I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less.

It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.

> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.

They still do. The vast majority of YT content is not monetized by creators, often not even eligible for it in the first place. Further, some big-ticket content creators hedge their bets, uploading to backup platforms, trying to shift to Patreon, etc.

The main thing is that viewers only ever go to YouTube, a learned habit. This is where they listen to music, where they get their news, where the algorithm suggests them related videos, where they can search for tutorials and reviews for gear, etc.

But TikTok shows that you can disrupt that simply by offering a video format that is different in some way and thus not gated by the same muscle memory.

YouTube as a whole has a giant moat.

But niches within YouTube can be disrupted. We've seen it with short form (TikTok etc), music (Spotify etc). We see it with specific niches of content creators (nebula etc). It's happened with livestreams.

I'm bad at predicting future, but could imagine niches like "publicly funded content" from e.g. EU public broadcasters moving away (e.g. NPOstart in NL) because of privacy issues or because they legally can't monetize their content anyway. Maybe university lectures? Or sports video? Game reviews by a specialized platform by steam? Video between 4 and 10 minutes? Podcast videos?

So YouTube as a whole will stay, but it can be chipped away at. Some chips may prove in themselves a small, but still good business model.

What was unique about Youtube is that it got to claim the first search result for "Lazy Sunday", a popular SNL skit at the time. That is how everyone came to learn of it. The "homemade" videos that followed were also necessary for its longevity, but initial discovery was critical.

Disrupting YouTube is difficult because the rampant piracy isn't as easy to pull off anymore.

TikTok emerged very quickly as an alternative to Youtube. Different kind and form of content, but something that Youtube ended up replicating.

I am sure if YouTube somehow died overnight, TikTok or some other player would work very quickly to get the alternative out there.

I disagree, the internet is full of websites who were on the top of the world until they weren't. Its easy for content creators to post their content on multiple sites. The main moat is the critical mass of users.

/. Used to be the goto tech forum, but now we are all at hn. Digg was the place to be, now its reddit. Audiences can shift surprisingly suddenly.

YouTube has recently have had massive, competitive attacks on their business and have had to quite drastically amend their offerings.

TikTok, SnapChat and instagram has all had huge success in their short form formats.

It’s not unheard of, that even millennial couples, will spend and evening together in bed scrolling TikTok instead of watching tv together.

While the battle is far from over, had YouTube not reacted, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these mobile first competitors would have started experimenting with long form content by now.

This is why YouTube should be treated, like all large social media, as a utility. There isn’t a real path to competition here. Things like censorship or Google having exclusive rights to train their AI on YouTube data have a lot of negative impact on the world.

Those are very hard but also very solvable problems with a lot of capital. It's the same basic idea as creating a new media company, albeit a lot more costly to build. This is way too expensive to do in a seed round, but one of the other FAANG giants could try if they wanted to.

The even harder problem is just answering the basic question of why the viewer side should care, and why they should change their deeply-ingraned habit of going to YouTube to find something to watch. "YouTube isn't fair and transparent to creators" is not going to be compelling to very many people, if the experience of the likes of Tidal competing with Spotify is any indication. YouTube is valuable to creators because it aggregates a huge audience of viewers, those viewers stick around because it's addictive and there is a content flywheel already.

But if you actually had a truly good answer for why the average person should switch their YouTube habit to watching some other site instead, the resulting payoff is huge enough (and there's enough crazy risk-hungry investors in the world) that the capital and the moat problems could theoretically be overcome.

> People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.

It also helped that tons of copyrighted content was uploaded and the policing and take down was originally pretty lax.

The main reason youtube has no competitors is because people want free (no ads, no subscription) content. And people will gleefully ad-block your service.

Look up the story of Vid.me

It exploded in popularity around 2015-17. Many youtube creators moved to it.

Then they went bankrupt because no one wanted to pay a subscription, and no one wanted to view ads.

Internet users desperately need to look in the mirror to figure out why so many services have strangleholds and why so many services plain suck for users - the users aren't paying for anything in any form, and they celebrate that fact.

If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.

Meta, Bytedance, Snap, and even X could fill the void relatively easily. a few new views focussing specifically on video, and video focussed apps that don't require a login for all the platforms.

> Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)

I don't think that's as big as a problem as you do, as long as you don't care about exclusivity.

Think of the streaming music market: Youtube Music, Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, ect, generally have mostly the same content and little exclusivity.

