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YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

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Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just made up, it tracks downvotes from extension users and combines them with a historical database. And I think some creators share new info with the database to help the accuracy.

Creators can only share own counts and would be heavily incentivized to lower their dislike count, no? How is this supposed to work?

Many videos had the dislike count collected by the extension and stored before YouTube completely removed the counter from the videos. That number is now combined with dislikes sent by the users.

New videos will only show dislikes sent by people using the extension. There's no way to know the real number anymore.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#202
Positives:

* Presided over a vast increase in revenue, from $4 to $29 billion

* Steered the ship through a number of content controversies

* Anecdotally, the brand value of YouTube remains good

* YouTube Premium seems to have good uptake

* Presided over enormous cost savings with custom encoder hardware

* Few major technical outages, good streaming performance generally

* Relationships with advertisers and content creators generally remain good

Negatives:

* Missed the Twitch/streaming wave

* Missed the TikTok, short video wave

* YouTube Originals flopped (partly bc they didn't commit hard enough, not like Netflix or Amazon)

* Overall low user experience - slow/complex website and apps

* Issues for content creators - overly aggressive ContentID, not rewarding short but valuable videos enough (indie animation), opaque demonetization rules

* No shrinking of the algorithmic filter bubble

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#203
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays the comment section on several channels I watch is full of spam, oftentimes 50+ fake accounts responding to each other in threads.

I don't see that on the videos I watch. For example, this section from a song I recently listened to. Very nice comments. The Beatles - Within You Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck Do you see a bunch of spam comments? Maybe my ad blocker is blocking them?

I see "Video unavailable" + "Comments are turned off"

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dislike button was never removed, that is not accurate. The dislike count is no longer being displayed to viewers. Dislikes still exist. In my opinion, it is important to be accurate with language.

Isn't this a distinction without a difference? The point of having likes/dislikes is it's supposed to be a social signal for quality of the content? I have found dislikes useful for knowing which videos to skip if I am crunched for time and do not want to watch all of them, like music.

I regularly dislike decent content based on my idea of what youtube thinks of my recommendation preferences. It’s baffling how much I need to manually participate in their “engagement” metrics to be able to go to youtube.com without closing it shortly thereafter. And I wonder how much more echo chamber-y it is for less tech-savvy users who rarely touch these controls.

80% of regulars are not subscribed and don’t “like” videos according to content creators, that’s why they nag for “like, subscribe” five times per minute. Developers tend to think that bigcorps’ data analysis is at a rocket science level, when in reality it’s probably less efficient than SQL LIKE query could be on some `video.tags` field.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#205
post #202

Positives: * Presided over a vast increase in revenue, from $4 to $29 billion * Steered the ship through a number of content controversies * Anecdotally, the brand value of YouTube remains good * YouTube Premium seems to have good uptake * Presided over enormous cost savings with custom encoder hardware * Few major technical outages, good streaming performance generally * Relationships with advertisers and content cr…

> * Relationships with advertisers and content creators generally remain good

I'd say this is due to lack of competition and network effects than a good relationship. CuriosityStream, Nebula, and even channels as benign as Linus Tech Tips trying to get Floatplane off the ground show this relationship is far from strong. Your non-edgy creators wouldn't be trying to replace you if they thought you were doing a good job.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#207
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you sell it to a current spotify user?

YouTube's music library feels richer than Spotify. A few years ago I was contemplating a switch from YT Music to Spotify (I like Spotify's UX), but a lot of stuff I enjoy listening to was missing. But I might just have a weird taste in music.

I use both, spotify for my main listening and yt music for mixes, live shows, and lots of content that plainly isn't on spotify.

Yt music also supports tapping the side of the screen to jump forwards or backwards in 10 second increments. Seems like a trivial feature, but holy shit I have needed it my entire life. The ability to both rapidly and finely adjust the time is huge when listing to things like live shows that are a 2 hour video.

Crazy but I don't think I have ever had a program or hardware player that could do both. Always either fast forward/rewind or trying to finely slide a slider.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#208

YouTube has become such an unfree, restricted platform in recent years. Hopefully that changes, although I doubt it.

You can thank the concerted media effort to paint Youtube as a host for terrorist propaganda for that. The adpocalypse changed the site permanently for the worse, and a lot of people seem to overlook that.

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/ads-shown-isis...

this was a huge story overnight with tons of advertisers pulling out of youtube. the site became a lot more locked down after this and a few more advertiser threats in the following years.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#209
post #94

YouTube has been riding it's content momentum for too long. It really needs a change of leadership to continue to innovate. For some searches, it's baffling that the top results are clearly intuitively wrong (e.g. showing videos where dislike to like ratio is very high, compared to clearly better alternatives that you can find if you wade through the results)

YT search is dogshit now, rather than just returning results for the keyword you want they mix in random videos you've watched before and "suggested" videos that have no relation to the search and the lack of likes/dislikes makes it harder to determine quality, which is probably some dark pattern to try and drive more engagement by forcing people to watch multiple videos. Dark patterns work short term, long term they…

It's also not SHORTS really trying SHORTS to mix its content nicely SHORTS because i seem to find its recommendations boring SHORTS and often can't find videos that SHORTS i know should be there. Maybe SHORTS i should be using bing search to find youtube videos. Yandex also has a nice video search

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#210
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays the comment section on several channels I watch is full of spam, oftentimes 50+ fake accounts responding to each other in threads.

I don't see that on the videos I watch. For example, this section from a song I recently listened to. Very nice comments. The Beatles - Within You Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck Do you see a bunch of spam comments? Maybe my ad blocker is blocking them?

I think the targets for the spammers are are generally influencers/solo creators. The spammers create imposter profiles to announce phony giveaways, or otherwise appeal to the creators' fan base.
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