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Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

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11–20 of 187 posts

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#11
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-marketable topics) is close to worthless.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#12
The drive for monetization certainly shows in the form of needlessly, absurdly long videos. I recently came across a "How to Make the Windows 11 Taskbar Completely Transparent" tutorial (I had a whim to do just that). The whole content boils down to "install such-and-such app". Length of the video? 5:50 :) (And the narrator calls it a "real quick video" by the way, so apparently that passes for being rather brief).

YT, or even videos in general, don't have a monopoly for that though. Eg. in my country some Sundays are shopping, some are not. Every now and then I need to google it out to find out if the shops are open next Sunday, and inevitably at the top of search results will sit a 4 screens long blog post starting with an 'immersive' story to the tune of "Imagine you wake up on Sunday morning, and your fridge is empty. That's a bummer, huh?", followed by paragraphs and paragraphs of such fluff with the only information any sane person could care about buried somewhere near the end : )

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#16
It did so several years ago. It is now practically begging for a competition with deep pockets to end its journey. Toktok has taken a lot of the fun content away from it.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#17
I still find youtube invaluable for tech related demos and tutorials. In fact, I've probably learned more in the last 5 years from youtube than any other source, books included.

There's little better than watching someone walk you through something new, especially when there's a good bit of exact configuration to get right.

As for other content, who knows. There's SO much stuff on youtube, stuff I wouldn't begin to know how to find. I'm sure most of it is of low value to most people, but I think some people just use it as a creative outlet, or a place to talk (with no viewers).

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#18
There is still some quality content on youtube, but the ads I get are awful and repetitive... It's probably my own fault though as I turn personalisation off (so likely no frequency capping)

And there's something tragic about people making content in their homes and reading out a marketing script about some crap for a minute.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#20
It’s the fact that every video is 10 minutes long now because then you can monetise better.

The majority of videos have about ~3 minutes of the actual content that you’re interested in and 7 minutes of just pure fluff and fillers.

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