For example, you could have a feature where all uploaded videos are automatically uploaded to YouTube and all of your competitors.

> Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.

I think the Zero Interest Rate era made a lot of business like this.

I can think about YouTube, Uber, several food delivery apps, Fintechs, and so on.

The big thing with content: They were really relaxed to care about copyright, till they had agreements (and content id etc.) in place.

A competitor needs a good legal department willing to take up that fight.

I remember reading a history of YouTube once, and early on they were about to go under from the sheer weight of music industry copyright lawsuits and the cost of bandwidth. Google had the technology, heft and resources to do infringement detection at scale to really save them, not to mention their global bandwidth.

> "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult

For a company, it's impossible. For any country except for the US, it's very easy: you use any of the million different protectionist measures available. Such as tarriffs, as the US itself has taken a liking to - in this case it would be their digital equivalent, namely digital service taxes.

So if you succeed, how the terabytes of content and bandwidth will be sponsored - by what? The only way i can think of it is some super-efficient neural codec with extreme video compression ratio that runs on mobile devices. Othewise Youtube wins by sheer scale google invested in it.

Currently many YouTube creators request additional money on patreon-style platforms. It either means that YouTube's paycheck sucks OR they are greedy. In both cases this reverts your arguments on paying to creators, because if some platform would be better in some meaningful property, it could steal the user base.

For example - background playing, less commercials, less distractions etc.

A lot of creators that started with a YouTube channel nowadays have moved a lot of content to social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram reels. To me YouTube risk to be replaced (or it has already been replaced) by short videos, because a lot of people is no longer interested in watching a 20 minutes long video nowadays, especially new generations tend to spend a lot of time on just TikTok.

YouTube is incredible, YouTube is poorly run. If I were making the laws, I'd do something similar to mandatory licensing of songs for radio: mandate that YouTube, as a sort de-facto content monopilist, provide third-party access to its database (upload, discovery, view counts, recommendations, etc). Devil is in the details, but well-done it would strictly improve the world.

Independent competitive companies are great, but things tend to devolve into de-facto mini-governments once things stabilize, and from there I think the (real) government using its power to force a little more competition could really improve things.

> "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.

That simply means that the alternative to YouTube will look nothing like YouTube.

Maybe it can be replaced by something like Anna's archive, but for videos.

On the other hand, an alternative without all the "content creators" that are just in it for the money sounds really great to me.

TikTok disrupted YT and gained over a billion MAU.

> What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.

What if I told you it did?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Original_Channel_Initi...

https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/investing-in-future-of-...

Counterpoint: TikTok

All this means is its a public good and should be made a utility. Either directly or strip mined and mirrored.

There will always be a new kid on the block.

I do not see that as inherently correct. There have been and are several alternatives to YouTube and every single one has been actively sabotaged for primarily political/ideological reasons that have nothing to do with any of what you are talking about.

There is quite literally a conspiracy to suppress alternatives to YouTube because they do not align with the ideological parameters of the pernicious system. If you let that boot up from humanity’s neck, there would be many competitors to YouTube that would immediately atrophy YouTube. You seem to simply not be aware of what is going on outside of the authorized narrative. You will never be able to see the reality of things if you limit yourself to only the confines of the illusion matrix created for you by the system.

But yes, YouTube has a moat and like all moats it is built and maintained by the tyrannical monarch who believes himself to be chosen by God, but must hide away behind it from reality.

The replacement may be AI generated content or something.

Let me go into wild eyed futurist speculative mode here,

1- AI/LLMs are basically a response to the enshittification of Google. The reason this tech is so good and useful is because for years Google rewarded SEO optimized content a.k.a. long winded articles that repeat the same words over and over again and take ten years to make a point, which after training on all that gunk, your LLM can now do in one paragraph. The Google search monopoly gave rise to this lengthy word salad web content and blanketed the earth with it. The AI summarizer arose as a natural response. The web as we know it may now die.

2- The software industry seems to gravitate toward a layer cake of monopolies. E.g. we have Microsoft monopolize the OS and app platform, it becomes so awful the government even tries to put the brakes on it, partially succeeds, then we get the Web application platform. Sitting in a browser on top of Windows and others. Which Google goes on to monopolize. One may suppose that another platform will be built on top of this, which will be unmonopolized for a few years, and then someone will monopolize and enshittify that too, paving the way for the next cycle. It's turtles all the way down.

