YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by OuterVale » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 12:46 AM UTC

nntwozz wrote: post #26

Mandatory shoutout to Invidious: https://invidious.io https://github.com/iv-org/invidious An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data. [EDIT] Also Yattee doing the Lord's work: https://github.com/yattee/yattee Privacy oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS with Invidious support.

Invidious' docs recommend restarting the service regularly[1]. I can only imagine that this means there is a serious memory leak somewhere. I notice the hardware requirements specifically note: '2GB of free RAM, as long as it is restarted regularly'

It has been this way for years. Seems odd.

[1] https://docs.invidious.io/community-installation-guide/#crea...

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

#232

Post by thundergolfer » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 12:52 AM UTC

fancyfredbot wrote: post #82

thundergolfer wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their algorithm has a toxic positivity problem where they weight positivity so much the most moronic, saccharine crap sits at the top and you'd be hard pressed to distinguish the comments from LLM slop.

"Epic refresh pull" is my personal pet hate right now. Although "like if you are watching this in " on older videos is close behind.

The comments pretending Marvel actors (e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch) are their Marvel characters in other movies (e.g. Sam Mendes' 1917) kill me.

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

#233

Post by Panzer04 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 12:55 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #104

GuB-42 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they? The entire point of YouTube Premium is removing ads. There are a few other benefits, but being ad-free is the big one. If they put back ads, I believe that most people will simply cancel their subscription and get a renewed interest in ad-blockers. It makes more sense to just increase the price, as they do. It is not like Amazon. Most people get Amazon Prime for the "free" shipping, and Prime with ads…

At least the sponsored segments can almost automatically be skipped now. If you press forward on the remote it will jump ahead of the sponsored bit. A little annoying that I have to actively skip it but still better than watching them. Dunno, big corporations really like showing ads for some reason. I think Google, whose main business is ads, will try to shove them in more peoples' faces, and claim that YouTube Premi…

I don't buy that there's a segment of customers willing to pay to get rid of some but not all ads.

The entire point of premium as it already stands is ad removal. None of the other features are relevant (I don't even know what they are)

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

#234

Post by hitekker » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 1:02 AM UTC

wffurr wrote: post #74

hitekker wrote: post #40

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.

> it respects my time > remove video thumbnail” and “remove YouTube shorts” chrome extension is a must install Which is it? Does YouTube respect your time and attention as a user or does it prey on them? I'm pretty sure it's the latter. The fact that you can pay to opt out of ads has always seemed like a weird business decision to me. Sabotage your ad viewership by siphoning off users with spending money for things l…

Well, it respects my time and I respect my time. Youtube wants me (its idea of me) to have a bright, colorful, exciting experience; I want a dreary and focused one. That's not disrespect, it's just different expectations.

I'd like Youtube to one day enable me to disable the fun colors in-app, but that's not a requirement. At the end of the day, the onus is on me, first, to number my days. (Psalm 90:12)

I'm sympathetic to the idea that most internet websites are addicting and bad for society, but I think the blame-game obscures our own agency, which we pretend not to have, and overemphasizes the platform's power, which isn't as strong as we pretend. We're not victims, they're not Gods.

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

#235

Post by mx7zysuj4xew » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #208

kang wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was in pre-tiktok world(push to regular content update) & before the purge. A lot of content is now gone. Its a great resource but very loosely coupled with humanity/human knowledge (and arguably a pretty poor resource for it, both theoretically (linear information with contant velocity such as video) and practically (the content just isn't there on youtube, search is truncated etc.)). > I didn't a single thing ab…

What purge? I'm searching Google trying to figure out what you're talking about but not getting any meaningful results.

