I think k8sToGo's point is that she never "joined Alphabet", Alphabet did not exist when she joined Larry and Sergey. She joined concurrent with Google's founding as a company, she probably joined when the search engine was named Backrub. Alphabet would be created decades later.
> With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki
Wojcicki has been involved with Google practically since the beginning. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set up office in her parents' garage soon after they incorporated Google in 1998. Wojcicki became Google's first marketing manager the following year and played a role in the earliest Google Doodles. In 2006, she encouraged Google to buy YouTube, which launched a year earlier.
> In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up office in Wojcicki's parents' garage in Menlo Park, California. [1]
YouTube is almost unwatchable. The show I’m viewing now has an ad every minute or so. I don’t see how they will survive another few years. They’ve literally angered their user base to the point of abandoning the platform.
There’s no alternative (though Tik Tok certainly is doing a decent job of taking all the short content). I think it would be a gangbuster opportunity for Apple to integrate user created content into Apple TV. They don’t need to rely on ad revenue, and similar to Microsoft kneecapping Google with ChatGPT, it would be a great opportunity for Apple to further hurt Google by winning longer form video content and driving advertisers away from YouTube.
But I am not sure Apple has the stomach for the controversy that often surrounds user generated content. Maybe Facebook would be the better competitor, though they are as beholden to advertisers as Google.
All I know is that it will take a massively well financed group that can sustain the server costs of video streaming with most of it generating zero revenue.
With MSFT it's obvious that Satya is trying to distract a competitor in cloud, but chatgpt is hardly going to "kneecap" Google. Satya is hyping it with all the credibility of a used car salesman. There's zero evidence that LLMs are going to finally make Microsoft capable of launching a competitive search service.
I can’t tell if you are trolling. Google develops Android which is the primary competitor to Apple’s biggest product. If Google loses revenue it weakens its ability to compete. This directly benefits Apple.
> With MSFT it's obvious that Satya is trying to distract a competitor in cloud, but chatgpt is hardly going to "kneecap" Google. Satya is hyping it with all the credibility of a used car salesman. There's zero evidence that LLMs are going to finally make Microsoft capable of launching a competitive search service.
All the reporting on this seems to be consistent that Google is freaked out about ChatGPT, rushed its announcement of Bard, etc etc. So I guess you could have the opinion that ChatGPT isn’t a threat, but I think it is obvious you would be in the minority. No one knows for sure of course, but the smart money, and Google itself, seem to think it is a major threat.
You can't afford $9 a month or whatever it is to remove the ads? What other service are you planning to use instead that has no ads and no subscription fee?
Worse for whom? Everything you listed is favourable for cutting costs and pleasing/attracting advertisers[1]. There are not a lot of alternatives to YouTube, certainly nothing with the same size of audience, so squeezing the users and creators to improve revenue makes business sense.
YouTube users are the product being sold, not the customers.
[1] The recent crackdown on swearing falls in the same category.
I've no use for the dislike button in YouTube ("never show me this channel again" is more useful) but its search/sort functions are getting increasingly broken.
In the early days, YouTube had a 5 star rating system which I think is better than a binary like/dislike. You also could customize your channel more including custom backgrounds.
I am personally completely unable to understand the decision to remove the ability for me to search a youtuber's videos. I didn't even know this was something a video website could take away!
It does exist but it's hidden in the tabs. My m1 mac screen is not large enough to show the search icon which I must click on the right chevron icon to see as it's on the far right.
I'm glad it's there but it wasn't always like this. I wonder if I'm just an idiot (totally possible), a dark pattern, or just a bad UI change.
I couldn't care 2 shits about the dislike gauge (felt more there to wax the ego of the powerless).
Search as little as I use it is fine. Maybe you just don't have a ton of matching content left to watch, maybe it is worse but this all feels too subjective/situational to speak qualitatively about.
Sort by date of me is only really relevant in a creators page, and the "uploads" stream is always by date recent to oldest, so profits?
The only thing that has significantly gotten worse over the years is their ridiculous increase in ad placement throughout videos. I'm guessing you block ads or have premium because it HAS to be the #1 most hated change in YouTube over the past few years.
Curious why this is important enough to be on the front page. Even as a techie I don't find this news interesting, at least not HN front-page worthy. (Instead of down voting it would be nice to hear what others think as valid reasons). How does this affect our day-day lives?
YouTube is one of the largest and most influential tech companies in the world, and wields huge social power. Some of the greatest content on the internet is hosted there, so it makes sense to me that HN readers would find a major change like this of interest. Wojcicki has been in charge of YouTube for a long time now, so hearing that she is stepping down and will be replaced opens up tons of space for speculation about where YouTube could be heading in the near future. Personally, as someone who spends many hours a week using YouTube, I find this article to be absolutely HN-front-page-worthy!
If it's in the company of curious, smart people like the kind I routinely encounter here on HN, then yes! Absolutely! I greatly enjoy a good round of civil speculation and discussion with my fellow hackers :P
* There's absolutely nothing we could do to influence YouTube's leadership changes.
* There's very little you can do to influence changes in the product YouTube as well.
* There's very little we know about the internals of upper C-level leadership changes.
Speculating is an utter waste of time. I don't see a point. For me this news was just another passable piece of information. Meh! Definitely not HN front-page worthy.
What "belongs" on the front page of HN is whatever ends up on the front page without being moderated or flagged. At the end of the day, HN is a community and it decides for itself what it wants to see and share with its members! Like the guidelines for submissions say, anything that is intellectually stimulating or interesting to hackers is fair game! Vox populi vox dei :P
I guess Susie stepping down the corporate ladder of a shitty company must be more stimulating.
Also, why the downvotes? I didn't know it was illegal to discuss how banal and uninteresting a post is. Clearly posharma and I see it that way. Yet every time this happens, people get downvoted. Why? Can't you just scroll through and move on, or do other people's opinions bother you?
Hopefully this brings back the dislike button. Intellectually I know a change of CEO shouldn't/wouldn't impact a feature like this, but I am still annoyed at its absence and find it makes YouTube substantially less useful.
Edit: I understand the dislike button is still there, I misspoke. But for my purposes of seeing like/dislike ratio, it might as well not be there.
Completely disagree. Getting rid of that button has significantly cleaned up the associated comments sections. I’ve also noticed a general improvement in my recommendations. Great move imo.
How can you tell when a video contains something misleading? For example, I struggle to find quality DIY videos without the dislikes warning me away. Dislikes are a great way for the community to clean house.
DIY videos are my primary concern on this as well. It is also why browser extensions don't help me too much because my use case is usually in the garage, half way through a project having issues, on my phone furiously trying to get a solution to the problem I'm having.
I had this exact scenario yesterday trying to remove rounded/stripped lug nuts off my wheels. It would've been very helpful to be able to see if the video I was watching had 1000 likes but 6000 dislikes to know if what I was about to do was advisable or not. Yes, I read the comments and it ended up being a simple fix with the right tools, but the like/dislike ratio is a great way to filter dangerous/dumb/unhelpful videos.
Isn't YouTube already pushing down the bad-ratio videos, though? I know it's not the same as you being able to filter the counts yourself... but the data is being used to try to hide crap.
But YouTube is already using the dislikes to push content down, it's just not showing you the count (nor does it show you the many-other engagement signals it uses for its rankings and recommendations).
Personally, I see the removal of visible dislikes as a net positive. They were used to rain down negativity and meanness on well-intentioned videos. I think YouTube is now a happier place when a kid's crappy singing video gets quietly ranked down, versus being shown to have 34 classmates (or 34,000 strangers) that hated it.
same experience trying to find videos that answer a technical question - there's no immediate gauge on whether or not the video's useful, and it's easy (and often automatic on YouTube's part) to hide any comments with a negative sentiment
Sure, we all got fucked by that but just think of the political porn addicts who now get to have their feelings protected. Ensuring the integrity of their ideological bubbles is much more important than preventing videos with dangerous instructions in them from being promoted.
I'm not expert on YouTube's algorithms, how did getting rid of visible dislikes help improve recommendations?
I could see it having an impact on the comment section because rather than just dislike and move on people feel compelled to say what is wrong with the video, but I could also see the opposite effect where instead of just disliking and moving on now people spam the comment section with unhelpful attacks on the video/creator.
Because people would brigade videos they politically disagreed with even if it was good content. I’m seeing those videos now. Taking away dislikes has a chilling effect on brigading.
