Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 309 posts

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

#101

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

irusensei wrote: post #38

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…

you're missing something. the job of an ad company isn't too sell products, it's to sell ad spots.

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

#102

Post by causi »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #97
causi wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. God help you if you're looking for a video not made by a popular youtuber. Saw an amazing fried chicken recipe ten years ago and think you can just scroll the results until you see it? Ha, fat chance. You've got about five results and then nothing but whatever horseshit is trendy today.

Add it to a playlist (or bookmark it). I don't trust the videos to still be up when I might be interested in them so I've become a little bit of a data hoarder.

Yes, it only takes one scroll through your "Liked" videos and noticing how many are gone to become an archivist. The Youtube folder on my media drive is quite large.

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

#103

Post by globular-toast »

From the title I thought you were talking about video quality. I've noticed the quality of videos is abysmal lately. Anything close to noise in a scene (like a waterfall, confetti etc.) is unwatchable. I don't get why they push the higher resolutions like 4K and 8K when upping the bitrate of 1080p would probably have a better impact. Marketing, I suppose.

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

#105

Post by kenOfYugen »

TL;DR The Unhook browser extentions makes YouTube usable.

Searching for something on YouTube does not work as expected at all. At some point they started deleting older videos with not that many views, and I remember at one time that I tried to access a video through a bookmark because it would not appear in the search results, that I was asked to state if this video should be removed or kept.

It didn't get deleted thankfully, however I could not find it easily again via the search results because of all the crap recommendations.

What I have found that makes the search work again is the Unhook extension [1,2]. By applying a few tweaks, YouTube has become usable again, as it removes most of the unrelated recommendations.

As mentioned in other comments, uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock are a requirement if one values their time. There are more efficient ways to support creators instead of watching random annoying ads and sponsor segments.

1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom... 2. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/unhook-remove-yout...

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

#106

Post by mkl »

washadjeffmad wrote: post #88
Larrikin wrote: post #32

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 w…

Your timeframe is right, but it's not just about ads. In 2017, Youtube altered search results following the mass shooting at the Las Vegas nightclub "to quell the spread of conspiracy theories". [1] It wasn't their first time changing the algorithms, but since then, they've applied measures of varying degrees of severity following similar domestic and certain politically sensitive events, like the attack on the Googl…

A tangential quibble: Terrorism, not domestic terrorism. The perpetrator was foreign.

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

#107

Post by ddmichael »

You asked about bots and spam but I want to talk about the content degradation. YT has been heavily commercialised and lots of people are trying to make a living out of it. Most videos are about keeping viewers for as much time possible watching your content. As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video with introductions, discussions about the weather and silly sales/crowd manipulation tricks. Content is key and I really don't have the time for such a time waster: I'm always skipping to the point or completely ignoring absurdly long videos.

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

#108

Post by mulcyber »

popcorncowboy wrote: post #94

This is almost boringly textbook late-stage "monopoly in practice" playing out. Start with an "edge". Get big because edge. Use "big" to sharpen edge further. Use big (and/or edge) to consolidate market. Once sufficiently consolidated and/or controlled, raise costs. This is what costs getting raised looks like in a monopoly market. Who's gonna stop them.

Totally agree but I think it's only part of it, other problems probably take par in this:

- spammers are getting better and Google is less able and willing to moderate - the use of AI without much design around it. It's speculation since who knows how their algorithm works, but from what I've read and the general mindset in ML these days, it's very possible that they just use a recommendation AI with a single target (I've heard watch time, but again, who knows) with little to not design around it. This just does not work, especially if the AI is good at his job. It's a similar problem to decision makers blindly following KPIs, knowing if you did well and choosing criterias can be as hard as taking the decision itself, and an AI can't do that, you can't avoid designing your product.

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

#109

Post by luckylion »

shapefrog wrote: post #66
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…

> YT on a clean slate is horrendous It makes me worry about the future of humanity, as the clean slate is what is popular in your location. > open mouthed dweebs on a rainbow background for thumbnails Dont forget to add a large amount of money to the title my $$$$250,000 computer . But it f'ing works - I am really not sure what is wrong with people. Oh and now I get 2 ads every single video, its barely worth it ...

Hey, maybe in the future you'll inherit your parents' recommendations. If you're lucky and your parents and grandparents made good choices, you'll have a pleasant experience that makes it easy to make good choices, and if they didn't, your digital life will be terrible from the start. We'll talk about recommendation mobility as the easy of adapting to a user, regardless of their ancestors.

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

#110

Post by jerf »

gherkinnn wrote: post #93
Beltalowda wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YT on a clean slate is horrendous. Give it a few days and it becomes bearable. I’m mostly impressed. This used to be the case, but starting a month or two ago I get lots of completely and utterly irrelevant recommendations for things like soccer, hip-hop, "vlog" twats, and other "popular" content that I have absolutely zero interest in and that I can guarantee are 100% unrelated to any of my previous history. I als…

Interesting how our experiences differ. It is true that I always watch videos that aren’t immediately related to what I want in my feed incognito. Fuck these non-deterministic algorithms and the feeds they fill.

You can go to your history and remove videos. While I harbor no delusion that YouTube as a whole forgets that you've watched it as a result, I can vouch for the fact it does seem to mean the recommendation algorithm won't see it anymore.

I'm not immune to the occasional "cute pet" video, but the problem is the attraction basin of that is in the algorithm is so strong that if you show the slightest inclination towards it with so much as a single video view, it will instantly turn half your feed into "cute pet" videos. (There are many other such attraction basins.) Removing the view from your history fixes that problem.

It is still possible to keep the brow-level of your YouTube feed above "low". I've successfully been recommended some math videos in the past few days from channels I've not already heard of (might as well signal boost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vxW42R47bc , a nice crunchy analysis of a solution to a math problem covered on Numberphile that was unsolved at the time but surprisingly has a reasonably accessible solution). But it takes deliberate maintenance.

Post reply on HN