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Ask HN: Why has quality of YouTube reduced drastically?

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

#201

Post by tpoacher »

gtirloni wrote: post #100
tpoacher wrote: post #85

And more importantly, how can we as a community take advantage of this opportunity to promote / establish some open alternatives?

What are they?

Well, ideally, the best platform for video is one that is not for video, but instead simply attaches appropriate information to existing videos, or aggregating links to existing videos present on the internet and attaches that information as a third party service, which then allows them to be searched via a standard search engine and viewed/downloaded directly. Like it was before youtube in the good old altavista days, and like is still the case for images.

But if you must have a platform, there are several alternatives to youtube: peertube, odysee, lbry, ipfs, (legal) torrents, internet archive, oldskool p2p tech, ...

There's also alternative interfaces to youtube (e.g. youtube-dl, newpipe libretube), though that's a suboptimal solution to the larger problem.

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

#202

Post by kzrdude »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #87
kzrdude wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good thing in my book, that's a feature. Recommendations are made, and they are random in some sense. But an interface needs a certain persistence to be user friendly. Too annoying to glance something, try to go back, and it's gone. Some persistence creates an environment that is a bit more spatial and nicer to my brain.

I don’t think you’re understanding what I’m saying. As a YouTube user I don’t want the same 20 videos displayed on the home screen ALL day. If If I haven’t watched them by then I clearly don’t want to.

No wonder I didn't understand, no time frame was mentioned. I think I understood your message and I think it is a good feature on a shorter time scale.

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

#203

Post by antioppressor »

andsoitis wrote: post #184
antioppressor wrote: post #145

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 sounds like you find near-zero value from YouTube, so you might as well stop using it?

I find value, but at what cost? When you are info hungry you don't like your precious time being wasted bc of inefficient systems hindering your work. Do I have to write API helper scripts and scrapers in 2022 for a top10 visited internet site?

BUT, BUT, BUT THE PINNACLE OF INNOVATION IS YOUTUBE/GOOGLE, RIGHT?

And they host these nice and trendy videos about how advanced they are, and how you should do your coding, how you should organize your work, your life, your team, whatever. And the terrible libraries... gimme a fn break. Too bad for the end consumer, it's all about pain.

I mean even porn sites have finer grained control on content filtering than YT :DDD. I'm wondering why they are not opening their code base and let the coding done by individuals, OF COURSE, FOR FREE! ha ha ha

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

#204

Post by dereg »

antioppressor wrote: post #145

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…

The best part of YouTube recommendations - side bar recommendations - have been broken for at least 7-9 years. I remember going on deep YouTube rabbit holes in another era, because their recommendations always pointed to new, highly related content. Then, at some point in time, YouTube switched their recommendations algorithm to direct me to a mixture of 1) videos (mostly on unrelated topics) that I've already viewed, 2) videos about topics that I've recently searched for or watched that are unrelated to the current video, 3) videos trending across all of YouTube, and etc.

There are other things that drive me nuts about YouTube's recommendations, like the fact that they will never recommend me the next part of a n-part video. If I'm watching part 2/3 of something, please show 3/3 in the side bar, YouTube!

YouTube's iterative degeneration into its current state points to the folly of A/B-maximalism. In the pursuit of getting more base hits, it seems like YouTube forgot that the goal of baseball is to win games and keep fans entertained.

YouTube has been bad for a while. I suppose that some part of that is good – YT effectively killed the addictive loops that made their website irresistible. However, there is a lot that sucks about it. The utility of YouTube has gone down. Furthermore, I think YT blew open a hole in the video space for services like TikTok to emerge. TikTok may be crack, but YouTube used to be cocaine.

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

#205

Post by andsoitis »

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…

> 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.

If you want entertainment that is not funded by ads, why not subscribe to YouTube Premium? "YouTube and YouTube Music ad-free, offline, and in the background"

https://www.youtube.com/premium

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

#206

Post by MiddleEndian »

I really only use youtube for very specific things. Music, and watching sumo wrestling. For those purposes, it's pretty good.

But Youtube is absolutely intending to replace broadcast television. So they want everyone talking about the same stuff, they want endless passive engagement, etc.

I never visit the homepage, I just have a bookmark https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s with the shortcut `yt` and search for what I want directly.

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

#207

Post by andsoitis »

is_true wrote: post #172

People creating content to scratch their own itch -> people creating content to make money But YouTube is also giving more room to spammers, they make more money when you have to watch 3 videos than when you watch 1. Unfortunately there's a big lack of ethics in the tech community.

> People creating content to scratch their own itch -> people creating content to make money

In both cases, isn't the driving force ultimately that of seeking relevance, attention, and/or popularity?

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

#208

Post by cmrdporcupine »

It's always had issues, but something has changed in the last few months. I'm seeing much lower quality recommendations than a year ago. And when I say "lower quality" I mean obvious bot spam, fake news and agitprop channels ("NASA discovered aliens" and "Trudeau/Biden/etc is a communist", "How Putin just owned the west" etc.)

The question I have is: let's say "we" collectively decide to "move on" from YouTube -- what could possibly replace it?

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

#209

Post by krelian »

ddmichael wrote: post #107

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…

Today's story[0] from the NYtimes sheds some light on the Youtube content industry. Basically these people are ruining it for the rest of us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/technology/youtube-automa...

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

#210

Post by dereg »

mrweasel wrote: post #162
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #134

Machine learning probably had something to do with it. It notices videos with thumbnails of people with their mouths and eyes wide open doing some kind of shocked expression with red arrows pointing to something perform better than average. Then it starts recommending videos with thumbnails like this preferentially. YouTubers take notice and start producing thumbnails like this for every video. Go to the front page r…

There was a Linus Tech Tips video where he admits that it's stupid, but sadly it works really well. It's a bit like when Wikipedia kept using Jimmy Wales' face in banners requesting donations. People claim to not like it, yet it's was what got the highest conversion rates.

This is a clear example of penny-wise but pound-foolish. At no point in a product's lifetime does should machine learning obviate the need for good taste.
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