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Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

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Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#31

Post by labrador »

smcl wrote: post #24
labrador wrote: post #8

Suggestion: Have an AI or text analyzer assign a grade level to all documentaries and talks. I say this after wasting some time tonight trying to find a documentary or lecture on early humans. The first 4 I tried were 6th to 8th grade level while one was in the style of Bible stories, so it was for even younger. The nearest I can figure is home schoolers are creating these for their kids and uploading to pass them ar…

I can't help feeling this is a modern day repeat of JWZ's old aphorism on regexes, and the root cause of quite a lot of user frustration with Google products: > Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use AI." Now they have two problems.

I don't know what you call a tool that ranks text by grammar complexity and word obscurity so I called it AI or just "text analyzer"

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#32

Post by Larrikin »

At some point during Covid they seemed to just decide they wanted to abuse users and its been a steady decline since.

My largest use cases were watching DJ sets, music videos, stand up comedians, instructional videos, and life of (random career) videos

Music videos have multiple ads before and after now. The music videos are still watchable but it sucks to put youtube on at a party now.

Life of videos from channels worth watching have started to turn off ads in place of putting in their own sponsored content. Annoying but similar to TV commercials of the past and are always skippable.

But they have started destroying all of the other content I enjoyed. Instructional videos are overly long with the interrupting ads to the point of questioning whether the visual information with more time but easier understanding vs the extra reading becomes a serious contemplation.

But comedies and extended DJ sets are unwatchable. The ML "predicts" natural breaks in language to insert ads into. When it comes to comedies its usually right before the punch line/the laughing, but the developers do not care at all that after the commercial ends and are resuming a second or two after the punch line. Not only is the timing ruined but you often miss the joke entirely. They have not figured out what to do with DJ sets so they just randomly interrupt in the middle of songs. I had ad breaks 3 times within 10 minutes of a 60 minute set today before I switched to AirPlaying my computer with AdNauseum installed.

Anything I think I might want to watch ever again is immediately added to a playlist for yt-dlp. It makes the content watchable again and protects against channels that will delete content so they can add it back later for increased later views or because of fake DMCA takedowns.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#33

Post by hattmall »

ralusek wrote: post #10
dageshi wrote: post #7

Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well. Significant downgrade on what it used to be.

I've noticed this with Google, too. Particularly when searching for things in the past, it's like they adamantly don't want 3+ months ago to exist. I now have to archive news articles and the like because I know that I'm going to have an extremely hard time finding them later.

If search works too good you are gone too quickly. Amazon figured this out A LOOOONG time ago. If Google makes you rephrase your search 10 times that 10x ads they can show you. If they take those opportunities to also drive you to crap sites that waste time but are heavily monetized by Google ads then that's even more for them. It's no different than grocery stores putting the most commonly purchased items all the way in the back. Want to run in and get milk? Maybe, we have 6 gallons that expire in the next 5 minutes up front, but if you want more you gotta walk past chips, beer, frozen pizzas and a wall of cheese.

It's definitely an accelerating trend though, online search is getting so much worse and even fast food menus are insane now. You need to the app to see anything other than the most profitable combos in many cases.

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#34

Post by badpun »

lozenge wrote: post #20
AraceliHarker wrote: post #9

YouTubers have become more professional and post a large number of videos optimized for monetization (trendy videos, videos around 10 minutes long with additional ads inserted in the video, etc.). In addition, in order to maximize advertising revenue, YouTube tends to place more importance on new click-bait videos that have a rapid increase in views, rather than high quality videos that can be viewed over a long peri…

Specifically, YouTube stops suggesting videos from your channel if you aren't posting weekly. They need to keep posting bad videos just to keep the revenue increasing on the good ones.

Ooh, that explains so much I see in some of my favorite youtube channels...

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#36

Post by RL_Quine »

nullandvoid wrote: post #30
o_m wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deleted my youtube/google account and started using RSS feeds instead.

The only sane way to consume YouTube these days. I also just manage a curated list of channels and consume via RSS, with YT perpetually blocked, short of a few re-review days per year.

Youtube is also basically unwatchable without both adblock and sponsorblock. At this point most videos are are at least 1/3rd clipped by the latter.

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#38

Post by irusensei »

I keep reading they are an ad company and that’s fair except they are doing a really bad job. I keep seeing the same ad over and over and over again. Those are annoying loud ads that are more region than preference based. You don’t need some personalized ad system to find out what kind of ad a person watching a video game video would be interested.

Skipping a video to look for a certain scene will trigger double ads and sometimes you will see another set of ads a few seconds later.

If a video is less than 3 minutes long and it starts with unskipable 12 seconds ad followed by another one I don’t even bother.

My general experience with the platform is brands advertising on YouTube gives me repulse instead of wanting to buy something.

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#39

Post by lloydatkinson »

gherkinnn wrote: post #19

YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed. Though there is a growing number of anecdotes surrounding (niche|not palatable to SV) channels who’s subscribers don’t get notified despite the bell thing being on, new videos no longer in feeds, and even people getting unsubscribed for no apparent reason. This is a problem, as I’d sooner give up peanut butter than on…

I can refresh the home page a hundred times in a row and the exact same videos in the exact same order get displayed. It never used to be like this. I have no idea what the hell is going on at YouTube head office.

Re: Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

#40

Post by ur-whale »

dageshi wrote: post #7

Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed. They've changed it to start showing random shit you might want to watch instead of the thing you actually searched for after the first 10 or so videos. They seem to repeat videos they think you ought to watch quite often in search results as well. Significant downgrade on what it used to be.

> Their search has got pretty bad I've noticed

YT search was never good (that I can recall).

When I want to find content on YT, I use Google search with a site restrict [1].

Infinitely better.

I invite you all to do the same and forget the YT search box.

[1] something like : life of Albert Einstein site:youtube.com

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