Yes. It peaked in 2017. You can actually see this change with the quality & variety of content that existed in 2017 vs after that. Then Google shot itself in the face with monetization changes: https://www.quora.com/How-has-YouTube-monetization-changed-o...
Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
101–110 of 187 posts
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#102[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#103Especially since the removal of downvoting it's hard to get to good quality material. Majority of tech videos are a case of blind leading the blind and unless you know the subject already it's hard to spot. Nowadays I start with a forum/reddit/discord/hn search for a list of hive approved creators and only then go to youtube with that list in hand. Starting the search in youtube (unless for a very niche/non-marketabl…
> Especially since the removal of downvoting A wake-up call that a single company annihilated our ability to sort out information for ourselves. I'm still rather disturbed and shaken.
"Shaken"? That seems a bit hyperbolic.
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#104Maybe in some areas (software) but I'm finding YouTube a goldmine for my current interest - learning to drive in the UK When I was 17 I started learning for about 8 months but then stopped due to various reasons. I'm 35 now and picking it back up again and the most mind blowing aspect of it is how much content there is on YouTube to help learner drivers, compared to back then! There are loads of creators (usually dri…
If you're seeking a horrorshow of real life "don't do this" examples of questionable driving practices I recommend DashCamOwners:
UK: https://www.youtube.com/c/UKDashCameras/videos
AU: https://www.youtube.com/c/DashCamOwnersAustralia/videos
both drive on the same side.
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#105The drive for monetization certainly shows in the form of needlessly, absurdly long videos. I recently came across a "How to Make the Windows 11 Taskbar Completely Transparent" tutorial (I had a whim to do just that). The whole content boils down to "install such-and-such app". Length of the video? 5:50 :) (And the narrator calls it a "real quick video" by the way, so apparently that passes for being rather brief). Y…
> 4 screens long blog post Or blog posts that explain every little thing related to a topic before the information you searched for. In your case, for the article "Shops that are open on Sunday in 2022", titles would be: "What is Sunday?" "What is shopping?" "Why you should prefer to shop on Sundays?" "Is the distance to the shop important?" "Remember to carry money" etc...
There's a whole website seemingly built around this concept - WikiHow : )
It bursts at seams with brilliant "do not say!" type of tutorials - one my favorites is "How to Survive a Coup". Here's some of the advice given by the expert authors (who clearly must have survived a few coups back in the day):
"The most important thing to do during a coup is to stay out of range of gunfire [...] Stay tuned into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to get regular updates on what is happening [...] If you have television, then you can also try watching your local news channel for updates [...] Leave the country or go to a safer region if the conflict continues"
So remember, try staying out of range of gunfire and don't forget to subscribe, everyone
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#106I think that the monetization on youtubes (not individual creators) side is slowly destroying youtube. Just a few years ago, you could search for anything, even current-political, and find a bunch of videos from a bunch of people, from "best trump insults" to "why xyz is bad?" .... but now, all the top search results about anything remotely current (be it politics, covid, russia/ukraine, crime, heatwaves,...), all yo…
> but now, all the top search results about anything remotely current (be it politics, covid, russia/ukraine, crime, heatwaves,...), all you get is mainstream media (cnn, msnbc,....). If I wanted to watch CNN, I'd watch CNN, not youtube.
I think this has nothing to do with monetization per se, it was an explicit decision taken by YT and hard-coded into the search and recommendations algorithms in light of the craze about "fake news".
It's very funny to notice when looking at videos from new media creators - even though I am subscribed, Like most videos I watch, watch them till the end etc, I will almost always get "redirected" to a mainstream news video if Auto-play is on, at least after 2-3 videos.
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#107I think YouTube is like Reddit: it is what you make of it. If you only ever look at the front page of Reddit, you're going to be fed memes and outrage. If you go and subscribe to a few small, focused subreddits, you're going to see things that are relevant to you. Same with YouTube. If you watch a lot of junk content, that's what it's going to feed you in recommendations. If you focus on some specific segment of cont…
> There's definitely still organic, passion-driven content out there, especially with new fan-funding mechanisms like Patreon, you just need to focus on it, because it's really easy for YouTube to shovel junk down your throat, if you give it the chance.
With all due respect, your whole post smells of "blame the victim", or "you are not doing it right" vibes. I think we can all agree that the big numbers in YT are in videos made explicitly for that, where some new stars arose due to the new media but now it's not that different from mainstream TV (yes, there is still this plus that if you dig deep enough you might find something worth that the TV didn't have due to much lower bandwidth, but I would ignore that since you can/could do that "in the Internet" anyway).
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#108I totally agree, and what's annoying is that when YouTube runs an ad I have the feeling that the App on my LG TV is increasing the volume when showing an advertisement.
Since as you said most of the stuff has become marketing garbage, I am not willing to pay for an ad free experience because YouTube anyways can't guarantee that content creators are not doing secretly paid content in favor of their sponsors regardless of ehat they say.
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#109Maybe in some areas (software) but I'm finding YouTube a goldmine for my current interest - learning to drive in the UK When I was 17 I started learning for about 8 months but then stopped due to various reasons. I'm 35 now and picking it back up again and the most mind blowing aspect of it is how much content there is on YouTube to help learner drivers, compared to back then! There are loads of creators (usually dri…
> When I was 17 I started learning for about 8 months but then stopped due to various reasons. I'm 35 now and picking it back up again and the most mind blowing aspect of it is how much content there is on YouTube to help learner drivers, compared to back then!
YouTube hadn't been founded when you were 17, so it isn't particularly surprising that it didn't have eLearning content back then.
Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?
#110Especially since the removal of downvoting it's hard to get to good quality material. Majority of tech videos are a case of blind leading the blind and unless you know the subject already it's hard to spot. Nowadays I start with a forum/reddit/discord/hn search for a list of hive approved creators and only then go to youtube with that list in hand. Starting the search in youtube (unless for a very niche/non-marketabl…
Did that dislike button ever do anything? It made a number go up, but other than that I have never seen any effect of it. If you want to make bad channels go away, hit the three-dots next to the video on the recommendation side and click "Not Interested".
That sounds wonderful except that it works about as well as the voice on my Google assistant understanding anything beyond simplistic questions and answers. I’ve attempted to train YouTube repeatedly since the appearance of “not interested” that I’m not interested in violence. If I wanted this much violence, I could have gotten it for free. At least with Google assistant I can scream expletives and insults at the ai and get some satisfaction that the qa retrospective will be amusing for those stuck working there. I mean, does ai really deserve respect when it is so poorly designed?