I dont believe that is the case, and I cant any reference to it. Nearly all are pointing to Spotify as number one both in terms of revenue and market shares.
The thing I dislike about Youtube Music is how it is basically not a product the team have put any thoughts into it. It is constantly rated one of the worst in Apple Music and Spotify comparison. It has so much potential but it is just very poor done.
so did I until I found myself using YouTube music over Spotify more and more. it has all the standard music but also includes more remixes and smaller artists. the most important thing is that it doesn't mix podcasts in with music and you can easily view your own playlists!
haven't used Spotify in any meaningful way in a few years now.
Same. Also, my Spotify auto generated playlists hadn't changed for several years. I finally got fed up and googled around only to find it was a known issue. Clearly somebody realized they could just turn off those expensive GPUs...
I always wondered if this would be the case. All non-tech-nerd people I know share Spotify links that I can't open (yes, I can download another app, no I'm not going to do that).
I use Youtube extensively for discovering new music and new artists. Sometimes (1 out of 100 times) I find myself on Soundcloud for a song that's not on Youtube, but for the rest Youtube is just perfect. I always wondered how many people use Youtube for music streaming... apparently a lot.
The reason I've always used YouTube Music over the competition is that it includes whatever-the-hell anyone uploads on YouTube.
So, while Spotify can't get the rights (or the data) for that band that played down the pub one time in 1987, someone happened to record them and put them on YouTube and now they have royalties sat accruing somewhere and I get to listen to them on a nostalgia binge.
Not surprising, Youtube has tracks that Spotify does not. Live stuff, unofficial bootlegs, out of print B-sides, the lot. Some are "official" but many are user-uploaded. Youtube has enough legal power to keep those online I suppose, where smaller operations like Grooveshark did not.
That alternatives to YouTube have come to naught feels unfortunately like a de facto monopoly.
Certainly it's because the content creators stay on YouTube because that's "where the eyeballs are". (Or rather, the money is to be made there on ad revenue ... because that's where the eyeballs are.)
I don't know how you break that. eBay is probably in the same enviable position.
It’s even worse than you think, because by all accounts YouTube is absurdly expensive to operate. Some even claim to that this day it has still never turned a profit for Google. And if Google can’t make it work— with their own ad network, tons of their own fiber, their own operating system, etc.— it’s likely that nobody can. Hosting unlimited video for free is just stupefyingly expensive.
First, this is just a pervasive myth. Not that Google doesn’t operate money losing services: Blogger is a good example of that.
Second, “if Google can’t make it work no one can” is also a myth. YouTube, even the idea of which came after Google video was already launched, is a good example of that.
It’s also really hard to compete with YouTube simply due to the cost of compute and storage associated with serving video. The costs are way higher than most any other type of website. You have to do transcoding and also store multiple versions of videos at different resolutions.
There are few companies with the resources to create a real competitor.
It is partly the network effect. However all the alternatives having serious issues:
- Odysee - has performance issues and the app is crap and no discoverability. Some niche, interesting content on there but a lot of the time I only used it because someone would upload Joe Rogan stuff while he was exclusive to Spotify.
- BitChute - full of racists and not a lot else, crap discoverability. The website feels like something from the 2000s.
- Rumble - US/UK right wing slop politics and conspiracy rubbish from David Icke wannabes. I don't like the interface at all. Tends to work okay. But there is very few things I want to watch/listen to on there. Discoverability isn't great.
- Daily motion - I remember it being decent a decade ago, but it has fallen behind and turned into something else from briefly looking at the home page.
- Twitch - Streaming platform only, I think. There is a lot of slop left wing politics on it and (for want of a better term) "titty streamers". I have visited the site once, not for me.
- Kick - Basically Twitch but has more permissive T&C. Bankrolled by Stake.com IIRC. I watch one live show if I am awake to watch it. Otherwise I wouldn't bother with it.
I spend most of my time on YouTube watching stuff either about Computers, Repairing 4x4 trucks, Weird Soviet Era vehicles, WW2 stuff by Mark Felton or some sort of Tech related stuff. None of that is catered to on the alternative sites at all. None of that is catered by TV particularly well either.