3- How this pertains to YouTube, well in the near future I suppose someone could ingest all of YouTube, and create AI versions of it, exactly like what was done with the web. And they might even get away with it once we set a bunch of legal precedents that this is not a thing you can get sued for. Presumably the AI platform would need to be different or better in some way, so perhaps we'll see a video platform where all the content is generated on the fly by AI, and you can get exactly what you want because it was trained on the videos that humans made. E.g. you can simply tell the AI you want to watch a comedy show called Three and a Half Horses where all the characters are reverse centaurs, and it will spin up as many episodes as you want until you get bored. And YouTube will continue to be an aging monopoly for decades, like Windows, but no one will really care because we'll be watching horses deliver Seinfeld quality jokes [1]

[1] It's not horses and it's not as good as Seinfeld, but someone's already doing this. So all that remains for my prognostication to come true is for a financial crisis to happen, at which point the government can use it as an excuse to print a random $500B and give it to a politically connected billionaire intermediary who will invest a fraction of it into the engineering, and history will continue to march forward as it does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing,_Forever

If the US government was a function body, it would force Youtube to separate the hosting business and the website itself. The hosting would be a low margin low risk business which doesn't care about traffic either way. It's just selling infrastructure the way telecom companies do. It would be paid by websites to offer a frontend to users.

This way there is real competition on what matters, the user experience and still a economy of scale on what costs a lot which is actually storing and delivering videos.

Some frontend would be free with ads, some with a paywall but without ads. Some low quality, some high quality, some both. The user would have a choice. Each creator would be free to choose its licensing model. The hosting company would then only provide the video to frontends following the creator's wish.

The creator would pay by the bytes stored and the frontend by the bytes transferred. No incentive for the hosting provider to favor either of them.

Not perfect as the hosting company is still a monopoly, but it could be regulated to be neutral and behave like a utility.

The frontend has to cater to users and nobody else. They have competition and disappear if they enshittify.

Creators are free from the tyranny of google. They become the clients of the hosting company which makes steady money whatever the content.

Everybody wins, except google, which is fine by me.

Youtube relies on human creators.

Youtube will be disrupted by AI created, better content.

Who builds AITube? AITok?

I don't know. TikTok was able to take on Youtube. May have even won by now if the government hadn't intervened.

> On YouTube: as I mention in the piece, I think the service is excellent as a consumer, and I pay for Premium

Why? Because the tools that allow them to take almost 50% of the revenue (they say you earn) have low friction?

I would say the opposite. There is no customer service. There are endless legal pit traps that allow larger channels and companies to predate on smaller ones alongside the AI channels, which lead to the same end. The entire point of the platform is to push as much advertising as possible, while mutating a user's search habits. Ironically, this leads to videos becoming borderline useless for many use cases, without taking them off youtube. This is not a good platform.

I'm sure I feel this way because I don't have a bunch of content I'm afraid of being yanked from the platform. Another "benefit" of having a big youtube presence, is I would be forever worried about implied retaliation.

> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.

I realized this back in 2009 and tried really hard to start using other platforms, but wound up just not watching YouTube as often instead. I hope this changes. The only true competitors are places like TikTok and Instagram, but they don't feel like a true replacement to the rest of us who don't want to be tied to "social media" but YouTube shorts are evidence that it does compete with YouTube directly.

I think YouTube even tried to have "IG Stories" at one point iirc.

Linus Tech Tips has also noticed some really odd view to like ratio stuff happening recently as well. They discuss it in last weeks WAN show.

Something is going on.

I host videos on my own server and there's Vimeo and Mux. I guess you're saying it's the free-as-in-beer service that has a social network and recommendation network attached to uploaded videos.

> This piece was mostly written because I've been frustrated that YouTube is effectively the only place for user submitted video on the internet.

Well, technically there's lots of user submitted videos posted to p*rn sites... Apparently even started posting educational videos there, like math and neural networks and stuff.

Structurally there's only a few ways disruption can happen to a platform that has existing centralized hosting of metadata and centralized hosting of data. Either the disruptor also centralizes both, decentralizes just the data or decentralizes both.

The second isn't viable in most real world cases until something changes the huge expense of decentralized CDN fetching. My gut says that the third would be on the losing side of almost every network effect.

Hmm,

One of the things that is notable about Youtube is there was once competition (Vimeo and Daily Motion) but they effectively outdistanced it. A bit like Amazon and Ebay. There are related things semi-competing like Twitch.TV etc, also, of course.

