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Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

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141–150 of 187 posts

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#142
When you ask this question, you need to ask: "what aspect?".

I primarily use YouTube for three particular tasks:

1. Watch lecture videos from Stanford, MIT, NYU classes.

2. Watch or listen to music videos.

3. Watch some channels like Vox, Veritasium, 3b1b, Lex Fridman Podcast, etc. That is, stuff from sources that I already know pretty well.

For me, YouTube is more than fine. I will not change anything.

Even ten years before, this much educational content weren’t available. And it is increasing every year. And more and more people from the US and the rest of the world are getting connected.

This aspect is far from being plateaued.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#143

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 finding YouTube a goldmine for my current interest

Same here. I exercise daily at home. A few months ago, on a whim, I bought some kettlebells, which I used to see in the gym but had never used before. Once I started searching for and watching kettlebell instruction videos on YouTube, I started getting more such videos as recommendations. Some of the videos were really good, and they helped me learn how to exercise with kettlebells safely and effectively.

Among the recommendations were also some videos about maces, or macebells, which I had never even heard of. Intrigued, I ordered a couple, and now I have added them to my daily workout, too. I never would have discovered them, or learned how to use them, if it weren’t for YouTube.

Occasionally I dip into YouTube rabbit holes for subjects I was interested in when I was young (I’m sixty-five now), things like music theory or woodcraft or typography. I am always impressed at how much easier it is to learn such things on one’s own now than it was fifty years ago. Instruction books and searches of the wider web are also useful, of course, but for learning anything with a visual and/or audio component YouTube is fantastic.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#144

I hate the youtube search these days. You get back a very limited list off content you serached for and a lot off videos that are "related" to your search.

Have you tried searching for videos using Google, DDG, or Bing? I find it's better than YT's search. There is a browser plugin named "Unhook" that removes "related" search results.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#145

No, YouTube has not peaked, YouTube is only getting better. However, the only way to experience this is to DISCOVER CONTENT OUTSIDE OF YOUTUBE. If you just click around YouTube you will get the content equivalent of Mountain Dew and Cheetos - unhealthy garbage that will make you worse off but will enrich the vendor. If you want to find the good stuff you have to know what you're looking for and seek it out.

I use DDG to search for videos and find it much more useful.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#146
post #58

Oh, they have content on there still? I thought it was just ads.

If you use browser plugins, it's still quite a nice experience.

* uBlock Origin (kills the ads)

* SponsorBlock (uses crowdsourcing to skip the sponsored, intros, self promotion, credits, etc. This cuts 10% to 20% from most videos, saving a lot of time)

* Channel Blocker (gives you a button to permanently block all videos from a channel)

* BlockTube (lets you block videos based on keywords in video titles)

* Unhook (removes recommended and suggested videos)

* Better Subscriptions for YouTube (lets you hide videos you've already watched from your subscriptions page and other pages)

Another popular YouTube plugin is 'Enhancer for YouTube', but personally I don't find this one very useful.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#147
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)...

Yes, this ship has sailed ever since search is not returning most relevant results but ordered by whatever they think would make me watch more...

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#148
post #139
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Majority of tech videos are a case of blind leading the blind and unless you know the subject already it's hard to spot. It drives me CRAZY! How often I want to know something about a product (something less popular than smartphones, let's say IP cameras) and I find only ~3 reviews, I watch them all and they are all full of BS, because the reviewer has no experience with the product type they are given, they just f…

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 fakes, or possibly reviews for other products. In any case, there are no incentives to give high quality reviews of products, and google seems to have no incentive to show me the few remaining real review blogs.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#149
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.

I wonder if there's any service/search engine that could help find authentic, non-monetized content? Ideally results would be filtered out if they had any ads at all or affiliate links anywhere on the domain. Perhaps it'd also be valuable to exclude analytics platforms? I feel like a decade ago discoverability of those little corners of the internet where someone is passionate about something and writes a blog about…

To be fair, even a passion project will use analytics because it’s nice to know one doesn’t produce passionately for the void.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#150
post #34

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.

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