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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 someone.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't your first parapraph an example of YouTube's algorithm underfitting though?
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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).
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.
> 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
> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know!
Check out Peter Millard.
> 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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
There is no barrier, only a moat. The moat is enforced by copyright.
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.
they're competing against themselves to essentially not screw up.
Netflix, Disney, Paramount, cable TV, satellite TV, Twitch, etc etc
It's like saying McDonalds doesn't have any competitor.
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.
And Morphe (https://morphe.software) on Android.
Have a look at Odysee, it is a decentralized alternative to YouTube, not just a frontend, and some YouTube channels are mirrored there already.
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.
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"?
"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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[delayed]
I always see it as more of a social media company rather than a media co.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
There's nothing social about it. You don't add your friends and chat with your friends on YouTube.
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.
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.
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.
Youtube's the only social media left where subscribing to a channel actually means something
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 someone.
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.
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.
Unrelated plug for a youtube channel:
Photonicinduction
The very best of what youtube can offer, to me. Pick any video.
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
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).
can someone tell me why youtube music is so good at recommending me music i certainly won't like?
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).
> 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
How much of the revenue is based on fake news, hate speech and conspiracy theories?
proportionally the same as everywhere else, so insignificant for comparison