- Odysee - Has an easily accessible RSS feed, a link to download every video and it has no ads. Unfortunately nothing original going on here. Just a repository for YouTube's sloppy seconds.
- BitChute - If you can get past the 'racists' and the MGTOW gayness that dominates the front page, this site has a rather large catalog of free movies available.
- Rumble - If you can get past the political slop, this site streams a lot of NFL sportsball for free .
- Twitch - I used to go here to watch my sportsball but the site is now overexposed, old and busted. Can't go five seconds with a copyright notice appearing.
YouTube is mostly popular, but it doesn’t really stand out in any technical way.
Content creators prefer YouTube because it has more users, and each creator is afraid that their followers wouldn’t follow them to another platform. Even content creators focused on open source or self-hosting kind of tech.
Honestly, I really wonder if users would refuse to follow creators whom they like to another platform. Are most people really that adverse to just watching videos on another website?
Watching videos on other websites isn't the issue, but where are you going to find new videos to watch? Where are you going to search to find a video on a specific thing, a recipe, a how-to, or some other more obscure thing?
If I want to follow someone, I’d use RSS, or subscribe to a newsletter.
If I want to find videos on a specific topic, I use a search engine. DuckDuckGo yields much better results than YouTube, even when the results are hosted on YouTube itself.
> Honestly, I really wonder if users would refuse to follow creators whom they like to another platform. Are most people really that adverse to just watching videos on another website?
My wife and I watch ~15 hours of YouTube together each week, entirely on our Apple TV. If someone we watch were to move to another platform, we just wouldn't watch them anymore. Honestly even if there is an Apple TV app for the other platform, it's still unlikely we'd switch over just to watch them instead of filling up their "time slot" with someone else.
personally i havent watched tv or listened to the radio on my own accord in many years because there are too many ads. i like the idea of not being able to choose the content im engaging in but it feels like 70% ads and 30% content
Non Youtube contents such as TV broadcast needs to get streaming done right. And they haven't done it. Apple or Google could have helped here. Where All Broadcast TV are in one place / App just like a normal TV. And the content will be streamed in decent quality. But neither are they interested as Youtube belongs to Google and Apple is going with Apple TV+ direction and wants to own TV itself.
It is such a sad state of things since Steve Jobs passed away both Apple and Google have a complete lack of taste and product sensibility to deliver something truly helps the customers. Instead every product and features are marketing or sales driven.
Apple and Google tried that for years on their TV platforms and the content providers aggressively blocked them.
E.g. Netflix outright refuses any kind of integration where their content would be surfaced next to other services - their product managers DEMAND that people go to their app into their owned experience to access content.
And designers/product managers at other content providers are the same.
Netflix refusing to integrate is a huge pain. I recently set up an Apple TV box for a non-technical parent, and while most services can be effectively navigated with the system-level voice search, Netflix is the odd one out and so I suspect Netflix is going to go mostly unwatched.
In an ideal world, each streaming service would provide the service itself, users can pick whichever app they like, and connect that app to the services they use.
In the real world, each company wants to be THE number one streaming platform, and wants users to use their app above all else. So each company reinvents the same things, and users need to deal with the mess of N apps for N services.
The idea of cooperation is completely alien in big tech companies. Descentralisation is perceived as dangerous, since it doesn’t let each individual be the number one.
In the end, because everyone want to be the number one and screw the rest, they all end up sucking. This is obviously predictable, but management everywhere remains oblivious of it.
> In the real world, each company wants to be THE number one streaming platform, and wants users to use their app above all else. So each company reinvents the same things, and users need to deal with the mess of N apps for N services.
The companies do not care about app usage. They care about subscription fees, which are highly (though somewhat elastically) dependent on a platform's available content. They don't give a damn what you watch with, they just want you to pay. They already know there will be no 600lb gorilla in streaming, so it's all about getting another month of fees from you, and that is unrelated to app usage.
> All Broadcast TV are in one place / App just like a normal TV. And the content will be streamed in decent quality.
