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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

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Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#471

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

Pretty sure this is intentional to encourage doom scroll and to make the giant video titles and shocked-face-tiles easier to see and thus click on. Whatever gets you to click faster and make those ad dollars.

I'm more than a little disgusted by how moronic we are made to look now that every video tile caters to the dumbest person with the most base instincts. If YOU aren't SHOCKED by this TITLE how will we get you to CLICK IT? :O :O :O MUST SEE this video BEFORE YOU CONTINUE READING HN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#472

Post by sd9 »

charlesabarnes wrote: post #382
iMerNibor wrote: post #13

What gets me the thumbnails are now so big, they're blurry since the images need to be stretched to fit now! The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me

I've recently noticed that the thumbnails on the homepage are higher resolution than the thumbnails on the subscriptions page

Same for me. How strange.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#473

Post by npteljes »

PaulHoule wrote: post #297
npteljes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a chance. YouTube needs shorts so that they can compete with TikTok. They HAVE to put it in front of everybody so that they can leverage their existing, vast userbase to quickly bootstrap such a product. It's a fight for market relevance for them. You will most likely not see them let that go.

My experience is that if you have a population doing some activity online it is self-perpetuating https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html and you might think, "I have (say) N=250,000 people playing game A and I can get them playing game B" you are probably going to be disappointed and very lucky if you get somewhere between 250 and 2500 of them playing your new game. The two-sided market that makes YouT…

I was thinking that Shorts is popular, and it seems like it is. What I estimates I find put it from half as many users as TikTok to on par with TikTok. With regards the flywheel, I think that it works better than your example, and I think that the existence of the myriad product bundles that we see are why. That strategy works so well against competitors that sometimes antitrust comes into the picture, to break something up that's too encompassing.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#474

Post by carlosjobim »

silisili wrote: post #437
carlosjobim wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a million videos uploaded to YouTube each second. If you're only seeing low quality videos it's because you're only looking in the wrong places.

I don't doubt good videos exist - I'm blaming YouTube for boosting the awful ones so it's all I see in my first page of search results, and the 'creators' who make them.

As for search results, I cannot help you.

As for recommendation, the algorithm works perfectly if you make the effort to "Like and subscribe™" to quality channels and videos. It's amazing how good YouTube can be if you curate the algorithm with this – and with dislikes if you have to.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#475

Post by ChuckMcM »

dylan604 wrote: post #302
silisili wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between shorts, search results, the ads, and the content...I treat youtube links like pinterest links these days. Basically, I'll only click it if I think I really, really need to see it. By 'content' I mean the fact that every video has a moron talking for 10 minutes at the beginning. You can search up something as simple as how to tie a shoe, find a promising video with a lot of likes, then click it. Gotta start wi…

> Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore. when you're not an old, and this is all you know, you just accept it without knowing that there was a better world back when the olds were young. not being able to accept this really shows how old man yells get off my lawn you are. YT is not trying to capture you, and probably doesn't care one bit about olds. it's the younger crowds that have b…

This response captures it perfectly. I started at Google in 2006 and the "mini kitchens" (essentially a convenience mart) were just getting "re-organized" The new CFO was out to "cut unnecessary costs."[1] While Google was banking billions of dollars in "Free Cash Flow" every QUARTER than were cutting the 'unnecessary' costs that were something like $12,000 per employee per YEAR. So with 20,000 employees, that is about 1/4 billion dollars a year, or roughly 3% of the free cash flow. I called Eric on it at a TGIF[2]. The gist was "We're going to lose all these great employees because you want to keep more of the free cash than you currently do?"

And people quit, lots of people, and the flow moved out. And people who joined had no idea it had been "better" than what it was, this was just the standard which was admittedly still better than other companies. Eventually everyone for whom this affront was to high left leaving an employee base reasonably happy with the status quo.

They continued to "downgrade" the 'lifestyle benefits' the entire time I was there and it continued to piss people off who left.

As margin pressure grew the need to monetize grew and Marissa Meyer who had been the 'brick wall' between the user experience and monetization left the company. Others who felt as she did also left for a variety of reasons. Leaving only those for whom monetization was just the cost of doing business and hey, "We're Google!" right?

