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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?

#301

Post by raarts »

bmitc wrote: post #269
dereg wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content they want you to watch and not content that you want to watch. Watching intellectual long-form content does not equal ad revenue, user "engagement", and whatever else bullshit addictive metrics they only care about. None of these systems are for the people. It's either about YouTube's bottom dollar or some influencer's ego. It is really amazing t…

> It's pretty clear to me that YouTube wants to steer you towards content _they_ want you to watch and not content that you want to watch.

This is it. Exactly.

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

#303

Post by antioppressor »

dwild wrote: post #263
antioppressor wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is also nonfunctional, useless, not for human consumption. You can't filter those in any way. It looks like a relic from the 90s :DDD. Anything else you want to add?

> You can't filter those in any way. You can easily filter it, by unsubscribing to content you don't actually want. If you watch so little content of a channel that it annoys you to see it on the subscriptions pages, then you shouldn't be subscribed to them. I can't see how adding a filter system would be less annoying at that point, you would take more time by selecting some filter than just ignoring that specific c…

If you allow several hundred subscriptions, then make sure you can filter through various ways too. So easy. There are channels who create good content, but on rare occasions. So if you unsubscribe you have to manually view their channel.

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

#304

Post by antioppressor »

aninteger wrote: post #193
andsoitis wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe near-zero but not zero. They said that they watch content from 10 (out of the 100) creators they are subscribed to. I'm in a similar position. I'm subscribed to 78 channels but typically will only watch content from a fraction of these due to preferences on quality and time (some creators have good content but end up putting up an hour video, which I am less likely to view).

^^^ mil has arrived :D

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

#305

Post by is_true »

andsoitis wrote: post #207
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?

It depends. I know a couple of people that have channels and they really like to help others. But I'm sure most people is looking for something else.

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

#306

Post by shapefrog »

gherkinnn wrote: post #73
shapefrog wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ...

> It makes me worry about the future of humanity I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies. Teenagers are stupid. Always were, always will be. I know I was. And yet here we are. Alive and well.

> I have the impression that most of it is geared towards children and teenagers. So of course it seems abhorrent to us oldies

I have seen what facebook feeds boomers - it too is abhorrent.

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

#307

Post by Pyrodogg »

I wonder how much removing the public downvote count has led people to reduce or stop reporting altogether. Now it's just another signal that does into the void, so who cares. Its now solely up to YouTube to consider that metric and possibly down rank videos. It used to, at least in part, be a social effect. It was an aggregate signal from many people to many people. Even if YouTube didn't consider it at all in ranking it would have power. Now YouTube is on the hook for modeling all of that.

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

#308

Post by Gareth321 »

thematrixturtle wrote: post #28
Gareth321 wrote: post #23

Odysee is going from strength to strength. It's quite solid now as a platform; just needs more content creators. As YouTube continues to ban creators for any and no reason at all, they'll find their way to these competing platforms. Rumble is also pretty good but I've noticed it tends to attract more right wing American creators. That's fine if that's what you're into but I am not American and prefer a wider range of…

I had never heard of this before, and it seems to be a shallow clone of YouTube with (surprise!) crypto grafted on. The videos all seem to be copied from YouTube, and the first "Top featured" video had racked up all of 188 views in the past week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LBRY

I'm not sure why it would be surprising or bad that creators upload to YouTube and alternative platforms. I don't like exclusivity and I'm glad that that doesn't appear to be a major strategy for any of them. As for engagement, what I understand you to be arguing is that because Odysee doesn't have the same userbase as YouTube, it is bad? Can you see why this argument would invalidate anyone trying to compete with any incumbent in any market?

My comment was really to reinforce that the platform is competitive now. As I said, it just needs more content creators.

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

#309

Post by _ncore »

martythemaniak wrote: post #111
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…

This isn't a problem, people have to pay their bills somehow. You can either watch ads or pay for Premium and not watch ads.

Hi marty,

Are you the creator of Blockbattle.net? You seem to be the creator of this subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/a:t5_2sezu/)? I remember playing it a couple years ago but it seems to have been taken down. Have you thought about open-sourcing it potentially? I've been wanting to re-create it for a while but really like to keep to original aesthetic, so having access to the CSS and game-logic would be great so I could faithfully re-create it. You can contact me at benjamin@bartels.dev

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