Isn’t that what YouTube TV is? The problem with YouTube TV is that it’s essentially the old expensive cable model that everyone was trying to get away from in the first place.
BBC has been doing streaming likely longer than you've been aware of streaming -- it left beta in 2007, same time that Netflix started streaming in the US.
The content is nowhere near as addictive as youtube though, partly because the format is still television and still built with a television executive mindset.
I feel like this is the result of the major streaming services cutting back on original content due to production costs, the 2023 strikes, and winning the broadcast fight.
Initially, streaming had to compete with broadcasting's long seasons by producing the equivalent amount of content, spread between more shows, with higher-quality production but much shorter seasons. Now streamers are providing fewer shows and only semi-annual seasons. It ends up leaving a lot of open viewing time with nothing fresh to watch.
YouTube also has the advantage of people making highlight reels of the most popular movies and series. We get out-takes, behind the scenes, bloopers, best quotes etc. Streaming services haven't figured this out (yet). I've never watched The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on TV, but I watched almost every monologue on YouTube.
Streaming services in general have become terrible.
What once was on ~3 platforms is now on ~10+ platforms. They constantly shuffle around who has what, new promising series are constantly killed because if they don't instantly become a worldwide sensation and the prices are rising non-stop.
At some point I just said screw it and left all of them.
I'm not sure the economics of big budget TV series work anymore unless you catch lightning in a bottle so I understand them cutting prod costs.
YouTube's economics are just so much better. YT provides no up front payment for content. The channels are almost infinite, microtargeted to everyone's interest. And the payout is proportional to the success of the content, and paid AFTER the audience has viewed. TV on the other hand has to make big bets before they know whether a show will be a hit.
I've had a TV for years but don't have cable and never watch broadcast. My TV is just a large ipad.
I never get this argument. To see themselves without fresh content, I reckon people would have to expend at least some 4 hours every single day watching tv.
Anyone watching this much TV should instead cut it down, it is fucking too much time wasted.
It’s not just about content funding. YouTube creators make content for any interest - and can compete for a small audience, while Netflix shows have to have mass appeal to recoup costs.
> major streaming services cutting back on original content due to production costs
Are we sure about that? Apple seems to keep making more and more TV shows instead of focusing on technical debt. Last I knew my phone didn't work right with Apple Intelligence or whatever "Siri" is supposed to be but we're on season 4 of whatever a Ted Lasso is.
YT has solid channels, from DIY to black hole talks and most importantly, uncensored news.
TV is just ADs and more ADs, garbage content after garbage content.
Not everything is pretty tho, YT has a complete monopoly and there is nothing anybody can do about it, the alternatives suck with some silly subscription when there is no even content.
I do pay for Youtube Premium since Youtube Music is hands down better than Spotify.
I would pay for alternative services to help them out IF they were worth it. YT Premium is the only subscription I pay and happy to do so, I see value.
youtube does not put ads before, during or after a video for a premium subscriber. creators are in control of the content within that video (and that could include sponsored segments). if that is an issue, you will need to skip those or use something like SponsorBlock.
Yes, but as YouTube payments to videographers have dropped, most have started filling the gap by having sponsored content inside the video, which is harder to skip and avoid.
I unsubbed from YT premium when I realized the only feature I was really paying for was not being bombarded by ads every 30 seconds of video. Sometimes you'll get back to back aggressive ads within only a handful of seconds. The purpose seems to be to annoy you into purchasing a subscription, which is really predatory and annoying. Or locking "features" behind a paywall basically every other app provides, like continuing playing even when the app is in the background made me eventually annoyed enough to just cancel, and I can somewhat tolerate the ads. If not it forces me off the app sometimes which is not what I had intended but is a nice side effect.
It would be one thing if the ads weren't incredibly annoying by themselves, the content is either really, really weird, seemingly AI generated, or annoying, or some combination of all of those. I cannot imagine who they are for.
This has always been my philosophical objection to paying for YT premium: You're not really paying for any additional feature--you're paying them to stop tormenting you with ads. "The free version should be deliberately unpleasant so they pay to make it pleasant" just isn't a business model I want to support as a customer.
