YouTube is very frustrating because it might be the greatest store of human information but has no decent search function. I would pay $20 a month for the best search functionality Google could create, with the transcript of every video fully indexed in BM25 and vector indexes and the videos in a vector index. So you could search for "All videos of pewdiepie wearing a blue shirt talking about bitcoin"
YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
251–260 of 284 posts
Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#252My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.
Firefox and uBlock Origin lets you watch YouTube without ads.
Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#253YouTube is very frustrating because it might be the greatest store of human information but has no decent search function. I would pay $20 a month for the best search functionality Google could create, with the transcript of every video fully indexed in BM25 and vector indexes and the videos in a vector index. So you could search for "All videos of pewdiepie wearing a blue shirt talking about bitcoin"
I subscribe to YouTube Premium Family (and yes, they raised my monthly rate too.)
YT's search functions are nerfed very deliberately. YouTube's main purpose is to shove content at the user that we don't want. Ads or no ads, we're supposed to consume unwanted content at a far higher volume than the stuff we actually sought out.
This is the same no matter what the platform or the medium. It's long been a paradigm for scheduling television shows, that the viewers are too lazy to switch channels away from that great show they loved, and so they can "tailgate" a really awful show after a highly-rated one. Radio stations aren't playing what the listeners want to hear, they're shoving sounds into our ears as dictated by the labels and the media companies, and so forth.
YouTube (and YouTube Music, especially with its extremely sticky "AutoPlay" switch) are shoveling suggestions at us, and counting on our laziness, to just mindlessly click the first thing that comes under our mouse.
I'm obviously all-in on YT and Music as media players, and I use their Playlist features extensively, but it is completely impossible to organize Playlists in a way that will help me find content again! It is completely impossible for me to create a nice, uniform set of Playlists across the months and years. I often create time-and-date sensitive playlists, i.e. I want to find it again in mid-April next year, but that all basically falls by the wayside. I often impulsively create a Playlist based on some theme I envision in the moment, abandon it, and I never find it again. YouTube and Music count on that behavior and they will never show us our own Playlists in suggested stuff, or in searches unless we deliberately hammer on it. YouTube wants us to find "Community Playlists" and stuff that you don't want, but is otherwise hyped or algorithm'd to appear in front of our eyeballs.
Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#254Hyperbolically, 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.…
It's one of the US's (or some future world government) greatest future public utilities for sure.
Right now it's ruining it's own content by overoptimizing for engagement slop. Making the creators dumber and consumers poorer, limiting ad growth in the long term.
Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#255Youtube 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…
ishitani
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Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I wonder how people are motivated to comment if they can't even track replies or check likes. It certainly completely kills motivation for me
Do you and GP not get notifications for replies and (at least some) likes?
I don't think I get notified but maybe it's because my replies are unpopular
Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If anybody knows some good DIY or woodworking channels, let me know! There are dozens of great channels in those spaces. Here are some I remember just off the top of my head. * Cars: Watch Wes Work (need 1.5x speed here!), Prop Department, Mat Armstrong, Chris Fix * Woodworking: Frank Howarth, Matthias Wandel, The Wood Whisperer, John Heisz, Steve Ramsey * Metalworking: Clickspring, Cronova Engineering, Tubal Cain…
Thanks! I know a couple of 'em, will check the rest. Indeed not hard to surface, but a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative. Sometimes I get these rare gems inside my recommendations; a small channel with a couple of very interesting videos, maybe not the best or slickest productions, but definitely of interest. I gues…
> I can subscribe to these channels, but I can't even find them in my subscriptions. There's no overview
You can just click "subscriptions" on the left to only show videos from channels you are subscribed to, and then there's another button somewhere to show a list of your subscriptions.
> a handful of channels is a drop in the ocean of all the videos that must have been uploaded and are at least nice to watch and informative
It wasn't an exhaustive list!
Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#258My biggest concern about Youtube is that they do not truly have a competitor. They just raised premium prices again making it one of my most expensive entertainment subscriptions.
Newpipe and freepipe!
A competitor to YouTube needs to support paying the creators not demand content for free.
Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#259Mandatory 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 is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith. At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public insta…
yt-dlp is essential for gathering what you really value. Even under stable URLs, videos can be changed.
Re: YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney
#260When will Youtube - Block "unverified" browsers? - Force KYC or Youtube premium to watch videos? In their ongoing fight against yt-dlp and others i can already not watch videos using VPNs. Adblockers has made most tech people unaware of the enshittification of most web services. For most normal people when they eventually make this change it will not affect them at all.
When the number of ad blocking and downloading extension users grows enough to make a dent in their revenue.
They're not in loss making business after all.