There's a lot more to YouTube than political videos. I'd estimate over 90% of "reviews" for exercise equipment are automated videos based on data scraped from Amazon. These used to get downvoted heavily, so you could quickly see which videos were worth watching and which ones were created by bots. Now you have to slog through a dozen bot videos to find even one created by a human, giving their actual review. But fuck those of us who use YouTube for something other than political porn because some politician got their feelings hurt by a high dislike count.
ah, good point. I thought when this originally came out the data was still available via api call but it appears thats not the case anymore, or possibly never was.
From the FAQ
> Where does the extension get its data?
> A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior.
It's not just made up, it tracks downvotes from extension users and combines them with a historical database. And I think some creators share new info with the database to help the accuracy.
Many videos had the dislike count collected by the extension and stored before YouTube completely removed the counter from the videos. That number is now combined with dislikes sent by the users.
New videos will only show dislikes sent by people using the extension. There's no way to know the real number anymore.
I don't think many people are going to go through the trouble of offering to help and then feed in fake info, especially if they make awful videos and it's easy to guess what they're doing.
Is it? I see in the network requests where the "likes" button data is returned, but not the dislikes. It's possible I just can't find it though - there's a lot of data in a lot of shapes.
That makes way more sense, but seems like it's a useless feature. I would assume that in that case it would be dislikes from the add-on (or some sort of federated dislike space?), which is really just going to tell you the opinions of people who like disliking things so much they downloaded an add-ons just to see others down-vote it as well.
My experience in this space is you would be surprised how many thing slike this only exist because of as few as one person wants it to be that way. It's not even the leader necessary. A mid-level VP can have an outsized impact just based on their area of responsibility.
It can be purely emotional too, no data whatsoever. If there is data it's just selectively chosen to support the preconceived view. It literally happens all the time.
Just look at the changes to the Macbook following Johy Ive's departure or even the iOS UI changes following Forstall's departure. In the latter case, the removal of skeuomorphic design was so impactful Apple engineers called it "de-Forstall-ation".
In this case, I see it being big brands pushing for the removal of dislike button. They simply don't want to be dislike-bombed for doing something unpopular. That's it. So I wouldn't bet on Wijicki leaving impacts this.
The stated reason for getting rid of dislike visibility was very suspicious to me. While I don't deny that targeted harassment and bandwagoning with dislikes on certain channels/videos happens, there's no way it was happening frequently enough to warrant removing the feature from all videos. I saw no reason why individual creators couldn't stick with hiding the controls on a per-video or per-channel basis.
Removing the dislike count takes away a valuable indicator of low quality and/or time wasting videos. Yes, it has false positives on charged topics, but I use it to help determine if an intriguing recommendation or search result is actually worthwhile or just clickbait. I suspect YouTube was pleased to remove the like/dislike visibility because it would boost engagement metrics. I assume any concerns about quality or the viewing experience are secondary or considered inconsequential.
Edit: They removed the dislike visibility, not the dislike button.
As someone who looks up tutorials on various pieces of software, the dislike ratio was a pretty good indicator as to whether or not a particular video would help me do what the title of it says without me having to sit or scrub through the whole thing
Thanks to the idea of disliking as a meme, the ratings are essentially meaningless. An overwhelmingly disliked video is probably worth watching, if for the humor alone.
The dislike button was never removed, that is not accurate. The dislike count is no longer being displayed to viewers. Dislikes still exist. In my opinion, it is important to be accurate with language.
Isn't this a distinction without a difference? The point of having likes/dislikes is it's supposed to be a social signal for quality of the content? I have found dislikes useful for knowing which videos to skip if I am crunched for time and do not want to watch all of them, like music.
Author/owner of the video would still be able to see it, so they can judge if their audience liked the video or not. But still, the biggest value proposition of having the likes vs dislikes is for viewers, not content producers, so it really sucked it went away.
I regularly dislike decent content based on my idea of what youtube thinks of my recommendation preferences. It’s baffling how much I need to manually participate in their “engagement” metrics to be able to go to youtube.com without closing it shortly thereafter. And I wonder how much more echo chamber-y it is for less tech-savvy users who rarely touch these controls.
80% of regulars are not subscribed and don’t “like” videos according to content creators, that’s why they nag for “like, subscribe” five times per minute. Developers tend to think that bigcorps’ data analysis is at a rocket science level, when in reality it’s probably less efficient than SQL LIKE query could be on some `video.tags` field.
Wow only now I noticed that the dislike button disappeared. That's a terrible decision. All social media should have dislike buttons. To many people with large following think they are clever because they only ever see likes and retweets, but if we could downvote/dislike some of their idiot comments on Twitter the world would be a better place.
My hope is that coming AI can be used to help better discern and classify content. Essentially, "prewatch" videos and help filter spam. I would love to see incentives for creators reset towards making quality content rather than sensationalized content. So, so fatigued on the stupid thumbnails with surprised faces and shocking claims and they are everywhere from home repair guides to physics tutorials.
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 first quite often.
Agreed. I would not be where I am in life today without the skills and knowledge I learned from YouTube. I am a huge fan of the way they compensate creators and align their incentives with creators' incentives, and generally just very pleased with the product they provide. I pay for Premium and it's the best monthly subscription I have imo — the sheer quantity of expertly-produced content on YT is unparalleled, and I've discovered so many new hobbies, interests, and people through it.
I’m not familiar w the compensation mechanism but am part of a YouTube premium family subscription and agree on the overall value.
The content is unparalleled. Home repair is one of my most valued content types on the site.
There are many, many different types of house problems and solutions covered by videos.
Even when you get to something that seemingly has no person describing the problem and fix, you can often get close enough to improvise based on other people’s ideas.
YouTube is a skill building platform. You can save money by becoming more self-reliant.
Despite other comments here, I think the search is quite good. It sometimes ignores keywords but returns the video I _intended_ to seek.
I don’t care for shorts, though and would hide them completely if able.
It would also be good to have relatively anonymous ways to upload video. Sometimes I’ll establish a novel solution and would post the information but wouldn’t want it associated with my identity—or even to monetize it.
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.
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.
Either she is being blamed, or she is deeply guilty and wants to try to avoid the publicity, or they anticipate this will become extremely ugly.
Or sundar is blaming her for lining him up for a firing squad.
Or she is a liability due to her past work.
Regardless, it seems like she is leaving because what she had to do to make the government happy previously is now going to be used against Google.
Someone else mentioned the theory that she might be the best Sundar replacement. Maybe she found out it’s not her or Sundar is eliminating competition here.
Maybe, but I also think a lot of these people that hit the jackpot from the maturation of the internet the last 25 years are just going to quit cause the job is going to suck going forward. Being an internet tech executive when the industry is no longer growing ridiculously and is just another sector of the economy like durable good manufacturing, or real estate development or whatever might not be very fun anymore.
The founders themselves of these companies have already gotten a headstart.
I always saw her as one of the best candidates to become the Twitter CEO. She has the industry credence, and the experience of leading and making both google ads and YouTube successful (the two parts that Twitter needs help with).
It would be ironic if Twitter turned into a graveyard for former Googlers, considering how many of them have been shut out from ever working at Google again/being rehired by the company end of their respective non-compete periods.
>considering how many of them have been shut out from ever working at Google again/being rehired by the company end of their respective non-compete periods.
Is this because of layoffs or something else happening? I would think that mass layoffs would still allow eligibility for rehire down the road?
So much hate for her on all fronts, yet she made the most rewarding media platform today on the internet. Any creator or consumer who has half a brain should realize the magnitude of the feat and how unobvious it is that YouTube exists as it does today.
Rewarding to who? And _she_ made it? To me YT continued its successful streak despite of the poor changes with not much to attribute to people actually making the calls.
Exactly, she was only CEO since 2014. Saying she made YT is laughable, if anything most of the annoying things at YT happened under her reign, from bogus DMCAs to dislike button removal to the force fed YT shorts and so on.
Don't forget having to have a fucking Google+ account. I'm proudly one of the few who spent half a decade being unable to comment or send direct messages because I refused to assent to the Google+ account creation pop-up.
Google plus is still "around", it's just not a social media network. A conspiracy theorist would argue it succeeded in its purpose: to unify all accounts under a single Google account banner. Google music, android, YouTube, maps, Gmail, search, drive, etc.
We didn't even notice it happening, like frogs being boiled. E.g. try being anonymous on a fresh Android device now. You can't even access the play store without logging in.
The yt of today and the yt of 2006 are very different services. If anything, Google bought a userbase and a brand name and built its own service from there.
I disagree. She was the CEO and was clearly not great from the perspective of users, in part because the real customers are advertisers. People who say "um, ok" when a CEO at a user-hostile corporation leaves are not haters. I know there are plenty of actual haters but I don't see "so much hate".
Also from Wikipedia: "YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. The trio were early employees of PayPal, which left them enriched after the company was bought by eBay. Hurley had studied design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign."
