Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

It depends on the subject matter I think. For more popular subjects I definitely think that an obsession with monetization is having a negative effect. For more niche subjects, it's still very much like early YouTube - lots of organic well made content.

I watch a lot of videos related to two of my hobbies fly fishing/tying and ham radio. There is very little in the way of sponsorship or paid reviews and nearly all videos on these subjects feel rewarding to watch.

Technical content on the other hand is a whole different ball game. If I have to learn a new framework or library I used to head to YouTube first to view a few tutorials before diving in to the docs. The quality of these has declined because a lot of channels are just churning out tutorials without really understanding the subject matter. In some cases they are just video versions of the getting started tutorials on the libraries website. There are loads of channels where they churn out new low quality tutorials every day on a wide range of subjects - jack of all trades, master of none - but they are doing something right because YouTube places them high in the search results.

And as for the bigger channels on popular subjects such a gadgets, computers, food and gaming - yes I do feel like they are often feel like the content support the advertising as oppose the adverts supporting the content.

I think to get value from YouTube you just need to be a bit more choosy. There is still good organic content being made, but it sits behind all the stuff that is primarily designed to get high up in the search results and make money. Remember, the way YouTube ranks search results and places suggestions is designed to benefit them more than you.

While the majority of recommendations are bigger monetized channels, I still come across tiny channels with view numbers in the double or tripple digits quite regularly, but it does require searching for something specific. Youtube also changed the algorithm recently to no longer punish old content, so there is a lot of old stuff that keeps bubbling back to the top. It might still have peaked, but I think for most part it's doing fine, it's still the best source for video on the Internet.

On a side note, I find it interesting that TikTok today feels quite a lot like early Youtube, back when Youtube had much more personal content, video replies and a <10min limit for video. Seems like the market for that content is there, it just moved to another platform.

> Oh also Youtube has become the home for the cancer of tutorial: the video tutorials. Why cancer? Because reading is faster, searchable, indexable, etc.

Reading may be faster for a lot of things, but there are instances where nothing beats a video - one of them is any sort of tutorial for a GUI program like Photoshop, Premiere, IntelliJ or whatever. A written tutorial either assumes the user knows exactly what the "lasso tool" is and how to select it (and so is useless for novices) or it assumes "know nothing" and so is excessively verbose for people above the "barely novice" level.

With a well made video tutorial, both a complete novice and an expert can find value, simply because all the verbose description can be seen in action on the screen.

I would say the YouTube content is better than ever, but YouTube itself is shittier than ever. Removing dislike button/count, demonetizing people without valid reason, censorship, copyright trolls without bounds, absolutely insane amount ads before, in the middle of and after the video etc.

Without adblocker YouTube would be unsable.

All I know is that my search results have the same <20 people for any subject matter. It's like, where the heck are all the humans that exist? It's almost as bad as any mainstream filter.