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YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

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Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#411
post #353

I'm nervous about this. YouTube Premium is my favorite and most-used product. As long as ads stay gone and my grandfathered price doesn't change, I'm a very happy user.

I too am a fan of YouTube Premium, but the sponsored ads in videos are starting to devalue it. Some creators, especially those with longer videos, have sponsored ads that pop up every 10 minute; they are rather annoying, especially when you're specifically paying not see ads.

I started using the Sponserblock[1] chrome plugin, and it's been great. It automatically skips over all promotion segments, while giving you an easy option to still watch them ad-hoc if you prefer.

[1]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#412

That crazy push for 10min and longer videos was a sole reason why tiktok happened. I still remember that there used to be short and super informative videos before but now everything is so stretched out with low info density

I think twitter killing vine was the real moment that brought us tik tok. It was like the digg exodus to reddit but way bigger. Everyone thought twitter was dumb for cancelling one of the most popular social networks out there for no good reason, and what do you know, the market proved this was dumb when tencent came in with their vine clone and became bigger than twitter ever was.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Youtube Vanced does a good job at blocking most ads, and the latest version has a feature that attempts to skip sponsored sections on videos. Well worth trying out.

I think it's important where possible for people to pay for the premium version, while it provides ad free value for money, though I don't begrudge people blocking ads in other ways if they truly can't afford it. But I think it's short sighted and selfish to not pay for something like YouTube that you use and get value out of every day, when you can afford it. Either pay for it and support it or don't use it at all.

First, YouTube doesn't even offer Premium in my country.

Second, the features of YouTube revanced apps also just simply surpasses official app for me anyway:

- My phone has 1440p HDR display and YouTube official app just doesn't show me above 720p60 for 60fps videos while in the past it could. And it put me in an awkward situation: for under 60fps and for HDR 60fps videos, it can show up to 2160p and 2160p HDR 60 fps like normal. The only videos that cannot go over 720p60 fps are the normal 60fps ones. I don't know what the actual bug they are introducing there. YouTube revanced extended works flawflessly.

- I can hide the sections I don't like (news, shorts, suggestions for me, mix playlists, the ending overlay at the end of videos... and many other things).

- I can swipe on the screen for brightness and volume.

- I can add the copy buttons that copy the video link AND the timestamp quickly, really convenient for me.

- And many more that I'm lazy to type on phone.

Those small features (except the first one) look like something I would laugh at but one by one they surprisingly enhance my experience with YouTube app a lot.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#414
post #35

We can all hate Youtube here for sure but when you listen to for example Linus from LTT he is very adamant that while youtube does have it's fair share of problems, when it comes to compensating creators fairly on their platform, they are much better than almost all others. And I personally enjoy Youtube very much. So much great content for free. If I need to learn about something i find myself looking into youtube f…

OTOH they are a snake eating themselves. At one point they were the webs repository for videos. Now things are built specifically for it, and its constraints. 90 second viral videos don't play well anymore. People don't show up nd upload two videos with a million hits and never post again anymore. It's screwy now. Everything is of a certain length to fit with advertising expectations. Things are all shot in the same uniform style of a talking head over enunciating things in what's probably a paid ad at the end of the day.

I guess that's what is to be expected with a platform over time. the market will optimize conditions until some peak of efficiency is reached, occasionally this will shift to another peak of perhaps even lower or higher efficiency after overcoming some activation energy or in the pretense of some catalyst (like when creators first realized the optimal video length). Its all seemingly thermodynamic in nature.

That being said, it sure gives you rose tinted glasses of those days of a dumb short and funny video of an actual unscripted happenstance, or someone teaching you how to fix something and actually pointing the camera at that something instead of their own face. It's like the stakes were lower and egos were nonexistent back then, and everything seemed a little more genuine.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#415
post #345
post #35

We can all hate Youtube here for sure but when you listen to for example Linus from LTT he is very adamant that while youtube does have it's fair share of problems, when it comes to compensating creators fairly on their platform, they are much better than almost all others. And I personally enjoy Youtube very much. So much great content for free. If I need to learn about something i find myself looking into youtube f…

Sure, Youtube is talking handsome faces, and that works very well, like it did for TV back then. But AI will ruin all that because you can't beat it. Youtube had a great run, but it is optional for the future

I wonder how many channels are out there right now that combine a deepfake and a language model? You could probably set up your "influencer" to be running a youtube, instagram, and tiktok campaign all at once, completely automatically with you raking in the passive income from the ads. Maybe run a thousand of these accounts in parallel, targeting all sorts of content. Might as well throw in a twitch and an onlyfans in there too. Maybe have it write its own kickstarter campaigns to pay dev time for you to refactor its code every now and then and add more functionality to the models.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#417
post #334

I'm nervous about this. YouTube Premium is my favorite and most-used product. As long as ads stay gone and my grandfathered price doesn't change, I'm a very happy user.

The ads haven’t stayed gone, though. I would pay a substantial premium for an option to filter promotions out of videos. I would even pay to just never get promoted videos in my steam. The option to pay for no ads doesn’t exist, today, although it would be easy to ad. Instead, you get to pay to remove one advertiser, and not all the others.

I don’t mind the promotional/sponsorship content in the Youtube channels I follow. Some people make them funny, and others are smaller so I don’t mind supporting them. Also, they’re always 100% skippable simply by scrubbing forward past them (which isn’t always the case with Youtube-injected preroll ads). That said, I don’t know how offensive these are across the entire Youtube landscape, and I could see them being a nuisance.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#418
post #202

Positives: * Presided over a vast increase in revenue, from $4 to $29 billion * Steered the ship through a number of content controversies * Anecdotally, the brand value of YouTube remains good * YouTube Premium seems to have good uptake * Presided over enormous cost savings with custom encoder hardware * Few major technical outages, good streaming performance generally * Relationships with advertisers and content cr…

> YouTube Originals flopped Maybe as a whole, but Cobra Kai was excellent and very popular! Also, in the long-run, will having "missed" streaming & shorts necessarily be a bad thing? Time will tell. I wish they never introduced shorts. Why do all platforms need to be everything to everyone? Why can't they focus on just being the best platform for user-created long-form video? I probably know the answer, but it makes…

Cobra Kai was a huge flop for youtube (missed opportunity?), because they had to sell it off, couldn't keep it going, and to be honest, I'm not sure it would've been great had it stayed there, I enjoyed the first 2 seasons, but Netflix has just gotten better and better, and you can tell from the last youtube season to the first Netflix season how the quality shifted.

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#419
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays the comment section on several channels I watch is full of spam, oftentimes 50+ fake accounts responding to each other in threads.

I don't see that on the videos I watch. For example, this section from a song I recently listened to. Very nice comments. The Beatles - Within You Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck Do you see a bunch of spam comments? Maybe my ad blocker is blocking them?

Probably referring to the spam accounts that Marques Brownlee called out many months ago[0] tl;dw It's the fake accounts that impersonate the content creator and request users to privately message them.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Cw-vODp-8Y

Re: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

#420
post #241

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.

If you haven't already: Disable Settings > Recommendations > Show your liked music from Youtube Enable Settings > Data saving > Don't play music videos

That first one only appears in YT music. My regular YouTube still has my music playlists.

Thanks though. Maybe some day they'll put in some effort.

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