If you're CEO of such a successful company and are surrounded by smart people, you don't have to be very good to keep the thing running... Any modest person with half a brain could do it.
Getting respect from employees these days is not difficult; most of them are extreme conformists and worship power for its own sake. They will interpret any dumb words out of your mouth as words of wisdom. Even if everything you say is idiotic, they will bend so far as to assume you speak in metaphors.
She did a good job, however, we had to see negative likes removed, a lot of really quality content demonetized, content creators removing words to avoid demonetization, and annoying af discovery algorithms. These were all things that she helped bring about, but that were in keeping with Google's strategy. Removing dislikes is similar to Google's search ads, where Google is happy to show all kinds of crap and it's up to you to filter them out. Caveat emptor.
Still, I think YouTube is better than average for social media. Its censorship of words sucked, but its censorship of ideas wasn't so bad. It was worse on other platforms.
>"yet she made the most rewarding media platform today on the internet."
I think TikTok holds this position, not YouTube. Indeed, YouTube seems to be pushing really hard for Shorts to be a viable competitor but it doesn't seem to be working.
Or, do you mean rewarding in terms of monetization for creators and not engagement?
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.
Agreed. I am a massive fan of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. While I am a bit nervous because major change like this could lead to those products getting worse, I'm also hopeful that it could lead to them getting better! So in general I'm just eager to see what happens next, come what may.
When I first compared Spotify/YT Premium (Google Music at the time):
- Relatively similar offerings of music, at least when it came to my tastes. I have a wide variety and some weird stuff in there, but both worked for me to find whatever I thought of.
- Relatively similar price ($10 Spotify vs $12 YT), so I knew I needed at least some extra value from YT to justify
- YT Premium not only gives me YT Music, but also HASSLE FREE ad-free YT. What I mean is -- I don't have to manage extensions for web youtube and apps for Android or iOS or using NextDNS or a pihole or something just to get "ad free" from YT. It just works. Not having ads, and not having to CARE is a big value add for me. This alone is well worth $2 a month just in the time it saves me dealing with it.
- YT Premium USED to be Google Music, which I loved the UI of way more than Spotify. I am still VERY upset at YT Music since it's objectively worse than Google Music in every way, but it's still the same goddamn company
- AT THE TIME, I was having serious issues getting Spotify to play music from cache. Even if I cached, it would still default to streaming it as long as I had data. This resulted in huge data usage each month. I am SURE this is fixed by now. But this went into the calculus for me at the time.
Would I move over to Spotify? I think the things that would push me back would be an increase in YT price, a further degradation in YT Music UX, some new killer feature Spotify has/gets (podcasts aren't my thing)
This was a VERY long answer which can TLDR to "Having ad-free YouTube + Music all at once for $2 more was well worth not having to give a crap about all the infrastructure needed to block ads across all my devices forever."
Spotify's catalog for Indian languages is smaller than Youtube. Not only is YT Music's collection larger, the recommendation system works better for Indian languages too. I have been that the autoplay follows the mood/ type of the song better than Spotify.
It’s probably inferior to both Spotify and Apple Music, but if you’re going to pay for YouTube premium anyway and are able to endure the weird UI… Then it might save you a small monthly fee you’d otherwise pay to competing services.
It’d never survive in the market as it’s own service, and it’s clearly inferior even to its own predecessor Google Music.
I have no idea who decided this thing was a good idea.
Same. I am always a little surprised to read these comments. Moved from Spotify to Google Play Music to YouTube Music and never really had many issues...
Not sure about inferior to spotify though. Lots of things (for me at least) aren't available on spotify, even with subscription. More often than not quality is actually better on YT music. Major thing is also asking in car for 'yo google play me this and that' and spotify just returns some nonsense or cover where YT Music always returns the right thing. Apple music is absolute crap, quality of sound was enough that I didn't even bother extending trial into anything more and UI is atrocious.
YT music, for me at least, not perfect but better than the two by far. I still keep spotify sub because sometimes we share playlists in office etc.. not sure I'll extend to be honest. YT Music on the other hand, especially in car is essential.
No, I don't know that since I never got to experience it through web nor app. Maybe I need to own an iphone? Googling for it turned a ton of questions about poor audio quality and some hacks as potential solutions, not to mention often blaming user's hardware setup for it. YT Music is no shenanigans just works, and works great, solution.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is the recommendation engine is much better in YT Music than Spotify IMHO. I've found a surprisingly large number of new artists that I enjoy and it's solely due to YTM's recommendation engine. Really obscure stuff that I just wouldn't have found otherwise.
YouTube's music library feels richer than Spotify. A few years ago I was contemplating a switch from YT Music to Spotify (I like Spotify's UX), but a lot of stuff I enjoy listening to was missing. But I might just have a weird taste in music.
I use both, spotify for my main listening and yt music for mixes, live shows, and lots of content that plainly isn't on spotify.
Yt music also supports tapping the side of the screen to jump forwards or backwards in 10 second increments. Seems like a trivial feature, but holy shit I have needed it my entire life. The ability to both rapidly and finely adjust the time is huge when listing to things like live shows that are a 2 hour video.
Crazy but I don't think I have ever had a program or hardware player that could do both. Always either fast forward/rewind or trying to finely slide a slider.
Works like shit. No support for basic features such as crossfade. Recommendations are repetitive, uninsightful and low-quality. No desktop app, and the web app is as bug-complete as any other alphabet property. Enjoy losing access to your playlist and album collection when your google account gets randomly banned.
Not a spotify fan either, but there's practically no upside to switching.
the sales pitch is that for $15 instead of $10, you get ad-free youtube as well as everything spotify gives you.
but the reality is that you're losing spotify radio and recommendations, and replacing it with youtube music's radio stations and recommendations. and for me, i found that spotify introduces me to a lot of new and interesting music that i wouldn't otherwise find, and youtube picks a dozen songs every month it wants to play, and regardless of what station i choose it plays those same songs.
for me, i'm currently paying for both because i like youtube premium, but the music offering doesn't replace spotify.
I guess most people forgot fast that Spotify platformed a major antivaxxer? I cancelled them immediately and can't even imagine subscribing to them any time. It was just a year ago...
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.
I liked Google Play Music when it first came out. But development was basically stopped and they replaced it with the crappy YT Music App. Unless they majorly change YouTube music I'll stay with Spotify.
Dev wasn't just stopped. The whole product was sunset and if you wanted to keep a semblance of what you had, you were forced to migrate to YouTube music. I saw the end of that crap rainbow and finally moved over to koel which has done just as much as I ever cared to use in Google music, but now I don't fear Google getting bored and killing the product in some future.
One big upside of having access to video in your music collection is all the independently-uploaded songs and song versions that have not officially found their way to streaming.
If your tastes are more eclectic this can be a really big thing actually -- the music streaming services are largely similar in what they do and don't have, which leaves out a LOT of stuff, and finally things vanish off of streaming all the time. Individually-uploaded youtube music-in-a-video on the other hand is astonishingly durable.
Totally agree about the UI though, and they also suck on royalty payouts -- only Spotify is worse.
I agree, my wife and I use the YouTube Premium family plan - I don't want them to mess with it. I think it is the best deal of any monthly subscription with the possible exception of Apple+ family plan (I use Fitness+, Arcade, iCloud storage - so it is also a pretty good deal).
The tendency is for prices to go up and for services to get worse or more restricted. Usually, a service initially runs at a loss or some sub-optimum during a trial or rollout phase, and then after critical mass, it is degraded or costs are raised to some new optimum that maximizes profit at the cost of losing some users.
Same, huge youtube premium fanboy. YouTube has pretty much replaced Netflix and all the other streaming platforms for me, the content it has is more varied and interesting than yet another generic new IP play. Although it doesn't have classic time-tested movies, so that still requires a subscription somewhere.
Agreed re: movies, though some have been cropping up there recently, and in really good resolution too. I watched "Glengary Glen Ross" for the first time in my life last weekend on Youtube.
Premium moved me from being a consumer of a content made by big companies (including movies, and most of the shows) towards more independent content creators. I couldn't be more happy about it.
The Spiffing Brit did a video on YT Premium revenue [0]. My understanding is all the money from all the premium subscribers is thrown into a big pool, of which YouTube takes 45% (or whatever their share is) right off the bat. Then, they take each Premium subscribers’ total watch time across all the channels they watched videos on, and split the remaining money based off of total premium subscriber watch time to each channel.