I suspect that the situation with the earlier video providers is that they were "bleeding cash" for many years until the process finally reversed - if they were the winner (again like Amazon).

I think this long capital investment process is what means that no one wants to or expects to step into the ring with a large, successful player. It took that player a long time to learn to be successful, that player will fight you to keep their relative monopoly and you will have to risk a lot of money.

Youtube content creators are effectively Youtube's suppliers. Youtube is squeezing and its "normal" - squeezing suppliers is part of the monopolist's playbook. Its unfortunately convenient for Youtube that people have been willing to make good quality video for nearly nothing since the tools to do so became cheaply available.

Why there is "no competition" for Nvidia, Amazon, Youtube, etc. Not that I like the situation but it's not an "unnatural" situation.

As someone who was subbed to Nebula, this matches my experience. Especially the lack of comments, spending time on Nebula just felt cold and isolating, even if the content was good.

just want to also plug dropout.tv, which is way less annoying than Nebula with ads-in-video, and is just a generally entertaining good time + inspiring business story.

This seems like a very strange perspective. Nebula is for specifically following content creators you really like and enjoy their videos earlier and at a better quality (plus some exclusive content).

Why would you particularly care about the title is that's a videomaker you follow anyway? Why would you care about seeking times? Are you jumping constantly in an ad-free and sponsor-free video you specifically subscribed for? Why miss the comments? Is it a video sharing platform or social media?

> The recommendation algorithm is weaker too

That's a low bar to be honest, because google's recommendation algorithm is absolutely atrocious.

ArchiveTeam is working on backing up selected channels/videos to the Internet Archive, where they can also be watched via their Wayback Machine. You can help them decide what is culturally or historically important enough to save.

ArchiveTeam generally is an interesting project I highly recommend people read about.

Their YouTube project can be seen here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube

And you can learn how to get involved (by running a virtual machine appliance) here: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

Video quality apparently slightly degrades as youtube constantly re-encodes/processes things and there's at least one well-known example of a Neil Cicierega video being completely unplayable https://twitter.com/neilcic/status/911080613733580801?s=20 (not this specific video, but this has happened in the past)

You should be locally saving any video you ever think you will want to watch again. Many of the videos I enjoyed in college of regular people just making stuff for fun (when being a content creator wasn't a thing) have been taken out by reruns of copyright searching bots and creators turning 30 and being embarrassed by what they posted in their 20s. One musical artist I followed decided to take down all of their old content because their latest album wasn't getting enough plays.

I save everything with replay value now, especially music.

It has already happened. A lot of content that used to be available on YouTube is gone because of policy changes (unlisted content automatically changed to private, banned users, videos deleted by the site) and more is already only available to logged in users or only in certain countries even though they used to be public.

On a personal level, you don't need the entire platform to go down to notice the bitrot. Over half of my "Watch Later" and other playlists from 8(?) years ago are now "deleted/private" videos.

I have been personally archiving the channels with content I enjoy. I know that doesn't help the general population…

Anything can disappear in this modern era. Thankfully YouTube is not DRM protected yet and you can do something about it. Any media company can take any video offline and your access to it will be gone. Same for ebooks, not only those tied to your account, but I was thinking, what if Overdrive/Libby terminate the access to particular library.

The steady state idea that most people have about civilization is just not applicable once there is oil-dependent information technology.

Either we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but acceleration eats YouTube in a transformative way, or we go up and eliminate the oil dependence but societal fission eats YouTube in a catabolic way.

In 2005, sure.

Its a bit more mysterious now a days though. Video compression got way better (albeit video quality also went way up), hard drives got way cheaper. Bandwidth is really cheap at scale. People are way better selling ads now then they used to be. A lot of video serving infrastructure got standardized.

Don't get me wrong, its still hard and expensive, but i don't feel that is the moat it once was. Network effects is also a whole other conversation.

I think the idea is that they operate as a black box and work in mysterious ways, not that it's mysterious how they became a monopoly.

I don't thinks it's quite that simple, there are other factors as well:

There are significant network effects. Content creators use youtube because there are a lot of viewers watching content there, and viewers use it because there is lots of content there. Since YouTube already dominates the market, it is extremely difficult for another platform to compete, even if it was better in every way.

Google can promote YouTube using its other monopolies/oligopolies. Most notably, google search prioritizes videos on YouTube over other videos. Also, being able to pay for video ads and search ads with a single vendor is probably actractive for ad space buyers.

Google also already has its own CDN, which probably reduces the cost of distributing the content.