I would like evidence of this because I hear constantly how certain topics are persona non grata on YT, and will be pulled or shadowbanned to page 1001 of results.
TV channels have been forced to produce TV shows that will draw the biggest audiences. they've not innovated online either.
Streaming services make great shows then stop them after one season or force one episode a week. they also drop then pick back up shows constantly.
YouTube let's people watch the kinds of shows they want to watch and let's people create the kind of shows they want to create. everyone wins, including YouTube! plus they do music, smaller artists, bigger artists and mashups in between. it's all just there fairly reliably and it works on every platform.
Jellyfin is really popular in our house. Everyone associates YouTube with quick and dirty dumb content. Garbage "looping" style content is allowed in private, but long form content on a screen or playing aloud has to be something that is an actual 30+ minute thing with a point to it.
Since this isn't a defense of Google but of the many clever creators on YouTube, I can comfortably applaud so much of their work. YouTube isn't at all about just garbage content. It has no shortage of that, but it also has absolutely no shortage of truly fantastic, educative, production-worthy videos and channels of all kinds. I mean some truly excellent ones here, that are easily as good as or very often much better than anything I used to see for documentaries on network or cable TV. That so many of them are made at a fraction of those old documentary budgets and by completely independent creators (often just some guy working from his home studio) is an incredible achievement of modern media technology and innovation.
The YT algorithm will often promote to you more that's similar to whatever you've already watched, so if you actually start seeking out a certain type of quality content, you'll find more of it being recommended. I carefully pick the things I take the time to view or play in the background while im working on household chores and so far haven't had any shortage of genuinely great things to enjoy.
YT has its many flaws, but one of them certainly isn't a shortage of quality vidoes about nearly anything you could want to know about.
I'm less caring about which services are watched or games are played. But intentionality is key. The decision is made before the action is started as to what the point of the time is.
Don't get me wrong, "looking to zone out for 30mins due to a tiring day" is as valid as anything else - I'm not some kind of "always be hustling" guy.
But just turning something on mindlessly is not allowed.
Don't get me wrong, I've been a subscriber for a very long time, and I get a lot of great content there. But going there to watch something specific, or watching a TV series, really sucks.
I recently realized a few studios (IIRC Warner Bros and Paramount) had put a lot of content there including movies and TV shows. I decided to watch Dick Van Dyke, because I'm a Carl Reiner fan. You can't really "Watch Next" a TV show and then go in to watch the next episode. And in fact sometimes it just wants to show you the shows in a non-linear order. "I want to watch the next Dick Van Dyke" is not something that YouTube makes easy. Another example, a friend recent sent me The Chit Show, I opened the playlist of the shows, and it played them in the reverse order (which I didn't really understand until the end when I realized I was on the first episode).
Also, the YouTube algorithm for suggesting things for you to watch is really bad. It gets stuck in ruts and it's hard to get out of them.
YouTube is amazing for learning DIY things, which is a large part of why I have subscribed for so long. But for watching entertainment the whole UI really just doesn't work.
> You can't really "Watch Next" a TV show and then go in to watch the next episode.
From the article:
A coming YouTube feature, called “shows,” can automatically queue the next episode on a channel, rather than serving whatever the recommendation algorithm thinks you’ll like best from billions of options.
And the Watch Next always insists on showing me some crazed anti-jew, anti-wax misogynistic conspiracy horseshit after three episodes of Dick Van Dyke. You can't even block creators on Youtube to make sure their content is not autoplayed or recommended to you
I'll come out and say that I am a full blown Youtube addict.
A lot of what I may watch on Youtube might be categorized as "background noise" - lots of talking head content that I can play on the background. Much of it is low quality and self-serious - but it's arguably much better quality than any equivalent "background noise" show on TV.
Ironically, I feel like longform Youtube content is actually better for my attention span and more rewarding - because creators aren't trying to appeal to broad audiences, they don't have to jump from topic to topic and keep things under a time limit.
