweiop: 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.
lemonish97: I always see it as more of a social media company rather than a media co.
busymom0: I often comment on videos but never do I check replies to my comments there.
kami23: 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.
FrustratedMonky: Its what people want.Time to stop thinking corporations will suddenly start policing themsleves.
ssenssei: 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
wat10000: 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.
rocketvole: 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
sheept: 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
unclad5968: I tried to one time, but I couldn't even figure it out so I gave up.
tombert: 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.
arccy: 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.
rickcarlino: 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.
tombert: 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.
Gagarin1917: 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.
rambambram: 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.
nonameiguess: 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.
ajross: 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.
rambambram: 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!
guzfip: > 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.
cogman10: 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.
wffurr: 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.
meetingthrower: This has happened to me btw. I can only suspect they are "testing" the reception.
tombert: 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 creative stuff.If I start seeing ads unless I'm extorted for more money, that might end up being a final straw for me.
iwontberude: 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.
raincole: 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.
keiferski: 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.
redwall_hp: 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.
asdff: 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.
hitekker: 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.
beezlebroxxxxxx: 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.
seydor: 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
ramesh31: >"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."Turn off the feed and turn on your brain. Think about what you want to learn and search for it. If you don't know what you want to learn, read until you do. The algorithms have turned our minds into mush.
rambambram: 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.
RobRivera: 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
esafak: "Who's here from Hacker News??"
nntwozz: Mandatory shoutout to Invidious:https://invidious.io https://github.com/iv-org/invidiousAn 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/yatteePrivacy oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS with Invidious support.
yangm97: Have a look at Odysee, it is a decentralized alternative to YouTube, not just a frontend, and some YouTube channels are mirrored there already.
gritspants: 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.
foruhar: 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.
wiether: > some cracking Scottish chap going for a bike ride with a bottle of whisky.I've seen that one!
Larrikin: 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.
peab: Youtube's the only social media left where subscribing to a channel actually means something
lotsofpulp: >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?
tombert: 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.
lotsofpulp: 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.
tombert: 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.
Quarrelsome: 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).
jorvi: 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.
argee: [delayed]
asdfman123: 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.
Cider9986: 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.
FireInsight: 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.
cgh: 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"?
m6z: 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.
dzonga: 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.
topsphere: Check out the Unhook extension (available in various browsers), it can turn YT into search box + video player.
CM30: 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.
chromacity: 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.
jeffbee: > The majority of views goes toward a relatively small number of mainstream content creatorsBy 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.
tshaddox: 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.
pyreko: 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.
Gagarin1917: >They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page nowBecause 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.
pyreko: Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shorts lol. It's at the very top too, so you literally could not avoid seeing. If they interspersed it with normal content 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.
kube-system: > 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
rambambram: 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.
Gander5739: They play on app startup on the android app, at least for me.
biggestfan: That happens if you close the app while on a Short. Otherwise it opens to the homepage.
Gander5739: I don't watch shorts. I have them disabled via morphe.
paul7986: 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).
csours: 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.
tonyedgecombe: [delayed]
parasti: 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.
signatoremo: 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.
dmbche: Newpipe and freepipe!
Hikikomori: Or smart tube and revanced.
giancarlostoro: 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.
charcircuit: >hide old videos they cannot monetizeAll videos are monetized. Some videos don't do rev share with the author, but YouTube still gets the ad rev.
Clamchop: 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.
charcircuit: I think at this point all videos have ads. Demonized videos not having ads hasn't been a thing for what feels like years.
toomanyrichies: > 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
imiric: > I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTubeWhy 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.
tombert: > The slight remorse I feel by not using official YT frontends is towards creators I enjoy watchingThat'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".
carlosjobim: Netflix, Disney, Paramount, cable TV, satellite TV, Twitch, etc etcIt's like saying McDonalds doesn't have any competitor.
Sohcahtoa82: Those aren't competitors to YouTube for the sole reason that nearly anybody can upload to YouTube.
carlosjobim: That is of no relevance to the customer/consumer. All of these companies are competing for customers of video entertainment.
bdangubic: 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.
carlosjobim: > 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.
Fnoord: [delayed]
kotaKat: You click the button to hide the card of Shorts on the home page and it just saysWe'll show you fewer Shorts on HomeNot "no more", but "fewer". Which means you don't get a choice, YouTube will still shove them down your throat.
