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Ask HN: Why has YouTube degraded so quickly so suddenly?

7 points by ardy42 ↗ HN
In the past week or two, the quantity and frequency of ads has increased to near intolerable levels (probably at least as bad as TV, if not worse), and today my logged-out recommendations seemed to revert to a generic list of trending videos (e.g. garbage). What's going on?

5 comments

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raxxorrax
Maybe it has to to with them age restricting videos so that original content doesn't get shown as much as that from established media players. Or any mechanism that facilitates this.

Without account I see the same channels from TV stations now. While virility isn't a good metric for quality, the current one is a complete joke. YouTube didn't seem to be ready for YouTube and instead degraded back to TV.

hexbinencoded
Yeap. It's basically semi-interactive, TV-on-demand and not much better. Theoretically, individual creators can start from nothing but they have no power when megacorps come along and claim videos they didn't make at all to extort creators. Depending on YT would be a huge liability.
krapp
I haven't seen an ad on Youtube in ages - except for a brief window when they got through my ad blockers recently but that seems to have cleared uo.

As far as content goes, I use it logged in, and I have plenty of good content, but of course the default for a logged-out user is going to be generic, trending videos. Youtube like any other social media platform expect you to have an account and curate that account.

Maybe you deleted your cookies or switched IPs recently?

recrudesce
I have network wide ad blocking at home, and I don't see any ads when I use my desktop. But as soon as I switch to my Android handset I get like 20 ads in a 10 minute video even when the handset is forced to use my internal DNS server.

You should try it sometime just to see how bad it actually is.

hexbinencoded
Corporations gonna corporate.

How YT abuses creators and viewers, it would be better for all to go to a non-profit, sustainable platform that has clear, straightforward processes and doesn't ban people without a reason by algorithms.

Corporate platforms will always devolve into Kafkaesque hells because their motives are aligned with rent-seeking extraction, not promoting the arts or creativity/monetizing fairly.