For example, imagine there are only three YouTube channels out there, The Spiffing Brit, Pewdiepie, and MrBeast. There’s $1,000,000 USD remaining in the pot for the month (or pay period, I’m not sure how regular the payouts are) after YouTube takes their cut. In sum total, YT Premium subscribers watched 100,000 minutes of content: 50,000 minutes to MrBeast, 40,000 minutes to Pewdiepie, and 10,000 minutes to The Spiffing Brit. The payouts would be calculated using:
A bit of a contrived and simplified explanation I’m sure, but as far as I am aware the formulae they use to divvy up the money between creators is as straight forward as it gets. Money out per creator = global money in total * (creator minutes total / global minutes total)
I subscribed to YT premium when it was bundled with YT music. I hate that there is not a plan in the US that allows me to just get ad free YT videos. I do not use YT music and don't care to.
I hope whoever takes it over creates an ad free plan that doesn't bundle music into it. I hate that all of these tech companies are taking the cable route they all rallied agains and bundling everything.
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.
Should it not let me see a product review if it was sponsored by the company that makes the product? Or only if the reviewers didn't have full editorial control?
Wherever you would want to draw the line, someone else would tell you that you drew it wrong.
I think you're being unnecessarily adversarial here.
Sponsored ads in videos are everywhere, and well delineated. Third party tools exist to skip them already -- and YouTube already has the data on where they start and end. They even show them on the timeline, although they call "end of sponsored advertisement" "most replayed"… presumedly because of everyone skipping the ad, losing their place, and then having to step back to try to find where the content begins again.
Here's how this could work. I would pay an additional $10/month for YouTube Scarlet. Content creators would have three options -- declare that their videos have no sources of revenue outside of YouTube revenue; provide start and end time stamps for any external-revenue-generating segments; or do nothing.
For my $10/month, videos in the second category would skip their promotion. In exchange, some portion of my $10/month would go to the video creator, just like ad/Premium revenue does today, and the metrics on number of videos where this segment was skipped would be made available in analytics for sharing with sponsors. Finally, I'd have access to a user preference to suppress videos in the third category for appearing in recommendations, ever.
Does this deal with every case? No. Would it make YouTube more pleasant for me and potentially others who share my values, without impacting current regular and Premium users, and with a neutral or positive impact on content creators? I assert yes.
Why would it have a negative impact on either the promoted businesses or the content creators?
Promoted businesses currently pay based on (an estimate of) the number of views that the video will get. This would trivially adjust to paying based on the number of views that the sponsorship within the video gets -- that's why I mentioned the requirement to make this available through analytics. If the cost per view stays the same for sponsors, they're now paying for a self-selecting audience of people who are not actively bothered by their ads. (I doubt I'm the only person who, if I as going to pay money for a VPN, would choose literally anything other than Nord VPN just as petty "revenge" for how much of my life they've wasted.) If this slightly-reduced audience does not sufficiently eat their marketing budget, they can find new creators to sponsor.
For the content creators, presumedly the target amount paid directly per skipped ad would be chosen to slightly exceed the expected payout of showing the ad. This is the same conceptual model Premium uses today. So even though the sponsor may be paying them for a 9.5 M view video instead of a 10 M view video -- the payout should more than cover the difference.
I agree that these marginal wins run into systematic concerns if more than, say, 5% or so of users start opting out of embedded advertising this way. But besides being incredibly unlikely -- what would it say about the business model of embedded advertising if 5% of YouTube customers were willing to pay to avoid it!?
So, you appear to dismiss my concerns completely, demand a feature, and then insist... that hardly anyone will use it? And that because hardly anyone will use it, that means promoters are safe... unless they're not, in which case, they had it coming?
A sponsor pays $10,000 to a content creator.
And then, they get zero views of their embedded ad in the video.
They got literally nothing for their $10,000 investment.
And let's say, for the sake of argument, that YouTube does not pay $10,000 for the same video, or ones like it.
Now, the content creator gets less money than they would have before.
It's almost like content creators have already done this calculus, and concluded that the best way to create content is to promote things.
It's funny to me when someone is like, "Why doesn't YouTube do X," and then they answer their own question, but then they still act like it's weird that YouTube doesn't do that thing.
Sponsors don't pay a fixed amount to creators. They pay for (estimated) views.
What I'm proposing is exactly, 100% symmetric to how advertisers who pay Google for YouTube ad placement are already treated -- they pay for views, and YouTube can and does choose to not show those ads to some users, those who pay for Premium. Is that unfair for the ad buyers? Sure, if you squint right… but they're not being deprived something they paid for, they're just not being offered the option to put in ads in front of that particular market.
Before Youtube Premium, I would have said the same thing about blocking first-party ads in YouTube. It was weird they didn't do that thing. And then they did it. So now it's not weird I guess?
> Sponsors don't pay a fixed amount to creators. They pay for (estimated) views.
This can't be right, I've seen many videos from creators that say the opposite, it is a fixed amount per contract which can be one or more videos. Maybe it is different with creators that have more than 1M subscribers.
The estimation is on the front end of the contract, not the back end -- the amount offered to a creator whose videos average 10M views is 10x than what is offered to one whose videos average 1M views, in general. If you think about it from the advertiser's point of view, this is the only sane way to manage the risk of a video going viral and exceeding expected number of views, while still providing a reasonably constant valuation of a view event.
A sponsorship in a video paid directly to the YouTuber is very different from a targeted ad that YouTube runs. It doesn't interrupt the content in unexpected ways (only ways planned by the creator), it's targeted based on content rather than data mining, and the creator usually tries to add a bit of personality to it. Not to mention you can skip them using the regular scrubbing controls rather than being forced to watch at least 5 seconds.
Yes. It is a somewhat-less-bad form of even more advertising. If you think paying to avoid some advertising is reasonable, why is paying more to avoid more advertising unreasonable?
It's unreasonable to expect YouTube Premium to filter out content inserted by the video creator when that's not the terms either you or the creator were given. I pay for Nebula and don't see any ads or sponsorships there, but I don't begrudge the sponsorships on regular YouTube.
If the sponsorships bug you that much, use sponsorblock.
It's totally reasonable: users would be happier, YouTube can charge more for it (YT Premium+?), and YT analytics can detect when a sponsor segment (which many videos already label, and which are known to be about 60s long) is skipped and pass those metrics on to the content creator so the sponsor isn't being cheated.
Everybody wins. (Yes this doesn't work for heavily integrated sponsorships but it'd still get most of them.)
Frequently you can pay more to individual YouTubers for that service, many have Patreon or other methods of providing early ad free versions of their content.
Yes. This is a very, very good answer when it's available as an option.
I do think, though, that if the best answer to "YouTube doesn't let me do <x>" is "pay an alternate service provider instead," it might suggest a market opportunity for YouTube to provide the same service with much less friction.
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.
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.
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.
You bring up a good point, that out of all the video players that exist on mobile devices, YouTube's is pretty weak. Maybe it's part of Google's philosophy to keep their UX simple and dumb for the widest possible audience. And everyone else has to deal with it.
Converted my under 8$ dollar Google Play Music plan to 14$ family plan for my Wife, and they honored that 14$ cost when YTM rolled out.
While unlikely, I have been hoping for some sort of "we changed our mind" PR statement from Google on this before we switch to a family Spotify come April.
The price hike doesn't hurt on our monthly finances, but considering the 12 month cost vs features compared to Spotify... it does hurt. Why pay more for less.
Like others are saying, the no ads Youtube is fantastic. We do use adblockers on all of our devices, but it's hard to do on Google Homes, casting to Chromecasts, and Youtube Kids.
I am prepared to go Firefox + Ublock/Brave on my Android phone if I do go Spotify though....
> Converted my under 8$ dollar Google Play Music plan to 14$ family plan for my Wife, and they honored that 14$ cost when YTM rolled out.
I'm currently still on the original $7.99 plan. Any tips on how to do the upgrade to the family plan for $14? I've wanted to do that for a while but not give up my grandfathered price. The price they show me for the family plan is $22.99.
Looks like youtube premium just gives you no ads and allows for video downloads. Which you already can get using ublock and youtube-dl if you're watching from a computer. People who are big fans of youtube premium is it because you're using youtube mostly on mobile device, or is there some other advantage here I'm missing?
It gives me no ads on mobile (both OSs), PC browser (without worrying about pre-roll or banner ads sneaking through a filter that breaks), Chromecast (without dealing with a pi-hole), and the knowledge that my spouse isn't having to deal with ads either (she wouldn't mind enough otherwise to deal with extensions), plus downloads on all those platforms, and background play without using an unofficial app. And it does that all while giving a bigger cut of money to people who make the videos than they would get even if I watched the ads.
Downloads and no ads on my mobile device (so I can listen while running) and on Roku on my TV. It also allows you to play videos with the phone screen off, which I don't think the free plan does.
