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Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

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Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#81

Post by adrianN »

poisonborz wrote: post #72
adrianN wrote: post #44

The whole Internet hat peaked due to monetization. Very little content is created because somebody is passionate about something and wants to share. Almost all content is created to either directly make money or to collect enough followers to eventually start making money. Everything is fake and optimized to grab attention. What organic content remains is drowned out by the firehose of monetized content.

What's the problem with the drive for monetization? Out in the physical world you also rarely get services and content for free. Also monetization here mostly means possibilites for donation and paying for extra content, usually most of a creator's content is still free. As for money-grabber content: a good platform should have an efficient and honest rating mechanism.

When I first started using the Internet it was like going to a pub and striking up a conversation with a stranger about a topic of mutual interest, or going to the park and watching people do things they enjoy. There was no competition to maximize my engagement in order to have me watch ads that create desires for things that I don't need. It was just some dudes who really liked talking about crop circles or model trains or semiconductors. Imo it's the difference between doing things in order to make money and making money in order to do things.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#82

Post by DavidPeiffer »

adrianN wrote: post #44

The whole Internet hat peaked due to monetization. Very little content is created because somebody is passionate about something and wants to share. Almost all content is created to either directly make money or to collect enough followers to eventually start making money. Everything is fake and optimized to grab attention. What organic content remains is drowned out by the firehose of monetized content.

I wonder if there's any service/search engine that could help find authentic, non-monetized content? Ideally results would be filtered out if they had any ads at all or affiliate links anywhere on the domain. Perhaps it'd also be valuable to exclude analytics platforms?

I feel like a decade ago discoverability of those little corners of the internet where someone is passionate about something and writes a blog about it was better. Trying to search for reviews has always been tough, but it's impossible to find anything that's not monetized to the hell and back for something like "best tent for camping" or "tent reviews 2022".

The closest I've found is millionshort.com, which does have some nice filters (e.g. "remove sites with live chat"), but that still doesn't quite get there.

https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=Best%20tent%202022&...

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#84

Post by Cloudef »

Its mostly product reviews and streamers. Probably the algorithm scores monetized content higher.

Installing sponsorblock and clickbait remover makes youtube a lot better experience. Sponsorblock skips all the annoying sponsors, subscribe reminders, intros and gives you option to skip straight to the meat of the content, it's highly customizable. It will also show a badge on video if it's obviously a shill video for company X's product. Clickbait remover, forces thumbnails to be from the actual video itself, it also has option to remove allcaps titles etc..

I don't like the shorts, I hate the UX and how it forces you to interact with these shorts and always found tiktok annoying anyways.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#85

Post by kypro »

There's been a lot of negative changes to algorithms recent years. Search seems to function more as an extension to the recommendation page at this point with little relation to the search terms used. Content moderation has also heavily sanitised some communities on the site, but I'm not sure how wide spread that is. I know certain kinds of "edgy" content or controversial political discussions aren't really possible on YouTube today like there were in the past though.

My main issue with monetisation isn't so much the content itself, but the content recommendations. It seems that a lot of the content recommendations today have a corporate bias which they didn't used to. If a tech review channel just wants to make market videos and post them to YouTube that's fine with me personally so long as the algorithms don't push me to that type of content (which it currently does). The authentic low-budget tech reviewer doesn't have a chance on YouTube today, and that's real the problem.

If you want authentic, low-budget user curated content YouTube isn't the place anymore. There was something special about those early years of YouTube when it was mostly just low-budget videos made by real people on 420p webcams or video cameras. Back then no one made YouTube videos to be rich or famous, they made videos simply because they enjoyed making them and wanted to share their content with the world.

I don't think YouTube has peaked as a business, but I think it peaked in terms of an web 2.0 platform about a decade ago. That's a common trend though. All web 2.0 sites have been trending towards corporatisation for years now. The dream of the internet being a place where individuals could make cool stuff that other people around the world could find and enjoy is dead imo. Search and recommendation algorithms across the web are increasingly pushing users towards the approved corporate content because that's where the money is. Unless you know where to look today authentic content is extremely hard to find.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#86

Post by martin_a »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #46
omega3 wrote: post #11

Especially since the removal of downvoting it's hard to get to good quality material. Majority of tech videos are a case of blind leading the blind and unless you know the subject already it's hard to spot. Nowadays I start with a forum/reddit/discord/hn search for a list of hive approved creators and only then go to youtube with that list in hand. Starting the search in youtube (unless for a very niche/non-marketabl…

> Especially since the removal of downvoting A wake-up call that a single company annihilated our ability to sort out information for ourselves. I'm still rather disturbed and shaken.

> to sort out information for ourselves.

How can you sort something you know nothing about?

Downvotes, and their ratio to upvotes, were an important signal to get an idea of how good the video overall was.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#88

Post by cowtools »

worldsayshi wrote: post #74
adrianN wrote: post #44

The whole Internet hat peaked due to monetization. Very little content is created because somebody is passionate about something and wants to share. Almost all content is created to either directly make money or to collect enough followers to eventually start making money. Everything is fake and optimized to grab attention. What organic content remains is drowned out by the firehose of monetized content.

At some point we will have to start building a "second internet" that is governed through a network of trust rather than through an economy of attention grabbing.

Wasn't there a a push for micropayments at some point? I think advertisements won out by being more accessible. It is hard to say if the internet would be better or not with micropayments instead of ads.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#89

Post by saos »

Yup and the problem is its creating medicore content all for the sake of earning money.

I won't name and and shame but theres a YouTuber who obviously put in big effort in their editting...but it quickly went south when the person started teaching JavaScript. I've never been dissappointed.

I'm also getting sick and tired of the YouTube how to guides and the constant pressure to "smash the like button" and subscribe.

And removing the dislike button is complete and utter garbage. I cannot even understand it at all.

Re: Ask HN: Has YouTube peaked?

#90

Post by Barrin92 »

poisonborz wrote: post #72
adrianN wrote: post #44

The whole Internet hat peaked due to monetization. Very little content is created because somebody is passionate about something and wants to share. Almost all content is created to either directly make money or to collect enough followers to eventually start making money. Everything is fake and optimized to grab attention. What organic content remains is drowned out by the firehose of monetized content.

What's the problem with the drive for monetization? Out in the physical world you also rarely get services and content for free. Also monetization here mostly means possibilites for donation and paying for extra content, usually most of a creator's content is still free. As for money-grabber content: a good platform should have an efficient and honest rating mechanism.

>What's the problem with the drive for monetization? Out in the physical world you also rarely get services and content for free.

It's just as screwed up in the real world, the difference is that the internet at least temporarily offered an escape hatch to our screwed up economic system because at least the same logic of scarcity didn't apply. Now we've bolted the same crap on top of our digital lives.

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