I recently watched the Animagraffs video on the Hoover Dam and I was blown away. I have probably watched dozens of TV documentaries on the Hoover Dam over the year, but none of them actually just stop and methodically explained everything from top-to-down so thoroughly.
Even beloved shows like Mythbusters, there are now dozens of channels on Youtube that do all the same things we enjoyed Mythbusters for but better and with less filler and shmaltz.
YouTube could be so much better. But because the alternatives are so bad, they full on monopoly it.
They could fix the bot problems, they could bring back dislikes, they should show downvotes on comments, comment history in profiles and an inbox for replies, search is broken, shorts is terrible, etc etc....
One thing I wished YouTube had like Twitter was to see what other channels the channels you like to subscribe. This way you are not held hostage by YouTube recommendation, which is definitely not in favor of the viewers
They just don't produce very good tv shows anymore. There is nothing to watch.
In the 90s we had Seinfeld, X-Files, King Of Queens, Frasier, Star Trek TNG, Macguyver and so on.
Then onto 1990s movies, which by the time they reached TV syndication were still good! Will I watch Lethal Weapon or Die Hard even though I've seen it before? Heck yes!
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I have recently been using technology to create long form videos on youtube and it has been a lot of fun to do edutainment https://www.youtube.com/@studyturtlehq
The algorithm has done well by me. It brought me Davie504, Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili playing Rhapsody in Blue, ICEPEAK, Ningen Isu, Rock Fujiyama, a Hungarian choir singing Metallica, and Donner Pass railroad/snowplow porn. Just a subset.
66 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadThe thing I dislike about Youtube Music is how it is basically not a product the team have put any thoughts into it. It is constantly rated one of the worst in Apple Music and Spotify comparison. It has so much potential but it is just very poor done.
haven't used Spotify in any meaningful way in a few years now.
I use Youtube extensively for discovering new music and new artists. Sometimes (1 out of 100 times) I find myself on Soundcloud for a song that's not on Youtube, but for the rest Youtube is just perfect. I always wondered how many people use Youtube for music streaming... apparently a lot.
So, while Spotify can't get the rights (or the data) for that band that played down the pub one time in 1987, someone happened to record them and put them on YouTube and now they have royalties sat accruing somewhere and I get to listen to them on a nostalgia binge.
Certainly it's because the content creators stay on YouTube because that's "where the eyeballs are". (Or rather, the money is to be made there on ad revenue ... because that's where the eyeballs are.)
I don't know how you break that. eBay is probably in the same enviable position.
Second, “if Google can’t make it work no one can” is also a myth. YouTube, even the idea of which came after Google video was already launched, is a good example of that.
And, of course, Google+…
There are few companies with the resources to create a real competitor.
- Odysee - has performance issues and the app is crap and no discoverability. Some niche, interesting content on there but a lot of the time I only used it because someone would upload Joe Rogan stuff while he was exclusive to Spotify.
- BitChute - full of racists and not a lot else, crap discoverability. The website feels like something from the 2000s.
- Rumble - US/UK right wing slop politics and conspiracy rubbish from David Icke wannabes. I don't like the interface at all. Tends to work okay. But there is very few things I want to watch/listen to on there. Discoverability isn't great.
- Daily motion - I remember it being decent a decade ago, but it has fallen behind and turned into something else from briefly looking at the home page.
- Twitch - Streaming platform only, I think. There is a lot of slop left wing politics on it and (for want of a better term) "titty streamers". I have visited the site once, not for me.
- Kick - Basically Twitch but has more permissive T&C. Bankrolled by Stake.com IIRC. I watch one live show if I am awake to watch it. Otherwise I wouldn't bother with it.
I spend most of my time on YouTube watching stuff either about Computers, Repairing 4x4 trucks, Weird Soviet Era vehicles, WW2 stuff by Mark Felton or some sort of Tech related stuff. None of that is catered to on the alternative sites at all. None of that is catered by TV particularly well either.
- BitChute - If you can get past the 'racists' and the MGTOW gayness that dominates the front page, this site has a rather large catalog of free movies available.
