151–160 of 187 posts
Especially since the removal of downvoting it's hard to get to good quality material. Majority of tech videos are a case of blind leading the blind and unless you know the subject already it's hard to spot. Nowadays I start with a forum/reddit/discord/hn search for a list of hive approved creators and only then go to youtube with that list in hand. Starting the search in youtube (unless for a very niche/non-marketabl…
I'm now watching YouTube more than any of my other streaming content. It's more interesting content than Big Entertainment is producing and I get a chance to learn something to boot!
What I don't do - I rarely watch IT-related videos. The videos I watch are related to my interests and hobbies. If I need anything IT-specific I first start with my company's training provider who provides self-paced content specific to whatever it is I need to learn.
I think YouTube is like Reddit: it is what you make of it. If you only ever look at the front page of Reddit, you're going to be fed memes and outrage. If you go and subscribe to a few small, focused subreddits, you're going to see things that are relevant to you. Same with YouTube. If you watch a lot of junk content, that's what it's going to feed you in recommendations. If you focus on some specific segment of cont…
So it is still impossible to decide today that I want to see good reviews of some technology category, whereas I am usually interested in something completely different.
Google, and I assume Youtube as well, tries really hard to connect all my different accounts and identities on different devices, browsers. That closes the escape hatch that I could have one browser identity focused on topic A and another on topic B. All in all we have to be honest here. Youtube only interest is to serve us content that will make us watch more content. They have absolutely no incentive to show me content, that is relevant to me.
Yes it has. It seems like the downturn was a few years ago when they made their monetization system pay less to the content creators and introduced a high barrier to entry for monetization (1k subscribers). Add in the algorithm preferring new content and channels that publish new videos frequently (weekly or more), making it essentially a full time job staying relevant. Youtube money is not enough to pay for living i…
> Yes it has. It seems like the downturn was a few years ago when they made their monetization system pay less to the content creators Do you have a source for that? As far as I know, the YT revenue share has been stable (at 55% to the creator) for like 15 years.
The revenue split may have stayed the same but the revenue total has gone down, despite the huge increase in the number of ads.
E.g. Mathias Wandel has discussed the financial side of running YouTube if you want to dig deeper.
I think YouTube is like Reddit: it is what you make of it. If you only ever look at the front page of Reddit, you're going to be fed memes and outrage. If you go and subscribe to a few small, focused subreddits, you're going to see things that are relevant to you. Same with YouTube. If you watch a lot of junk content, that's what it's going to feed you in recommendations. If you focus on some specific segment of cont…
Recommendation engines like YouTube are way too confident in their own abilities, to the point that they hide first-class operations like these behind the little three-dot menu on videos. They support negative feedback reluctantly, to the detriment of society.
I bet you their reasoning is "well, not many people use it so it doesn't need to be up front", but the problem is that it must be used in order to tailor the feed correctly, and now many people don't even know it's an option because it's hidden.
Maybe in some areas (software) but I'm finding YouTube a goldmine for my current interest - learning to drive in the UK When I was 17 I started learning for about 8 months but then stopped due to various reasons. I'm 35 now and picking it back up again and the most mind blowing aspect of it is how much content there is on YouTube to help learner drivers, compared to back then! There are loads of creators (usually dri…
If you're seeking a horrorshow of real life "don't do this" examples of questionable driving practices I recommend DashCamOwners: UK: https://www.youtube.com/c/UKDashCameras/videos AU: https://www.youtube.com/c/DashCamOwnersAustralia/videos both drive on the same side.
"I'll just watch one while I eat lunch" is a slippery slope.
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I think the OP's point is that people like Colin Furze used to film themselves and just put out content, but now they court sponsors and have a production team. All of the people you mentioned have a production team, I think. I've got some channels I watch that don't have production crews (I think) like "Under Dunn" and I enjoy them every bit as much as the big ones you named, if not more... But there's no doubt that…
It's true that monetization has changed things and I can understand that for some folks it's bad but for some I think it's been really good. In the old days the content was only driven by passion, because it wasn't really possible to make a living or fund a production team. These days, you get guys like Colin Furze who are able to do what they're passionate about full-time, with nice equipment and staff to support th…
His formula is taking topics that have been covered by other creators, dumbing the content down a bit, adding a sponsor block and a clickbait title. There's no effort expended in contributing new topics, or adding new colour to existing topics because researching that requires too much time and expertise to repeat day after day.
Especially since the removal of downvoting it's hard to get to good quality material. Majority of tech videos are a case of blind leading the blind and unless you know the subject already it's hard to spot. Nowadays I start with a forum/reddit/discord/hn search for a list of hive approved creators and only then go to youtube with that list in hand. Starting the search in youtube (unless for a very niche/non-marketabl…
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/return-youtub...
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It's so frustrating, too. I watch those videos to learn something new about the product (actual pros and cons, specific feature implementations, ...). But most of the time the "reviewer" basically reads the product description and goes over the list of features that I can find on literally any shop page that has that product. It's so hard to find videos of people that have actually used the product for longer periods…
This extends to review articles as well. 20 years ago there used to be magazines that reviewed products by actually using them. There were also users reviewing products and there were websites where these personal reviews were aggregated Nowadays all review article just work off the specs without using and testing the products. And the user reviews have moved to Amazon, which are mostly very poor quality or just fake…
I've also found user reviews on Home Depot to be more helpful than most. I'm not sure what they're doing to combat spam, but it seems to be working.