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YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

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Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#161
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now Because the people you subscribe to are making those shorts. Your subscription page shows you all the most recent videos from the channels you’re subscribed to. That in no way is shoving anything down your throat. You’re just supposed to watch what you want to watch. You’re not expected to click and watch every video in your subscription feed.

Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shorts lol. It's near the very top too, so I literally could not avoid seeing it. If they treated it as a normal video I wouldn't care as much. And unfortunately many YouTubers who do make normal, good content also make shorts because it's incredibly algorithm-friendly, so there's no avoiding it unless you blacklist every creator that dares make shorts.

It's also near the very top of the home feed too - it's even above videos for me, the only thing on top of it is ongoing livestreams. So if I want to use the feed, I have to scroll through a giant shorts section. Then its a row of videos, and then it's another row of just shorts. Again, I DO NOT WATCH SHORTS, but YT really wants me to watch them from the looks of it.

Of course, I then see one row of videos and then the damn "YouTube Playable" section so maybe the moral of the story is that the main page is unusable outright.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave up ~2021. Bought one of the 10tb 5200rpm disks and just started yt-dlping entire channels when I found something good. With mixed 360p/480p/720p backups, I've used ~1/5th of the disc across nearly 50,000 files. This does make me the unethical bad-guy, but my aversion to advertisement is so strong that I can't feel any remorse. AdSense is a scourge on the internet, and once Google is held accountable for it the…

Not really. Youtube is just pocket money for Google. It's not like they're ethical themselves.

Right now it's pocket money, but the content could very easily (and legally) be turned into a different business model if Google's de-facto ad monopoly falls through.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#164

I pay for YouTube Premium. No ads; I feel like it respects my time. Algorithm is well tailored too. The “remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install though.

What is shocking about youtube's advertising is just how bad the supposedly "targeted" aspect of it is. The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands w…

The ads are garbage because Google didn’t want the ads to be hyper optimized and hyper targeted to you. It gives people an uncanny valley feeling. Meta takes a different approach and people often accuse Instagram to snoop on their conversations, even if Instagram is not doing that and is merely good at optimizing the ads. And given that both companies are successful at ads, I’d say both approaches are commercially successful.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#165

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people…

Agreed. It painfully overfits based on what I've watched. I've watched thousands of videos and it still doesn't understand me at all because it appears to treat every action as equal. As an example, I like watching the Starcraft II streamer uThermal but I'm not really interested in other Starcraft II content creators because uThermal scratches that itch. However YouTube will keep showing me Starcraft II content creat…

Isn't your first parapraph an example of YouTube's algorithm underfitting though?

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#166

Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again. To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality videos from one day to the other a couple of years ago. Just opening up Youtube one day and seeing all kinds of thumbnails with people…

The recommended videos next to the current video and generally awful now. But my YouTube usage almost exclusively starts on the first row of videos they show when I'm logged in. They're almost entirely recent uploads from the channels I subscribe to and what most often. I subscribe to too many channels to keep up on the full feed of uploaded, but YouTube seems to do a good job highlighting the subscriptions I'm most…

Now that you mention it. First row is usually best for new interesting videos. After that, I usually click on the subscriptions page and discover some new interesting stuff from the last couple of days.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#167
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehhhh not recently. They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now, and shorts are _heavily_ pushed on my home page feed despite me trying to dismiss them multiple times. Like yes I can hide them all using ublock on desktop and morphe on Android, but that the fact I have to do it to avoid them is because they're pushing shorts harder as of late, it used to also be pushed but not as much from my person…

>They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now Because the people you subscribe to are making those shorts. Your subscription page shows you all the most recent videos from the channels you’re subscribed to. That in no way is shoving anything down your throat. You’re just supposed to watch what you want to watch. You’re not expected to click and watch every video in your subscription feed.

[deleted]

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#168
post #44
post #31

Honestly, I'm not at all surprised. In many ways, YouTube (and other content creation platforms in general) are just a better deal for many people than traditional forms of entertainment. The thing with traditional media is that it's all about limits and compromise and trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The TV and radio airwaves are limited, as is the schedule. Cinemas and screening times are limited.…

The world's greatest library of knowledge is owned by a private US company. For some reason I am reminded of this more often than I care to admit.

Imagine if it was owned by a government, such as China. What do you think would happen? Even if it was owned by US government, how much content do you think would get purged from the library when someone like Trump got elected? See what happened to NPR or PBS.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#169
post #145

Something interesting to me is that YouTube doesn't even capture the majority of the value stream. They allow content creators to use things like Patreon and their own ad reads to capture their own value. Of course, the preceding paragraph could be re-written in many different ways.

Yet. I’m sure the relentless pressure to increase profits will force them to address that sooner or later.

Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney

#170
post #115

Youtube's the only social media left where subscribing to a channel actually means something

And it's seemingly the only large platform where you have some control over the 'algorithm' - meaning if I tell it I'm not interested in something, or not to show me content from a creator, it actually works. On Facebook or Instagram the "not interested" button doesn't seem to do anything and it takes several clicks and a wait to block an account.
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