Somewhere during the 2010s YouTube became completely sanitized. It went from a general video platform for adults to some dumbed down media company that wouldn't offend negligent mothers in Idaho that gave their kids an ipad rather than parent them

Barely literate workers in 3rd world countries then went on a mass "moderation" spree deleting anything that might even remotely be considered controversial

Videos with millions of views were delisted overnight and the associated channels received community standards violation strikes

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

#236

Post by fragmede » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 1:18 AM UTC

Panzer04 wrote: post #233

tombert wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the sponsored segments can almost automatically be skipped now. If you press forward on the remote it will jump ahead of the sponsored bit. A little annoying that I have to actively skip it but still better than watching them. Dunno, big corporations really like showing ads for some reason. I think Google, whose main business is ads, will try to shove them in more peoples' faces, and claim that YouTube Premi…

I don't buy that there's a segment of customers willing to pay to get rid of some but not all ads. The entire point of premium as it already stands is ad removal. None of the other features are relevant (I don't even know what they are)

Queuing is pretty handy a feature. Long click then "add to queue" while clicking around in the app while something else is playing. Smart downloading means there's something to watch while offline without having to explicitly pre-downloaded something. If you're a video quality aficionado, there's better picture quality available. An in-app sponsorblock equivalent was being beta tested but I think it went away. YouTube music except that not all the videos are licensed. There's a couple others. But yeah, ad-free viewing is the primary reason I pay for Premium. Supporting creators is another.

The question is how annoying the ads are. One 15 second ad before an hour long video, I'm annoyed but I'm not going to flip the table over. 5 minutes of ads every 30 mins? At some point I'm getting annoyed enough to cancel my subscription.

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

#237

Post by rschneid » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #230

lairv wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that most of youtube videos can no longer be discovered through search. Search results can now only be sorted by "Relevance" and "Popularity" while you used to be able to sort by release date Search results are also non-exhaustive and biased towards recent videos as noted in this study https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11727 Basically many videos can no longer be discovered if you don't have a url to the video…

The non exhaustive thing is annoying as hell. You might as well delete old videos because there’s no way to get to them if you don’t remember the link. I used to be able to find this video I took in college 20 years ago. There’s just no way for me to get to it anymore.

Sounds like a good opportunity for a big indexing company to add some value by using thei-

Wait...

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

#238

Post by fooker » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

gerdesj wrote: post #219

foruhar wrote: post #113

Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources. I can find anything from precision machining, LLM internals, historical footage of WWI, music performances from pretty much any era, and on, and on. There are so many things that I didn't know there was any footage of or that I didn't a single thing about that I find there pretty much daily. I wish the BBC would publish their whole archive through YT.…

"Hyperbolically, I think it's one of humanity's greatest resources." The content is one of humani .... oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts. Is there not a better place for human creativity than ... Google? Should my TV license fee fund Google? Fuck off (hyperbolically)!

> oh it is all of ... oh its in the hands of ... a commercial company renowned for adverts.

As opposed to governments renowned for colonizing half the world, destroying countless cultures, committing genocide in living memory?

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

#239

Post by kbelder » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 1:34 AM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #186

bdangubic wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

of course it is relevant, more relevant than just about anything else. if you are a parent or have GenA family members you know it is youtube and nothing else precisely because of user-uploaded content. tt, insta etc are severely lagging behind and are not competitors to youtube in this regard.

> They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions. The above is from the comment I replied to. Netflix, Prime, Disney, cable TV, satellite TV, etc are without any kind of doubt competitors to YouTube within video entertainment. Just because companies have different ways of doing business doesn't mean they're not competitors. If your kids won't eat any fast food exc…

In your analogy, McDonalds is the only restaurant serving fast food. All others are sit-down cafes. The closest thing to a youtube competitor is Twitch and TikTok. The traditional media companies are not competing in the same field.

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

#240

Post by Willish42 » Wed, Apr 15, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC

nothrowaways wrote: post #16

Could as well eat Spotify in a snap, just has to comment out that stupid disable_minimize()

I wish the audio quality of youtube videos matched other streaming services. Bandwidth-wise it's pretty minimal, but the audio quality isn't quite as good as competitors like Spotify (and the longer they take to upgrade audio bitrate, the longer the problem persists and uploaded content has lower audio fidelity)