- Rumble - If you can get past the political slop, this site streams a lot of NFL sportsball for free .
- Twitch - I used to go here to watch my sportsball but the site is now overexposed, old and busted. Can't go five seconds with a copyright notice appearing.
Content creators prefer YouTube because it has more users, and each creator is afraid that their followers wouldn’t follow them to another platform. Even content creators focused on open source or self-hosting kind of tech.
Honestly, I really wonder if users would refuse to follow creators whom they like to another platform. Are most people really that adverse to just watching videos on another website?
Right now that's YouTube and TikTok.
If I want to find videos on a specific topic, I use a search engine. DuckDuckGo yields much better results than YouTube, even when the results are hosted on YouTube itself.
My wife and I watch ~15 hours of YouTube together each week, entirely on our Apple TV. If someone we watch were to move to another platform, we just wouldn't watch them anymore. Honestly even if there is an Apple TV app for the other platform, it's still unlikely we'd switch over just to watch them instead of filling up their "time slot" with someone else.
It is such a sad state of things since Steve Jobs passed away both Apple and Google have a complete lack of taste and product sensibility to deliver something truly helps the customers. Instead every product and features are marketing or sales driven.
E.g. Netflix outright refuses any kind of integration where their content would be surfaced next to other services - their product managers DEMAND that people go to their app into their owned experience to access content.
And designers/product managers at other content providers are the same.
Instead of "channel surfing" and picking a competitor's production they want to keep viewers inside their walled garden.
In the real world, each company wants to be THE number one streaming platform, and wants users to use their app above all else. So each company reinvents the same things, and users need to deal with the mess of N apps for N services.
The idea of cooperation is completely alien in big tech companies. Descentralisation is perceived as dangerous, since it doesn’t let each individual be the number one.
In the end, because everyone want to be the number one and screw the rest, they all end up sucking. This is obviously predictable, but management everywhere remains oblivious of it.
The companies do not care about app usage. They care about subscription fees, which are highly (though somewhat elastically) dependent on a platform's available content. They don't give a damn what you watch with, they just want you to pay. They already know there will be no 600lb gorilla in streaming, so it's all about getting another month of fees from you, and that is unrelated to app usage.
Isn’t that what YouTube TV is? The problem with YouTube TV is that it’s essentially the old expensive cable model that everyone was trying to get away from in the first place.
The content is nowhere near as addictive as youtube though, partly because the format is still television and still built with a television executive mindset.
Initially, streaming had to compete with broadcasting's long seasons by producing the equivalent amount of content, spread between more shows, with higher-quality production but much shorter seasons. Now streamers are providing fewer shows and only semi-annual seasons. It ends up leaving a lot of open viewing time with nothing fresh to watch.
YouTube also has the advantage of people making highlight reels of the most popular movies and series. We get out-takes, behind the scenes, bloopers, best quotes etc. Streaming services haven't figured this out (yet). I've never watched The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on TV, but I watched almost every monologue on YouTube.
What once was on ~3 platforms is now on ~10+ platforms. They constantly shuffle around who has what, new promising series are constantly killed because if they don't instantly become a worldwide sensation and the prices are rising non-stop.
At some point I just said screw it and left all of them.
YouTube's economics are just so much better. YT provides no up front payment for content. The channels are almost infinite, microtargeted to everyone's interest. And the payout is proportional to the success of the content, and paid AFTER the audience has viewed. TV on the other hand has to make big bets before they know whether a show will be a hit.
I've had a TV for years but don't have cable and never watch broadcast. My TV is just a large ipad.
Are we sure about that? Apple seems to keep making more and more TV shows instead of focusing on technical debt. Last I knew my phone didn't work right with Apple Intelligence or whatever "Siri" is supposed to be but we're on season 4 of whatever a Ted Lasso is.
YT has solid channels, from DIY to black hole talks and most importantly, uncensored news.
TV is just ADs and more ADs, garbage content after garbage content. Not everything is pretty tho, YT has a complete monopoly and there is nothing anybody can do about it, the alternatives suck with some silly subscription when there is no even content.
