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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

#61

Post by bigyabai »

tombert wrote: post #51
meetingthrower wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened to me btw. I can only suspect they are "testing" the reception.

Ugh. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very strong, borderline-irrational distaste for ads. I hate advertising, I hate having to watch advertisements, I will go out of my way considerably to avoid ads. I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media. I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube; there's alw…

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 they'll immediately try to extort their licensed library of millions of videos to make a living. And they'll have to try a lot harder than that if they want to deprive me of a daily Tom Scott video with my morning coffee.

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

#62

Post by sevenf0ur »

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.

Good to know. I disabled watch history just so YouTube wouldn't recommend any shorts.

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

#63

Post by charcircuit »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #55
rambambram wrote: post #42

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…

Their last video search changes have been the worst thing they've ever done, I can never find anything I actually search for, its pretty obvious its to shove ad stuffed videos in your face, and hide old videos they cannot monetize, but holy crap. There's even some youtube channels where both the video and audio I used to listen to is completely FUBAR'd so somewhere in YouTubes infra, old videos are hinging on a hard…

>hide old videos they cannot monetize

All videos are monetized. Some videos don't do rev share with the author, but YouTube still gets the ad rev.

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

#64

Post by rambambram »

ramesh31 wrote: post #58
rambambram wrote: post #42

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…

[flagged]

Don't talk to me like that. My post does not invite this kind of reaction.

> Turn off the feed and turn on your brain.

Don't suggest I don't use my brain, please. For this purpose I built my own feed reader (as part of all kinds of social functions for my website system, link in bio), which I also use to scan for new videos on Youtube's channels that I follow. It works great. Sometimes I want to discover new channels and go directly to Youtube.

> Think about what you want to learn and search for it.

This is exactly what I said in my OP. I searched for topics on Youtube to discover new videos and channels, it's hard and doesn't work.

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

#66

Post by beezlebroxxxxxx »

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.

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 would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way.

Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media!

The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.

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

#67

Post by asdff »

guzfip wrote: post #52
rambambram wrote: post #42

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…

> 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. Yep, for some reasons the recommendation engines seem to have become “oh you glanced at this post for 2 second or you watched a single video, this must be exclusively what you want” I’ve seen it on social media too, notably Facebook.

Spotify sucks too with this. Theres certain artists where if I create a radio station from a song/album or whatever, I will know what like 20 of those songs in that generated station will be. Maybe 8-15 artists and the same 1-3 songs they pick from that artist for that given sort of radio generated call. The feature is good for a toe dip into discovery but you hit the bottom of its depth almost immediately. Sometimes it changes the generated playlist, but hardly. Feels way more siloed than actual FM radio. I might have to start building my own playlists again and do old fashioned discovery, which was almost a part time job evaluating discographies and studying genre history.

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

#68

Post by redwall_hp »

keiferski wrote: post #59
raincole wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just anecdotes, but I feel YouTube comments are the bottom of social media. Even Twitter and Reddit are better. But if the 99% garbage is the price of the emerging of channels like 3B1B, I think it's still a pretty good deal.

I don’t agree at all. This was true a decade ago, but today YouTube comments are almost all positive, and you’ll often get some really insightful ones too.

Channels can moderate their comments too. So channels run by thoughtful, community-oriented people will zap trash comments. The music production sphere is especially good.

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

#69

Post by iwontberude »

tombert wrote: post #51
meetingthrower wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has happened to me btw. I can only suspect they are "testing" the reception.

Ugh. I can't speak for anyone else, but I have a very strong, borderline-irrational distaste for ads. I hate advertising, I hate having to watch advertisements, I will go out of my way considerably to avoid ads. I have over 400 blu-rays specifically because I wanted to guarantee that I don't have to risk seeing ads in my media. I liked YouTube Premium because it was an ethical way to avoid ads on YouTube; there's alw…

Yeah I have literally spent tens of thousands to host media that I could technically have access to for a handful of $10/month subscriptions, but I can't stand ads and cross promotion. A nice bonus is that a movie or TV show can't just randomly leave licensing window and disappear from my catalog.

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

#70

Post by wffurr »

rambambram wrote: post #42

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 YouTube home screen is a total wasteland. It's a disaster. It's a horrific attention suck that's done enormous damage to humanity's collective attention span. Recommendations are barely any better - sometimes they're loosely connected to the video you just watched, but other times it's just more weird addicting YouTube slop.

At the same time, YouTube is an incredible resources; a civilizational achievement. It's a library of an enormous amount of knowledge, often presented in an engaging manner and well summarized. You can learn an enormous amount of things on YouTube.

I wish we could have one without the other, but all those videos servers don't pay for themselves, and the good stuff doesn't come without an enormous amount of subpar video content, and the stuff that pays is rarely the most useful.

I try to never engage with recommendations or the home screen, but it's hard especially when I'm tired or otherwise low on willpower.

Ideally I could get a YouTube app that's just a search box and can handle links that I click from other sources. I don't know if that exists and if it does, Google has a strong incentive to shut it down.

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