This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore, they are 'search' users and if their OS pre-loads Bing they use that, sometimes they switch to DDG or Kagi. Once that takes hold in the bulk of the addressable market, Google will go the way of every other tech company before them. I used to point out to people that the "GooglePlex" was the dead hulk of SGI. Like wasps Google was living inside the corpse of a formerly big player. Everyone would tell me, "We're different, we're always going to be around." And like the Zen quotes from "Charlie's War" I would say, "We'll see." :-)

[1] I believe that this statement is perhaps the single most destructive thing any CFO can do. In part because they don't define 'necessary.'

[2] He was not amused :-)

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#477

Post by alabastervlog »

amluto wrote: post #234
npteljes wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a chance. YouTube needs shorts so that they can compete with TikTok. They HAVE to put it in front of everybody so that they can leverage their existing, vast userbase to quickly bootstrap such a product. It's a fight for market relevance for them. You will most likely not see them let that go.

Someone may believe this, but it’s utter nonsense. The users who don’t want to see shorts aren’t using TikTok . This would be like Starbucks randomly serving tea to 20% of customers who order coffee because they want to compete more effectively with Lipton. That’s not how competition works.

What's really funny is that I reckon if Youtube's persistence finally managed to get me to like short content, the first thing I'd probably do is... ditch them for TikTok.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#478

Post by SJC_Hacker »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #461
SJC_Hacker wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people stop watching, advertisers will not be happy Unfortunately this seems to be what people want. There's plenty of YouTube competitors (Substack, Patreon, Vimeo, Twitch etc.) Unfortunately, they just don't have the traction of YouTube

I think we need to be careful with the language like “this is what the users want” when something along the lines of “this is what triggers of pattern of compulsive behavior in users” is closer to the truth

Outside of legislation, there isn't a way to make a distinction. Corporations and most individuals are going to do whatever is legally permissible in order to maximize revenue.

And I would say its mostly not YouTube actually producing the content. They are responsible for the "reward mechanism" of clickbaity/shock content driving views, and in return, more views meaning more money for the creators. But I would really like to hear of another model. If YouTube didn't do it, someone else assuredly will. And traditional media is/was barely any better.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#479

Post by Root_Denied »

pizzathyme wrote: post #112

I always laugh at these shots from the hip criticizing YouTube and Google. As though Google doesn't have a entire team of data scientists and top tier engineers managing this experiment and driving it to optimal results. (Spoiler: they do) If you don't like the service, you can stop using it. And if you do, they have already factored that into their metrics guardrail, and it was the right decision.

>As though Google doesn't have a entire team of data scientists and top tier engineers managing this experiment and driving it to optimal results. (Spoiler: they do)

Optimal for who, though?

From Google's perspective I'm sure these changes push towards a more optimal revenue generation through ads. They potentially also push a more optimal layout on tablets/phones, or for shorts content.

Meanwhile from a desktop/laptop user perspective these changes are hardly optimal, especially compared to what they were before.

> If you don't like the service, you can stop using it. And if you do, they have already factored that into their metrics guardrail, and it was the right decision.

Also likely that people find and implement workarounds. Browser extensions or interface layers (e.g. Invidious or reVanced) that block ads and/or grant user specific control over the layout. This represents a hidden cost for Google too, because now you have a subset of your user base eating up resources that you don't see ad revenue for. There's a risk as they optimize more and more for a smaller number of people that this hidden cost grows.

All in all seems like a bad long-term proposition for Google to alienate parts of their userbase that are tech savvy enough to bypass their revenue generation.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#480

Post by mrighele »

wijwp wrote: post #316
mrighele wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you even need _different teams_ for the homepage ? The home page is made up of: a search bar with some extra buttons that link to different pages, a sidebar with some more buttons and a list of videos. What are the multiple teams for ? And even assuming it is necessary, there is really no single person responsible for the page so that issues like this can be seen and fixed ? And since we are talking about pet…

> and a list of videos Are we just going to gloss over this like the list of videos is random? haha

Of course no, the search is handled by a different team, but does that team also work on the frontend ? I would expect them to have a quite different set of skills from those that do frontend work, at least at Google's size.

And if not the case, I would expect at least one team to be responsible for the final result

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