Hacker News

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I always see it as more of a social media company rather than a media co.

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.

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.

Youtube's the only social media left where subscribing to a channel actually means something

Unrelated plug for a youtube channel:

Photonicinduction

The very best of what youtube can offer, to me. Pick any video.

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.

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.

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

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.

Could as well eat Spotify in a snap, just has to comment out that stupid

    disable_minimize()

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.

can someone tell me why youtube music is so good at recommending me music i certainly won't like?

> 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

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).

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

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

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

[dead]

How much of the revenue is based on fake news, hate speech and conspiracy theories?