Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

The answer is super simple.

Wrong incentives + lack of mechanisms to find, navigate to and promote interesting content.

Nowadays, people create content on Youtube essentially only for profit (be it actual profit from Youtube or promotion).

That's it. That's what you are selecting from.

There are of course exceptions, but these are rare enough to not dictate the general quality of content.

And if you are dissatisfied with general quality, that's it. There is no catalog where you can drill down and search for stuff that you don't know but you might be interested in. You can only search for things you already know -- and really interesting things tend to be a bit outside of what you already know.

This is part of a bigger problem of indexing, searching and result recommendations. We used to have to go to forums and threads to find the content we need, but we grew increasingly reliant on NLP search and feed. I remember fondly of the time Orkut was dominant. No recommendations, no feeds, you had to personally go to a community of interest and find threads there. You had to find communities by interacting with people, and that was key to it. The content you consumed was directly tied to your own social circle, instead of being controlled by a central corporation.

We might have to find a way to divorce ourselves from search engines until something comes along to replace them. I see no problem using YouTube and such as a hosting platform, but for finding and consuming content, a more personal approach is needed. I doubt however that the mainstream consumer will sacrifice convenience and content volume for better quality content. We don't have to act as a mainstream consumer though.

Recommendation system is long time broken. I am subscribed to 100+ channels and check 10 channels on a weekly basis, meaning I watch all the new videos these creators make. So that means I want the new stuff from the frequented ones on my front page ASAP. Yet, it's a hit and miss. From the remaining 90 channels I never get anything recommended. Why?

If I subscribe to a new channel it gets recommended like hell, then it forgets about it.

BUT! Totally irrelevant things that I never watch, is kept on my front page for weeks. Like it wants me to check it or wants me to mute it, but fuck them I'm not giving them any more metrics. If I clear the fingerprints and block the acquiring of these metrics the front page gets filled with new, interesting content. Who the hell understands this? I have also observed that if you have an adblocker enabled it gives you trash all the time.

When the absolutely disgusting, braindead, bottomfeeding "depp vs amber" nightmare was ongoing I had to "mute" the same channels multiple times and then 55 others, because it just slams it into my face. Watch it, watch it, you must see this muck.

The topic of my fav channels represent... I get nothing relevant from them. :DDD

The shorts... was the pinnacle of YTs innovation. :DDDD

Goog is all about control now. Look innovation for somewhere else... well... if you can find any, lemme know........

You can't do shit with godzilla and now he does whatever he wants.

I like to use adblock's element picker to get rid of:

- recommendation bar on the right

- comments

- videos recommended at the end of the video by youtube

Plus I subscribe only through rss feeds. This way, I left just with the content and completely isolated from the toxicity that is the recommendation system.

The moment a platform start the "monetization war" and have some "influencers" working for them and get traction... that moment will kill/bury original and honest content made from passion and not "to make a living, to win $".

The same way blogs died long ago, remember all the craze about having a blog, affiliate links, earn a living blabla

People jumped in.. and so advertisers.. and so 'they killed Kenny"

Imagine YT videos without ads (ok, buy a premium but.. the trash is still there just wihout ads), so it's not a solution, not anymore.

I just stopped watching YT, I just try to find articles and read them, using adblockers and imagine what: I disabled all images in Firefox, too much distraction.