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YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

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Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#381
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I am a massive fan of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. While I am a bit nervous because major change like this could lead to those products getting worse, I'm also hopeful that it could lead to them getting better! So in general I'm just eager to see what happens next, come what may.

YT Premium, definitely yes. However, YT Music is hot garbage. The UI is utter crap and the mixing of video and music is awful, especially playlists. Why the hell would I want my regular YT and music playlists mixed up together anyway? It gets worse with kids, as some video-songs (randomly!) trigger the inability to play in the background.

I liked Google Play Music when it first came out. But development was basically stopped and they replaced it with the crappy YT Music App. Unless they majorly change YouTube music I'll stay with Spotify.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#382
Reading through the comments the audience seems very split between lovers and haters.

At the end Susan managed to have a product on the market that was number 1 in its category, created revenue and has survived for so long. I think she deserve a fair amount of respect and acknowledgement, ad I have not seen any other platform with that track record (yep no time for envy, just hard facts).

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#383

Hopefully, the "stop showing me this ad" feature gets fixed. I'm tired of always being presented with an ad for the "Dixie Store". No, I don't want to shop for Confederate flags and other garbage.

I'm tired of the ads asking "Are you gay? Take this 10-minute quiz!"

Or alcohol ads when you have given up the juice.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#384
post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're being ridiculous. Like, would you want YouTube to skip over this entire scene in the Wayne's World movie? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs Should it not let me see a product review if it was sponsored by the company that makes the product? Or only if the reviewers didn't have full editorial control? Wherever you would want to draw the line, someone else would tell you that you drew it wrong.

I think you're being unnecessarily adversarial here. Sponsored ads in videos are everywhere, and well delineated. Third party tools exist to skip them already -- and YouTube already has the data on where they start and end. They even show them on the timeline, although they call "end of sponsored advertisement" "most replayed"… presumedly because of everyone skipping the ad, losing their place, and then having to ste…

Would it have a negative impact on the businesses who promote those videos?

Yes.

If it's a negative impact on the businesses who promote videos, how can you say your idea doesn't impact content creators?

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s literally it. It’s probably inferior to both Spotify and Apple Music, but if you’re going to pay for YouTube premium anyway and are able to endure the weird UI… Then it might save you a small monthly fee you’d otherwise pay to competing services. It’d never survive in the market as it’s own service, and it’s clearly inferior even to its own predecessor Google Music. I have no idea who decided this thing was a…

I must have extremely unsophisticated music needs, I've never had any complaints using the interface or finding any music that I want. I remember Google Music being pretty good, but YouTube Music seems good enough

Same. I am always a little surprised to read these comments. Moved from Spotify to Google Play Music to YouTube Music and never really had many issues...

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#386
post #229

I was big time addicted to youtube for a while starting around 2010, mostly bc the recommended videos were so good and content that was uploaded was more raw and silly then now. But at some point the recommendations got really bad, so much so that it made it a lot less enjoyable. I miss those days.

10 minute minimum length for monetization killed short good content. There's still good content, but it doesnt respect your time.

Now they're pushing shorts, which are (in my opinion) too short to convey all the relevant info. Not sure how monetization works with shorts, since I use an adblock, but 50%+ of my subscription feed is shorts on some days and it suck (for me personally)

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#387
post #335

I wonder if demonetization practices caused youtube to bleed creators. There was so much drama around youtubers and how youtube treated them. I guess Youtube must always obey its advertisers.

Due to demonitization some types of videos (especially political, "current affairs", medical, anything (even comedy) using curse words, etc.) almost always get demonetized and many people have stopped such content since it's not worth it. During covid times it was so bad, that even mentioning "covid" in a video got some of them demonetized (even in non-medical context, eg. "shippments from china got delayed due to covid").

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#388
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YT Premium, definitely yes. However, YT Music is hot garbage. The UI is utter crap and the mixing of video and music is awful, especially playlists. Why the hell would I want my regular YT and music playlists mixed up together anyway? It gets worse with kids, as some video-songs (randomly!) trigger the inability to play in the background.

I liked Google Play Music when it first came out. But development was basically stopped and they replaced it with the crappy YT Music App. Unless they majorly change YouTube music I'll stay with Spotify.

Dev wasn't just stopped. The whole product was sunset and if you wanted to keep a semblance of what you had, you were forced to migrate to YouTube music. I saw the end of that crap rainbow and finally moved over to koel which has done just as much as I ever cared to use in Google music, but now I don't fear Google getting bored and killing the product in some future.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#389

YouTube for the things I enjoy has improved dramatically because the comment section is vastly improved. Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of a comment section dumpster fire, but they fixed it. I've seen the recommendations get better then worse then better again as they tweaked the algorithms. Right now it's better than it's ever been. Again, for me. One complaint: I like to upload interesting clip…

Agreed on the copyright issues! I got a strike for a short screen cast / video I made to demo a new feature I built to my boss -- it wasn't public, you had to have the link but I happened to feature some music (maybe 45-60 seconds) and it got taken down.

Similarly I see YT content creators asking people to turn off their FM radios lest they end up with copyrighted music in their videos. Surely both of these cases are fair use?

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just discovered something very interesting: She is resigning one day after Google received a subpoena from the U.S. House of Representatives demanding answers to questions on censorship of conservative voices, and specifically on content moderation decisions. Yes, just yesterday. Subpoena to resignation. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-republicans-subpoena... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/…

Republicans have been complaining about perceived persecution for years (decades), there's no real Youtube-related news in the fact that they are asking companies about it now that they have a house majority...

There's a dead reply to this calling the phrasing "perceived persecution" "gaslighting" that I think is somewhat interesting for a couple of reasons:

1) It's undeniable that Republicans have been complaining about this shit. It's also something not everyone agrees happens at the level of the complaint. So "perceived" seems like an accurate description of the situation.

2) There's mention of a "strangehold" on journalism from Democrats which is exactly one of the sorts of complaints I was mentioning: but it's also one that seems no truer today than it was when I was hearing it on radio stations 25 years ago. Mainstream media personalities complaining that no personalities like themselves existed in the mainstream media. From Rush on the radio then to today's wave either on cable TV or online, the song remains the same. This is why personally I think the claims of persecution is wildly overblown.

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