I never click any ads, including the ad for Premium. So I still don't know how much it costs. Well, I can often go weeks without even opening Youtube so I guess the price would be unreasonably high for my usage. Or if I paid the viewing experience would be so much better, that I'd waste too much precious time on Youtube.
God, I wondered why these youtubers can't stop with the super long introductions, walkarounds to tell us something basic that could be explained in 2-3 minutes TOPS.
Yeah, lot of noise added. Reminds of those content mill articles that dance around the subject/question for 80% of the length of the article just to keep you for longer and increase the chance of clicking an ad.
I remember some of the best youtube content I've seen was less than 10 minutes in length, like short animations and other content which took a lot of time to produce in small amounts.
It's still out there, it's just harder to find. YouTube also doesn't want to send it to my subscriptions inbox so I now prefer NewPipe which actually shows me what each channel posts.
This is exactly right. Youtube has been trying so hard to turn itself into a tv network. Tiktok (for now) is a classic disrupter and has had tremendous success by making something great that people liked. Vine is the more embarassing failure, but YouTube is a close second. For those who dismis tiktok without even trying it, it is hard to convey how fun, interesting, and surprising it can be.
i'm not sure if vine was a true failure. the only difference i see between that and tiktok is the focus on music and the less rigid length requirement.
the users loved vine and it's still quoted in tiktoks
i think it's because china is able to dump money it was able to take off more
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.
That was a remarkably bad call and huge fuck up. The weirdest thing is I think all my older gen-X colleagues are the ones that could've told you that. They were the ones who had kids old enough to be on music-Ly or whatever that got bought by TikTok. I as a lowly millennial had no idea what they were talking about at first but whatever it was had all the signs of a viral success with their kids.
Wasnt there like a 10 year gap between the two? It's clear Vine left a gap that TikTok filled but it's wasnt like one shut down and the next started right away... Rgiht?
TikTok launched in 2016, about 4 months before Vine shut down, although it wasn't immediately available worldwide. Musical.ly, the precursor to TikTok which then merged with it, launched in 2014.
I think you are being disingenuous. It wasnt widely available or popular until 2018.
Saying that Musical.ly, a Chinese based lip syncing service, was where everyone went after Vine, a USA based short video service, closed down in 2016 is quite the stretch.
I said 10 years which was an exaggeration but TikTok may be the spiritual successor to Vine but TikTok didnt even exist in the country where the majority of Vines users existed until two years later.
I guess you could say there was a exodus from Vine, users wandered around in a desert for two years, and then finally arrived at the promised land, TikTok...
She got us to 100 miilion 'how to boil egg' videos. Hopefully the next corporate robot in charge or Bard (if the rumors are true) can take us to 1 billion.
YouTube has been riding it's content momentum for too long. It really needs a change of leadership to continue to innovate.
For some searches, it's baffling that the top results are clearly intuitively wrong (e.g. showing videos where dislike to like ratio is very high, compared to clearly better alternatives that you can find if you wade through the results)
- Why does seemingly every channel I follow, whether it be JCS Criminal Psychology or The 8-bit Guy, have to mention the YouTube Algorithm, Content ID, Copyright Strikes, or Community Guidelines? If almost every creator is struggling and not just the fringe and edgy, you've screwed up big time.
- Removal of the dislike count. Extremely unpopular decision. Also YouTube's API is still answering dislike counts making extensions to bring it back still function, despite over a year later, almost implying it was about keeping up appearances. Now... who could be so worried about keeping up appearances...
- Completely blowing up YouTube Rewind into an increasingly corporate affair that quickly started heading downhill until the absolute train wreck of 2018, where it became the most disliked video in YouTube history at that point. This was, in part, because YouTube basically sanitized it of the presence of the popular YouTubers at the time because they might not be advertiser-friendly. Rewind never recovered and YouTube has now given up trying to engage with the community in such a way.
- Taking a 5-second ad at the beginning of her tenure, and leaving it with multiple, constant, unskippable, rampant advertising; and a subscription plan that started at $10/mo. turning into $23/mo. for equivalent service (5 users).
- Launched YouTube Kids to provide a curated experience for younger individuals, then decided to make it run on automation. Which then screwed up big time and started serving kids extremely inappropriate content causing a brief congressional inquiry. Then YouTube settled as guilty to violating COPAA, and decided to shift all the responsibility on the creators by disabling comments and other features on any video that may possibly be seen by kids.
FWIW I think there are more or less two very distinct experiences/use cycles of YouTube. There is the one where people get to it from outside (mostly Google Search) and the one where people get to it from within YouTube itself. As someone who falls into the casual Google search category the latter class of serious YouTube user is just alien to me. The 2018 Rewind video was pretty bonkers stupid to me, but, to me, it also looks more or less the same as the 2017 rewind video. How you feel about YouTube is probably a function of how you use it.
> If almost every creator is struggling and not just the fringe and edgy, you've screwed up big time.
Whatever algorithm YouTube uses professional uploaders will try to maximize their views, which goes by acting as the algorithm requires. In a competitive environment there is a inherent struggle.
Bingo. This has made me spend a lot less time on Youtube because recommended content and search are worse for me. If I'm searching for a marine biology video I don't want to see recommendations for clickbait influencers 3 results in. I used to go down random rabbit holes when I found related interesting content, but now that just doesn't happen very much anymore.
YT search is dogshit now, rather than just returning results for the keyword you want they mix in random videos you've watched before and "suggested" videos that have no relation to the search
and the lack of likes/dislikes makes it harder to determine quality, which is probably some dark pattern to try and drive more engagement by forcing people to watch multiple videos. Dark patterns work short term, long term they result in TikTok or the equivalent eating your market share
It's also not SHORTS really trying SHORTS to mix its content nicely SHORTS because i seem to find its recommendations boring SHORTS and often can't find videos that SHORTS i know should be there. Maybe SHORTS i should be using bing search to find youtube videos. Yandex also has a nice video search
And if you start browsing shorts you're bound to get the same <9 creators ad nauseam with duplicates mixed in all the time.
It's a terrible experience, honestly.
The YT recommendation system is basically "we know what you want to watch better than you do", so it keeps blatantly ignoring any opposite signal.
No, I do not want to watch wedding videos that I've said I'm not interested in at least 50 times. No, there isn't anyone in my household watching wedding videos.
No, I do not want to rewatch a 6 hour long lecture I watched last month.
Yet it just doesn't bloody care. I am truly terrified to click on anything outside my regular comfort zone for fear that that's what I'll be recommended for the next 12 months. Youtube is the worst product I have to keep paying for — I tried going adblock, but good luck if you have Apple devices. I'd rather be held hostage to Youtube Premium than being brainwashed with ads every 5 minutes.
All of Google search is dogshit these days. You can't search for anything these days without a crap ton of ads and pages of SEO optimized wrong answers.
Youtube was fine years ago. People make stuff, I subscribe and watch it. Sure throw in some algorithmic discovery on the side. Bring back dislike count.
Other than that I don't care for any innovation. Just keep the lights on.
yea I'm a daily users of YT. Pay for premium. Don't produce. Only consume. Probably their ideal customer and I think the app is great. No idea what people are bitching about.
I'm happy to part ways with a couple of bucks for an ad free experience. I use youtube everyday. Entitlement is thinking you should have a certain premium experience on someone else's dime (you).
A major benefit of paying for it is easily supporting more creators without directly donating. They get pittance for ad rolls but substantially more for premium views.
I'm in the same boat (as a user - paying for premium and consuming a lot of videos). I think app is pretty good, but search is horrible. Their recommendations in the feed are top notch, so I always have something interesting to watch. But searching for new topics returns garbage.
The nature of The Algorithm and its tendency to decide who gets to be a millionaire leads to a TON of metagaming. I think the algorithm needs to be non-static just so content on the website doesn’t homogenize. They often make subtle tweaks to the website for seemingly no reason, but I think a lot of it is just to prevent metagaming.
There's no incentive there (until users start leaving)
The algorithm's goal is to maximize revenue or profit, and what does that doesn't change that dynamically. This means the metagame is inevitable. You're essentially asking for YouTube to cut their goal for an unclear long term benefit, and we all know how those conversations tend to go.
would you like to remove the ability to add labeled chapters to your videos?
would you like to remove browseable transcriptions to videos?
Youtube has a ton of things that it still needs to add, such as embedding multiple audio streams so you can have more than one audio language in the same video (I think they are testing it currently), or being able to better modify a video after you've uploaded it. Adding audio normalization to ads so they are not louder than the video they appear in? Still waiting.