Gagarin1917: 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.
greenchair: 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.
brikym: 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.
osigurdson: 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.
patmorgan23: Hosting cost and the network effects are the barriers
Gagarin1917: 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.
Gagarin1917: >Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shortsAn “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?
kang: 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.
crazygringo: What purge?I'm searching Google trying to figure out what you're talking about but not getting any meaningful results.
dbcurtis: > 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.
jjk166: 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.
lotsofpulp: >Youtube doesn't own any of the content on its platformWhat 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
siavosh: 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?
jamesfinlayson: 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).
TurdF3rguson: 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.
gerdesj: "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)!
rconti: 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.
tredre3: 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.
Dylan16807: 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.
lairv: 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 dateSearch results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727Basically 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
BloondAndDoom: 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.
jamesfinlayson: 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.
shiroiuma: >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?
charcircuit: Demonetized
darepublic: There is a huge amount of amazing YouTube content. I just fear the company that owns it.
saltyoldman: 40+ers Who here thought Google was nuts in 2006 for buying them?(raises hand)
MrDrMcCoy: 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.
MrDrMcCoy: 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.
dyauspitr: YouTube really is the best. It deserves it. It’s the vast majority of my video consumption and has been for many years.
viewtransform: Appending 'before:2024' to your search term works on YouTube and gives results from the pre-slopocine era.
thundergolfer: 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.
fancyfredbot: "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.
thundergolfer: The comments pretending Marvel actors (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch) are their Marvel characters in other movies (e.g. Sam Mendes' 1917) kill me.
OuterVale: 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...
dyauspitr: 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.
wffurr: > it respects my time> remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must installWhich 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.
hitekker: 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.If Youtube eventually enabled me to disable the fun colors in-app, then I'd consider that even more respectful of my time-- which is still not required since I know the onus is on me to first respect my own time. (Psalm 90:12)I'm sympathetic to the idea that most internet websites are addicting and bad for society, but I think blaming them is a bit of game, where we give up our agency in exchange for granting them a strange power. I'm not a victim, they're not a God.
mx7zysuj4xew: 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 themBarely literate workers in 3rd world countries then went on a mass "moderation" spree deleting anything that might even remotely be considered controversialVideos with millions of views were delisted overnight and the associated channels received community standards violation strikes
GuB-42: 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.
tombert: 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.
Panzer04: 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)
fragmede: 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.
kbelder: 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.
nothrowaways: Could as well eat Spotify in a snap, just has to comment out that stupid disable_minimize()
Willish42: 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)
NoPicklez: 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.
anon84873628: By the way, one of the Premium features is to be able to skip over in-video sponsored segments.
vivzkestrel: - 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
kimjune01: ishitani
mixmastamyk: Is that related to freetube removing the video tab (of a channel), sort by age dropdown menu?
xboxnolifes: It wasn't about favoring them. Videos needed to be 10 minutes long to get mid-roll ads.
dyauspitr: 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.
UltraSane: 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"
ButlerianJihad: 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.
UltraSane: Firefox and uBlock Origin lets you watch YouTube without ads.
casey2: It's one of the US's (or some future world government) greatest future public utilities for sure.
IshKebab: > 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 TapsI 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.
rambambram: 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!
IshKebab: > I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overviewYou 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 informativeIt wasn't an exhaustive list!
squigz: Click History on the homepage left sidebar > Comments on right side of History pagehttps://www.youtube.com/feed/history
croes: And now try to find the comment someone replied to
loevborg: 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
squigz: Do you and GP not get notifications for replies and (at least some) likes?
loevborg: I don't think I get notified but maybe it's because my replies are unpopular
nitrat3: 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.
izacus: 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.
euroderf: yt-dlp is essential for gathering what you really value. Even under stable URLs, videos can be changed.
izacus: A competitor to YouTube needs to support paying the creators not demand content for free.
kccqzy: 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.
kalleboo: [delayed]
user205738: SponsorBlock already does this.
OptionalDonuts: Thanks for your favourites/recommendations! I'm definitely gonna check them out, already watching Acerola's "Why I'm Moving To Godot In 2025".
pllbnk: 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
rustygorgon: 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.
chistev: I'm surprised it wasn't.
fooker: > 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?
wolvesechoes: > 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.
ButlerianJihad: One really stunning deep dive into the bowels of weird YT content: https://youtu.be/JAALDob9Ev0?si=vooePQoQM0TURpNK 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.
squishy47: 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 2mcat 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.
