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Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

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Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#51

Post by scoutt »

I'm split between agreeing with you, and that Youtube is no longer a thing for me.

Probably it's my forties talking here, but I am under the impression that the content and the format (including the length) is being leaned towards the 15-25 years old range.

For (our) work stuff, it's all 30 minutes "learning tutorials", for a kid getting hands on a programming language or tool, or the couch-video-watcher-curious.

I honestly don't have the time to look for tutorials of work stuff on YouTube (I don't even have audio on my work PC). If I must, I prefer to watch a lecture from a professor in some university. Text-format tutorials are always welcome.

What it leads me to my next point: everything in YT is entertaiment. No matter what, the main scope of all those video is to entertain people first, and teach later.

And for the entertainment PoV: for example last night I watched "What Makes This Song Great?" from a "Rick Beato". It's a musician that does an analysis about a song. Other than leaving me with a sense of "emptiness" the guy never REALLY explained "What Makes This Song Great". Perhaps a 25 yo sees this guy as an authority, or doesn't care wasting time, but I personally felt scammed.

I'll keep using YouTube to occasionally watch a trailer or an old music video clip or a live performance.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#53

Post by mkl95 »

Market segmentation, copyright trolls / bullies and extreme monetization have made Youtube lose most of its attractiveness. I created dozens of YT playlists over the years and copyright trolls ruined them, so nowadays I use Spotify instead. Youtube's future involves poaching Twitch streamers and targeting younger audiences.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#54

Post by me_bx »

Tainnor wrote: post #32
dtx1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why are you not using ublock & sponsorblock? Ads are a choice you know?

Ads aren't a choice on mobile or SmartTV.

on mobile, newPipe (open source app) is great to get youtube content without ads, and/or listen to the music of a youtube video with the screen turned off.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#55

Post by conradfr »

It's great for audio production and instruments, and music in general. Of course you have to be aware of the marketing and monetization aspect.

I see people raving about science or historian Youtubers etc, I see there's an audience and money to be made, but I'm not sure who has the time to watch all that?

For coding or tech in general I vastly prefer reading anyway.

Sometimes, a tech keynote at 1.5x in the background...

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#56

Post by V-2 »

jerrya wrote: post #23
V-2 wrote: post #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). Y…

There's a variety of youtube "creators" that I follow as I have the same interests or hobbies, okay, I'm an aviation nerd, and the videos from the same creators have over time morphed from ad-hoc, homemade, quicky explainers into very professional looking videos clearly put together by a team. And they are longer. And they are selling their merch. And they are all cross-promoting each other. And they are all advertis…

That's the problem. And it is said that internet has shortened our attention span - probably true. But the common wisdom is that it did so by being brief and to the point. But it's the opposite. Modern internet does that by drowning us in so much fluff (subscribe to our newsletter, or do you want to see our useless chatbot utterly fail to help you) that we've all developed our personal "skip intro" heuristics.

And we now have this knee-jerk reaction to aggressively cut through fluff even when there's actually no fluff.

Back in the day the list of shopping Sundays would be printed in my pocketbook calendar that I'd buy in early January. And it would be a simple list without all the "...shopping for goods is such an important part of life, you need to eat after all (sometimes too much, am I right!). But did you know that on some days..." BS. Because paper is an actual commodity, and no editor would publish a pocketbook calendar the size of a brick. Unlike paper though, kilobytes cost nothing, so there you go.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#57

Post by hef19898 »

adrianN wrote: post #44

The whole Internet hat peaked due to monetization. Very little content is created because somebody is passionate about something and wants to share. Almost all content is created to either directly make money or to collect enough followers to eventually start making money. Everything is fake and optimized to grab attention. What organic content remains is drowned out by the firehose of monetized content.

My youtube feed is heavily curated. Every once in a while Youtube tries to slip in some of those monetization channels (e.g. reaction videos, videos recycling snippets from films,...). Also, once in a while, I start exploring, trying to find some new stuff that inteigues me. This seems to kick the algorithm into over drive... It's two weeks now that I kick out channels and content after I watched some Goodwood Racing clips and stupid me clicked on one or two of youtubes recommendations below those...

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#59

Post by becquerel »

djhworld wrote: post #36

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…

I'm glad someone else has noticed this. There are tons of good vids showing mock driving exams with the faults highlighted and explained which I found really useful.

It's mostly good marketing for the instructors, I think - you get to know their personality and chops before you put down the quite large amount of money required for a full suite of lessons. And it's just good PR - adding value and all that...

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#60

Post by kuu »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #46
omega3 wrote: post #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-marketabl…

> Especially since the removal of downvoting A wake-up call that a single company annihilated our ability to sort out information for ourselves. I'm still rather disturbed and shaken.

You're waking up a bit too late... It's not different than Facebook and their news feed sorted by the "algorithm", the same as Instagram, TikTok or Twitter (at least with Twitter you still can choose)...
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