Point is, there is a ton to innovate and I think you are quickly forgetting all those useful features that came in the last 10 years that were't there before
I think theres a difference between innovating and polishing. I would love YT to polish the product, but don’t want it to innovate itself into something other than a medium length video hosting platform.
For me, as a consumer of video content that I find with google video search, YouTube is just a video host and no different than any other video host that Google crawl. The vast majority of those searches for me pertain to hands-on DIY projects where videos are very useful to learn how to perform some process - like laying floors (a recent one for me). I would never visit youtube.com directly as I've learned that it's incentives are very different. But most of the really useful content that I find is in fact hosted on YouTube, so the service is in fact extremely useful for DIYers. And I do often find in those videos tools or supplies that make sense to purchase, and I often click on the producers affiliate links in the video.
Downvotes are hidden now. I'm not sure they actually have enough information to determine video quality anymore. Its all about gaming the algorithm's "engagement" metrics. No one cares if you enjoyed yourself any longer.
The dislike button is still there, they just don’t want to show the results to advertisers. If advertisers can see the ratio, they start complaining about being associated with “problematic “ content.
They probably want to show viewers, but you can’t reveal the stats to only one group.
2. no more covid warnings/disclaimers on content. Public health is important, but this beyond the scope or role of youtube. If the CDC, WHO etc. want to buy YouTube ads warning of covid misinformation, they can do so, and can afford to.
3. do more about accounts being hacked and repurposed for elon musk livestream scams
4. fewer ads, or no more 15 second ads. The max length should be 10 seconds, and no more than a single ad at a time, instead of having two ads back-to-back.
Regarding warnings/disclaimers on content, I find genuinely helpful ones are far more palatable than censorship. I think Twitter's Community Notes is a great example of this.
From what I've seen, YouTubers are concerned about their videos getting censored or demonetized to a degree that indicates YouTube are being far too heavy handed.
549 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadI’m not a journalist, but that doesn’t sound right.
Maybe she was an early employee?
Google's first office was in her parents' garage
> With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki
https://about.google/intl/en_us/our-story/
2023-1998=25
Sounds right to me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki#Career
- removed ability to sort videos by date
- removed dislikes
what else.....youtube UX has being getting worse for a few years.
But I am not sure Apple has the stomach for the controversy that often surrounds user generated content. Maybe Facebook would be the better competitor, though they are as beholden to advertisers as Google.
All I know is that it will take a massively well financed group that can sustain the server costs of video streaming with most of it generating zero revenue.
With MSFT it's obvious that Satya is trying to distract a competitor in cloud, but chatgpt is hardly going to "kneecap" Google. Satya is hyping it with all the credibility of a used car salesman. There's zero evidence that LLMs are going to finally make Microsoft capable of launching a competitive search service.
I can’t tell if you are trolling. Google develops Android which is the primary competitor to Apple’s biggest product. If Google loses revenue it weakens its ability to compete. This directly benefits Apple.
> With MSFT it's obvious that Satya is trying to distract a competitor in cloud, but chatgpt is hardly going to "kneecap" Google. Satya is hyping it with all the credibility of a used car salesman. There's zero evidence that LLMs are going to finally make Microsoft capable of launching a competitive search service.
All the reporting on this seems to be consistent that Google is freaked out about ChatGPT, rushed its announcement of Bard, etc etc. So I guess you could have the opinion that ChatGPT isn’t a threat, but I think it is obvious you would be in the minority. No one knows for sure of course, but the smart money, and Google itself, seem to think it is a major threat.
YouTube users are the product being sold, not the customers.
[1] The recent crackdown on swearing falls in the same category.
Better for advertisers looking to push non-sense to toddler-level users.
It does exist but it's hidden in the tabs. My m1 mac screen is not large enough to show the search icon which I must click on the right chevron icon to see as it's on the far right.
I'm glad it's there but it wasn't always like this. I wonder if I'm just an idiot (totally possible), a dark pattern, or just a bad UI change.
Search as little as I use it is fine. Maybe you just don't have a ton of matching content left to watch, maybe it is worse but this all feels too subjective/situational to speak qualitatively about.
Sort by date of me is only really relevant in a creators page, and the "uploads" stream is always by date recent to oldest, so profits?
The only thing that has significantly gotten worse over the years is their ridiculous increase in ad placement throughout videos. I'm guessing you block ads or have premium because it HAS to be the #1 most hated change in YouTube over the past few years.
That seems like something that would be of enough interest to make the top-30 stories for a period of time.
Speculating is an utter waste of time. I don't see a point. For me this news was just another passable piece of information. Meh! Definitely not HN front-page worthy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This was also posted today, criticizing SV culture. Yet it doesn't even have half the votes. This is also not an exception here, but a trend:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/the-silicon-valley-l...
I guess Susie stepping down the corporate ladder of a shitty company must be more stimulating.
Also, why the downvotes? I didn't know it was illegal to discuss how banal and uninteresting a post is. Clearly posharma and I see it that way. Yet every time this happens, people get downvoted. Why? Can't you just scroll through and move on, or do other people's opinions bother you?
Edit: I understand the dislike button is still there, I misspoke. But for my purposes of seeing like/dislike ratio, it might as well not be there.
still, I found it more useful than not
I had this exact scenario yesterday trying to remove rounded/stripped lug nuts off my wheels. It would've been very helpful to be able to see if the video I was watching had 1000 likes but 6000 dislikes to know if what I was about to do was advisable or not. Yes, I read the comments and it ended up being a simple fix with the right tools, but the like/dislike ratio is a great way to filter dangerous/dumb/unhelpful videos.
Personally, I see the removal of visible dislikes as a net positive. They were used to rain down negativity and meanness on well-intentioned videos. I think YouTube is now a happier place when a kid's crappy singing video gets quietly ranked down, versus being shown to have 34 classmates (or 34,000 strangers) that hated it.
That's precisely why it was removed. Can't let the rabble have a voice. They might think the wrong things.
I could see it having an impact on the comment section because rather than just dislike and move on people feel compelled to say what is wrong with the video, but I could also see the opposite effect where instead of just disliking and moving on now people spam the comment section with unhelpful attacks on the video/creator.
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/return-youtube-dis...
From the FAQ
> Where does the extension get its data?
> A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior.
New videos will only show dislikes sent by people using the extension. There's no way to know the real number anymore.
It can be purely emotional too, no data whatsoever. If there is data it's just selectively chosen to support the preconceived view. It literally happens all the time.
Just look at the changes to the Macbook following Johy Ive's departure or even the iOS UI changes following Forstall's departure. In the latter case, the removal of skeuomorphic design was so impactful Apple engineers called it "de-Forstall-ation".
In this case, I see it being big brands pushing for the removal of dislike button. They simply don't want to be dislike-bombed for doing something unpopular. That's it. So I wouldn't bet on Wijicki leaving impacts this.
Removing the dislike count takes away a valuable indicator of low quality and/or time wasting videos. Yes, it has false positives on charged topics, but I use it to help determine if an intriguing recommendation or search result is actually worthwhile or just clickbait. I suspect YouTube was pleased to remove the like/dislike visibility because it would boost engagement metrics. I assume any concerns about quality or the viewing experience are secondary or considered inconsequential.
Edit: They removed the dislike visibility, not the dislike button.
80% of regulars are not subscribed and don’t “like” videos according to content creators, that’s why they nag for “like, subscribe” five times per minute. Developers tend to think that bigcorps’ data analysis is at a rocket science level, when in reality it’s probably less efficient than SQL LIKE query could be on some `video.tags` field.
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 first quite often.
The content is unparalleled. Home repair is one of my most valued content types on the site.
There are many, many different types of house problems and solutions covered by videos.
Even when you get to something that seemingly has no person describing the problem and fix, you can often get close enough to improvise based on other people’s ideas.
YouTube is a skill building platform. You can save money by becoming more self-reliant.
Despite other comments here, I think the search is quite good. It sometimes ignores keywords but returns the video I _intended_ to seek.
I don’t care for shorts, though and would hide them completely if able.
It would also be good to have relatively anonymous ways to upload video. Sometimes I’ll establish a novel solution and would post the information but wouldn’t want it associated with my identity—or even to monetize it.
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.
Either she is being blamed, or she is deeply guilty and wants to try to avoid the publicity, or they anticipate this will become extremely ugly.
Or sundar is blaming her for lining him up for a firing squad.
Or she is a liability due to her past work.
Regardless, it seems like she is leaving because what she had to do to make the government happy previously is now going to be used against Google.
Someone else mentioned the theory that she might be the best Sundar replacement. Maybe she found out it’s not her or Sundar is eliminating competition here.
The founders themselves of these companies have already gotten a headstart.
After 25 years and being worst case a hundred-millionaire, what's the point?