I do pay for Youtube Premium since Youtube Music is hands down better than Spotify. I would pay for alternative services to help them out IF they were worth it. YT Premium is the only subscription I pay and happy to do so, I see value.
I get the feeling that if many users start using Premium, at some point they'll see ads again.
It would be one thing if the ads weren't incredibly annoying by themselves, the content is either really, really weird, seemingly AI generated, or annoying, or some combination of all of those. I cannot imagine who they are for.
I would like evidence of this because I hear constantly how certain topics are persona non grata on YT, and will be pulled or shadowbanned to page 1001 of results.
Streaming services make great shows then stop them after one season or force one episode a week. they also drop then pick back up shows constantly.
YouTube let's people watch the kinds of shows they want to watch and let's people create the kind of shows they want to create. everyone wins, including YouTube! plus they do music, smaller artists, bigger artists and mashups in between. it's all just there fairly reliably and it works on every platform.
The YT algorithm will often promote to you more that's similar to whatever you've already watched, so if you actually start seeking out a certain type of quality content, you'll find more of it being recommended. I carefully pick the things I take the time to view or play in the background while im working on household chores and so far haven't had any shortage of genuinely great things to enjoy.
YT has its many flaws, but one of them certainly isn't a shortage of quality vidoes about nearly anything you could want to know about.
I'm less caring about which services are watched or games are played. But intentionality is key. The decision is made before the action is started as to what the point of the time is.
Don't get me wrong, "looking to zone out for 30mins due to a tiring day" is as valid as anything else - I'm not some kind of "always be hustling" guy.
But just turning something on mindlessly is not allowed.
Don't get me wrong, I've been a subscriber for a very long time, and I get a lot of great content there. But going there to watch something specific, or watching a TV series, really sucks.
I recently realized a few studios (IIRC Warner Bros and Paramount) had put a lot of content there including movies and TV shows. I decided to watch Dick Van Dyke, because I'm a Carl Reiner fan. You can't really "Watch Next" a TV show and then go in to watch the next episode. And in fact sometimes it just wants to show you the shows in a non-linear order. "I want to watch the next Dick Van Dyke" is not something that YouTube makes easy. Another example, a friend recent sent me The Chit Show, I opened the playlist of the shows, and it played them in the reverse order (which I didn't really understand until the end when I realized I was on the first episode).
Also, the YouTube algorithm for suggesting things for you to watch is really bad. It gets stuck in ruts and it's hard to get out of them.
YouTube is amazing for learning DIY things, which is a large part of why I have subscribed for so long. But for watching entertainment the whole UI really just doesn't work.
From the article:
A coming YouTube feature, called “shows,” can automatically queue the next episode on a channel, rather than serving whatever the recommendation algorithm thinks you’ll like best from billions of options.
A lot of what I may watch on Youtube might be categorized as "background noise" - lots of talking head content that I can play on the background. Much of it is low quality and self-serious - but it's arguably much better quality than any equivalent "background noise" show on TV.
Ironically, I feel like longform Youtube content is actually better for my attention span and more rewarding - because creators aren't trying to appeal to broad audiences, they don't have to jump from topic to topic and keep things under a time limit.
I recently watched the Animagraffs video on the Hoover Dam and I was blown away. I have probably watched dozens of TV documentaries on the Hoover Dam over the year, but none of them actually just stop and methodically explained everything from top-to-down so thoroughly.
Even beloved shows like Mythbusters, there are now dozens of channels on Youtube that do all the same things we enjoyed Mythbusters for but better and with less filler and shmaltz.
TV costs money
Youtube is free... and i can block the ads
They could fix the bot problems, they could bring back dislikes, they should show downvotes on comments, comment history in profiles and an inbox for replies, search is broken, shorts is terrible, etc etc....
In the 90s we had Seinfeld, X-Files, King Of Queens, Frasier, Star Trek TNG, Macguyver and so on.
Then onto 1990s movies, which by the time they reached TV syndication were still good! Will I watch Lethal Weapon or Die Hard even though I've seen it before? Heck yes!
I wish there were better ways to monetize it.