I wonder if Elon Musk would notice.
Is this because of layoffs or something else happening? I would think that mass layoffs would still allow eligibility for rehire down the road?
We didn't even notice it happening, like frogs being boiled. E.g. try being anonymous on a fresh Android device now. You can't even access the play store without logging in.
Also from Wikipedia: "YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. The trio were early employees of PayPal, which left them enriched after the company was bought by eBay. Hurley had studied design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign."
Getting respect from employees these days is not difficult; most of them are extreme conformists and worship power for its own sake. They will interpret any dumb words out of your mouth as words of wisdom. Even if everything you say is idiotic, they will bend so far as to assume you speak in metaphors.
Still, I think YouTube is better than average for social media. Its censorship of words sucked, but its censorship of ideas wasn't so bad. It was worse on other platforms.
I think TikTok holds this position, not YouTube. Indeed, YouTube seems to be pushing really hard for Shorts to be a viable competitor but it doesn't seem to be working.
Or, do you mean rewarding in terms of monetization for creators and not engagement?
Makes the price low enough to beat the hassle of various ad blocking methods across many platforms and devices.
- Relatively similar offerings of music, at least when it came to my tastes. I have a wide variety and some weird stuff in there, but both worked for me to find whatever I thought of.
- Relatively similar price ($10 Spotify vs $12 YT), so I knew I needed at least some extra value from YT to justify
- YT Premium not only gives me YT Music, but also HASSLE FREE ad-free YT. What I mean is -- I don't have to manage extensions for web youtube and apps for Android or iOS or using NextDNS or a pihole or something just to get "ad free" from YT. It just works. Not having ads, and not having to CARE is a big value add for me. This alone is well worth $2 a month just in the time it saves me dealing with it.
- YT Premium USED to be Google Music, which I loved the UI of way more than Spotify. I am still VERY upset at YT Music since it's objectively worse than Google Music in every way, but it's still the same goddamn company
- AT THE TIME, I was having serious issues getting Spotify to play music from cache. Even if I cached, it would still default to streaming it as long as I had data. This resulted in huge data usage each month. I am SURE this is fixed by now. But this went into the calculus for me at the time.
Would I move over to Spotify? I think the things that would push me back would be an increase in YT price, a further degradation in YT Music UX, some new killer feature Spotify has/gets (podcasts aren't my thing)
This was a VERY long answer which can TLDR to "Having ad-free YouTube + Music all at once for $2 more was well worth not having to give a crap about all the infrastructure needed to block ads across all my devices forever."
Youtube music is not great, but its "free" to me.
It’s probably inferior to both Spotify and Apple Music, but if you’re going to pay for YouTube premium anyway and are able to endure the weird UI… Then it might save you a small monthly fee you’d otherwise pay to competing services.
It’d never survive in the market as it’s own service, and it’s clearly inferior even to its own predecessor Google Music.
I have no idea who decided this thing was a good idea.
I remember Google Music being pretty good, but YouTube Music seems good enough
YT music, for me at least, not perfect but better than the two by far. I still keep spotify sub because sometimes we share playlists in office etc.. not sure I'll extend to be honest. YT Music on the other hand, especially in car is essential.
Sound quality not good enough? You know Apple Music supports lossless up to 24-bit 192kHz, at no cost, right?
Just what are you talking about?
Yt music also supports tapping the side of the screen to jump forwards or backwards in 10 second increments. Seems like a trivial feature, but holy shit I have needed it my entire life. The ability to both rapidly and finely adjust the time is huge when listing to things like live shows that are a 2 hour video.
Crazy but I don't think I have ever had a program or hardware player that could do both. Always either fast forward/rewind or trying to finely slide a slider.
Not a spotify fan either, but there's practically no upside to switching.
but the reality is that you're losing spotify radio and recommendations, and replacing it with youtube music's radio stations and recommendations. and for me, i found that spotify introduces me to a lot of new and interesting music that i wouldn't otherwise find, and youtube picks a dozen songs every month it wants to play, and regardless of what station i choose it plays those same songs.
for me, i'm currently paying for both because i like youtube premium, but the music offering doesn't replace spotify.
Disable Settings > Recommendations > Show your liked music from Youtube
Enable Settings > Data saving > Don't play music videos
Thanks though. Maybe some day they'll put in some effort.
If your tastes are more eclectic this can be a really big thing actually -- the music streaming services are largely similar in what they do and don't have, which leaves out a LOT of stuff, and finally things vanish off of streaming all the time. Individually-uploaded youtube music-in-a-video on the other hand is astonishingly durable.
Totally agree about the UI though, and they also suck on royalty payouts -- only Spotify is worse.
(The * was because it was on YouTube, not TV)
For example, imagine there are only three YouTube channels out there, The Spiffing Brit, Pewdiepie, and MrBeast. There’s $1,000,000 USD remaining in the pot for the month (or pay period, I’m not sure how regular the payouts are) after YouTube takes their cut. In sum total, YT Premium subscribers watched 100,000 minutes of content: 50,000 minutes to MrBeast, 40,000 minutes to Pewdiepie, and 10,000 minutes to The Spiffing Brit. The payouts would be calculated using:
revenue_share_ratio = sum_channel_premium_watch_time / sum_global_premium_watch_time
channel_premium_payout = global_premium_payout * revenue_share_ratio
So:
MrBeast: revenue_share_ratio = 0.50 = 50,000 / 100,000 channel_premium_payout = 500,000 = 0.50 * 1,000,000
Pewdiepie: revenue_share_ratio = 0.40 = 40,000 / 100,000 channel_premium_payout = 400,000 = 0.40 * 1,000,000
The spiffing brit: revenue_share_ratio = 0.10 = 10,000 / 100,000 channel_premium_payout = 100,000 = 0.10 * 1,000,000
A bit of a contrived and simplified explanation I’m sure, but as far as I am aware the formulae they use to divvy up the money between creators is as straight forward as it gets. Money out per creator = global money in total * (creator minutes total / global minutes total)
[0]: https://youtu.be/NLO5-IyS5pE
It's the major reason why I'm still subscribed.
I hope whoever takes it over creates an ad free plan that doesn't bundle music into it. I hate that all of these tech companies are taking the cable route they all rallied agains and bundling everything.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lgLYGBbDNs
Should it not let me see a product review if it was sponsored by the company that makes the product? Or only if the reviewers didn't have full editorial control?
Wherever you would want to draw the line, someone else would tell you that you drew it wrong.
Sponsored ads in videos are everywhere, and well delineated. Third party tools exist to skip them already -- and YouTube already has the data on where they start and end. They even show them on the timeline, although they call "end of sponsored advertisement" "most replayed"… presumedly because of everyone skipping the ad, losing their place, and then having to step back to try to find where the content begins again.
Here's how this could work. I would pay an additional $10/month for YouTube Scarlet. Content creators would have three options -- declare that their videos have no sources of revenue outside of YouTube revenue; provide start and end time stamps for any external-revenue-generating segments; or do nothing.
For my $10/month, videos in the second category would skip their promotion. In exchange, some portion of my $10/month would go to the video creator, just like ad/Premium revenue does today, and the metrics on number of videos where this segment was skipped would be made available in analytics for sharing with sponsors. Finally, I'd have access to a user preference to suppress videos in the third category for appearing in recommendations, ever.
Does this deal with every case? No. Would it make YouTube more pleasant for me and potentially others who share my values, without impacting current regular and Premium users, and with a neutral or positive impact on content creators? I assert yes.
Yes.
If it's a negative impact on the businesses who promote videos, how can you say your idea doesn't impact content creators?
Promoted businesses currently pay based on (an estimate of) the number of views that the video will get. This would trivially adjust to paying based on the number of views that the sponsorship within the video gets -- that's why I mentioned the requirement to make this available through analytics. If the cost per view stays the same for sponsors, they're now paying for a self-selecting audience of people who are not actively bothered by their ads. (I doubt I'm the only person who, if I as going to pay money for a VPN, would choose literally anything other than Nord VPN just as petty "revenge" for how much of my life they've wasted.) If this slightly-reduced audience does not sufficiently eat their marketing budget, they can find new creators to sponsor.
For the content creators, presumedly the target amount paid directly per skipped ad would be chosen to slightly exceed the expected payout of showing the ad. This is the same conceptual model Premium uses today. So even though the sponsor may be paying them for a 9.5 M view video instead of a 10 M view video -- the payout should more than cover the difference.
I agree that these marginal wins run into systematic concerns if more than, say, 5% or so of users start opting out of embedded advertising this way. But besides being incredibly unlikely -- what would it say about the business model of embedded advertising if 5% of YouTube customers were willing to pay to avoid it!?
A sponsor pays $10,000 to a content creator.
And then, they get zero views of their embedded ad in the video.
They got literally nothing for their $10,000 investment.
And let's say, for the sake of argument, that YouTube does not pay $10,000 for the same video, or ones like it.
Now, the content creator gets less money than they would have before.
It's almost like content creators have already done this calculus, and concluded that the best way to create content is to promote things.
It's funny to me when someone is like, "Why doesn't YouTube do X," and then they answer their own question, but then they still act like it's weird that YouTube doesn't do that thing.
What I'm proposing is exactly, 100% symmetric to how advertisers who pay Google for YouTube ad placement are already treated -- they pay for views, and YouTube can and does choose to not show those ads to some users, those who pay for Premium. Is that unfair for the ad buyers? Sure, if you squint right… but they're not being deprived something they paid for, they're just not being offered the option to put in ads in front of that particular market.
Before Youtube Premium, I would have said the same thing about blocking first-party ads in YouTube. It was weird they didn't do that thing. And then they did it. So now it's not weird I guess?
This can't be right, I've seen many videos from creators that say the opposite, it is a fixed amount per contract which can be one or more videos. Maybe it is different with creators that have more than 1M subscribers.
If the sponsorships bug you that much, use sponsorblock.
The original comment was proposing a new product, at a higher price point to reflect its higher costs, that /does/ cater to this expectation.
Everybody wins. (Yes this doesn't work for heavily integrated sponsorships but it'd still get most of them.)
I do think, though, that if the best answer to "YouTube doesn't let me do <x>" is "pay an alternate service provider instead," it might suggest a market opportunity for YouTube to provide the same service with much less friction.
[1]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...
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.
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.
Converted my under 8$ dollar Google Play Music plan to 14$ family plan for my Wife, and they honored that 14$ cost when YTM rolled out.
While unlikely, I have been hoping for some sort of "we changed our mind" PR statement from Google on this before we switch to a family Spotify come April.
The price hike doesn't hurt on our monthly finances, but considering the 12 month cost vs features compared to Spotify... it does hurt. Why pay more for less.
Like others are saying, the no ads Youtube is fantastic. We do use adblockers on all of our devices, but it's hard to do on Google Homes, casting to Chromecasts, and Youtube Kids.
I am prepared to go Firefox + Ublock/Brave on my Android phone if I do go Spotify though....
I'm currently still on the original $7.99 plan. Any tips on how to do the upgrade to the family plan for $14? I've wanted to do that for a while but not give up my grandfathered price. The price they show me for the family plan is $22.99.
(I.e., you can't use uBlock Origin or youtube-dl on mobile devices and TVs easily, and that's the way they want it.)
... and you get cost of living salary increases at the same time, right? Sadly a market oriented economy just doesn't work this way.
(basically, the SC is reviewing YouTube's Section 230 protections due to the use of recommendation engines)
I would broadly expect YouTube to get worse as a result of this.
So YouTube wasn't her passion project?! C'mon.
Maybe just wants kids?
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
However there seems to be a thing that you need 10 minutes for monetisation, so people stretch content not needing much time to those 10 minutes ...
the users loved vine and it's still quoted in tiktoks
i think it's because china is able to dump money it was able to take off more
it isn’t around anymore.
Sometimes companies shutter successful products.
Saying that Musical.ly, a Chinese based lip syncing service, was where everyone went after Vine, a USA based short video service, closed down in 2016 is quite the stretch.
I said 10 years which was an exaggeration but TikTok may be the spiritual successor to Vine but TikTok didnt even exist in the country where the majority of Vines users existed until two years later.
I guess you could say there was a exodus from Vine, users wandered around in a desert for two years, and then finally arrived at the promised land, TikTok...
TikTok is worldwide.
For some searches, it's baffling that the top results are clearly intuitively wrong (e.g. showing videos where dislike to like ratio is very high, compared to clearly better alternatives that you can find if you wade through the results)
- Why does seemingly every channel I follow, whether it be JCS Criminal Psychology or The 8-bit Guy, have to mention the YouTube Algorithm, Content ID, Copyright Strikes, or Community Guidelines? If almost every creator is struggling and not just the fringe and edgy, you've screwed up big time.
- Removal of the dislike count. Extremely unpopular decision. Also YouTube's API is still answering dislike counts making extensions to bring it back still function, despite over a year later, almost implying it was about keeping up appearances. Now... who could be so worried about keeping up appearances...
- Completely blowing up YouTube Rewind into an increasingly corporate affair that quickly started heading downhill until the absolute train wreck of 2018, where it became the most disliked video in YouTube history at that point. This was, in part, because YouTube basically sanitized it of the presence of the popular YouTubers at the time because they might not be advertiser-friendly. Rewind never recovered and YouTube has now given up trying to engage with the community in such a way.
- Taking a 5-second ad at the beginning of her tenure, and leaving it with multiple, constant, unskippable, rampant advertising; and a subscription plan that started at $10/mo. turning into $23/mo. for equivalent service (5 users).
- Launched YouTube Kids to provide a curated experience for younger individuals, then decided to make it run on automation. Which then screwed up big time and started serving kids extremely inappropriate content causing a brief congressional inquiry. Then YouTube settled as guilty to violating COPAA, and decided to shift all the responsibility on the creators by disabling comments and other features on any video that may possibly be seen by kids.
Some "success"...
Whatever algorithm YouTube uses professional uploaders will try to maximize their views, which goes by acting as the algorithm requires. In a competitive environment there is a inherent struggle.
That's because Youtube prioritizes engagement over quality. You make more money that way.
Like they innovated by blatantly ripping off tiktok and added "shorts"? Yeah best if they just stay exactly what they are.
Example: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-piano
https://youtu.be/ljjWeHmeVE8?t=157
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pub+piano+playi...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=shopping+mall+p...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=public+piano+pl...
and the lack of likes/dislikes makes it harder to determine quality, which is probably some dark pattern to try and drive more engagement by forcing people to watch multiple videos. Dark patterns work short term, long term they result in TikTok or the equivalent eating your market share
No, I do not want to watch wedding videos that I've said I'm not interested in at least 50 times. No, there isn't anyone in my household watching wedding videos.
No, I do not want to rewatch a 6 hour long lecture I watched last month.
Yet it just doesn't bloody care. I am truly terrified to click on anything outside my regular comfort zone for fear that that's what I'll be recommended for the next 12 months. Youtube is the worst product I have to keep paying for — I tried going adblock, but good luck if you have Apple devices. I'd rather be held hostage to Youtube Premium than being brainwashed with ads every 5 minutes.
All of Google search is dogshit these days. You can't search for anything these days without a crap ton of ads and pages of SEO optimized wrong answers.
And people think chatgpt is going to save us, when all it's going to do is make the web, and therefore search results, ever more nonsensical.
Youtube was fine years ago. People make stuff, I subscribe and watch it. Sure throw in some algorithmic discovery on the side. Bring back dislike count.
Other than that I don't care for any innovation. Just keep the lights on.
Basically, it's users are very entitled.
Edit: I have had premium since day 1, I'm speaking about others.
Nothing about Youtube the platform needs to change. It just works.
The algorithm's goal is to maximize revenue or profit, and what does that doesn't change that dynamically. This means the metagame is inevitable. You're essentially asking for YouTube to cut their goal for an unclear long term benefit, and we all know how those conversations tend to go.
Every corporation owning more than 50% of a market should be broken up. But then, USA wouldn’t reign on the international culture.
Not to mention "sort by oldest first".
would you like to remove the ability to add labeled chapters to your videos? would you like to remove browseable transcriptions to videos?
Youtube has a ton of things that it still needs to add, such as embedding multiple audio streams so you can have more than one audio language in the same video (I think they are testing it currently), or being able to better modify a video after you've uploaded it. Adding audio normalization to ads so they are not louder than the video they appear in? Still waiting.
Point is, there is a ton to innovate and I think you are quickly forgetting all those useful features that came in the last 10 years that were't there before
They probably want to show viewers, but you can’t reveal the stats to only one group.
1. make dislikes visible
2. no more covid warnings/disclaimers on content. Public health is important, but this beyond the scope or role of youtube. If the CDC, WHO etc. want to buy YouTube ads warning of covid misinformation, they can do so, and can afford to.
3. do more about accounts being hacked and repurposed for elon musk livestream scams
4. fewer ads, or no more 15 second ads. The max length should be 10 seconds, and no more than a single ad at a time, instead of having two ads back-to-back.
From what I've seen, YouTubers are concerned about their videos getting censored or demonetized to a degree that indicates YouTube are being far too heavy handed.