Also youtube is big enough that they can get cache servers in isp datacenters for the popular content - it saves the isp the cost of a bigger pipe so deals not offered in general exist. (Netflix also has this with some - or at least they were working on it years ago)

At the rates I use video, my CDN doesn't care I'm distributing video bits, so at my end of the use spectrum, video bandwidth costs no more than the CDN fees I'm already paying. But yes, that won't work for Netflix or Disney+.

If the quantities of money paid to all the YouTube freelance advertisers is anything to go on, a video platform having their own ad network would itself be highly profitable.

>Competing with YouTube is certainly possible,

It is, but it's hard to gain the same audience share for all the reasons you mention.

Just ask Dailymotion, Vimeo, Twitch, Odysee, Peertube, Rumble, Kick, BitChute...

> and there's a lot of fun technical work

Maybe it's just me, but I don't find such kind of work "fun". I would have a constant feeling of "well, we are simply trying to mimic what YT did, maybe we should just hire someone that worked there and do the same, instead of going through the same inevitable mistakes".

YouTube already has a very big albeit usual competitor - PornHub.

In the UK we have the venerable BBC which is struggling with the revenue model, cost of broadcasting and much else. I am not a fan but I think that under new leadership they could do the disruption.

In what way?

Youtube is not social media. Nobody makes new friends whilst on YT. However, broadcast TV in the olden days before satellite TV and video recorders provided a shared conversation for the whole nation. You could spark up a conversation by asking a friend if they saw something on the TV during the previous evening. Nowadays people say DON'T TELL ME, I HAVEN'T WATCHED IT YET with no further conversation possible without changing topic.

A video platform could build community by letting people know if their friends and family have enjoyed watching the same programmes. Also possible is a mechanism whereby you can have a schedule made just for you. I have two YT faves, one which is fun (parasocial relationship) and another which is intellectual. If it is early in the evening and I am possibly relaxing with food then I will want the former, not the latter. On a daily basis I could have what we had in the olden days, light entertainment in the early evening and stuff that requires some brain cells later.

Revenue is always interesting and the state broadcasters in the English speaking world might as well pool resources and supply content people enjoy as soft propaganda on a free basis with no adverts. If the CDNs are in place with everything cached with a little bit of P2P, the cost model for delivery could be improved on.

Agree, another point is that video content making is a space full of grifters, unlike other form of media.

Take Kick for example, made to compete against Youtube and Twitch, but ended up with mostly people who are banned by those 2 platforms for a good reason. "Kick streamers" is now a negative words.

So new players on this field has to be specific about curating the people posting on their platforms.

nah its too late honestly, if big tech didn't want or care to make competing platform

how can you expect company that has less resource make an alternative ???? I still remember when microsoft throwing money to make mixer (twitch alternative) and yet it failed miserably

tiktok is close as we can get honestly, but youtube also expand toward shorts

I remember that before I knew a lot f people that used to watch movies on YouTube

You just don't make enough money from ads anyway, a lot of creators now see YT as more of top of funnel advertising leading you to a patreon or even more common livestream format where they make the real money from superchats.

Youtube is such a dominant and ubiquitous monopoly that it is almost easy to forget about it as a monopoly because there is so little competition to contrast against and to even remind you that there ought to be. I've wondered for years why it gets so little attention vs so many of the other tech giants that do have more competition.

Well managed? Not so sure about that.. the fact that UMG can harass content creators unchecked is a problem, and it's not just UMG abusing the copyright strike system.

Also, the amount of highjacked accounts and the length of time to regain control is absurdly long.

And Shorts. I wish I could disable Shorts from my feed.

What is the "product"?

A website? ("platform" for advertising) A website's users? ("you are the product") Paid subscriptions? (insufficient revenue to sustain operations)

If YouTube is a "product" does that mean US products liability laws apply? (Please support your answer with facts not opinions)

History so far has shown website popularity varies over time

https://hosting.com/blog/the-most-visited-websites-every-yea...

Would anyone today claim that, for example, Yahoo.com was "extremely well managed"? Yahoo was #1 for many years. Change is inevitable

It is hilarious to see people obsessed with targeting virtually anything for "disruption" until their favorite website becomes the target

In any organisation there is always room for improvement. Monopoly power reduces, perhaps even eliminates, incentive to improve

For some definition of well, that includes forcing shorts on everyone and getting most of the youth addicted to your product.

I don't know it's constantly kicking youtubers I subscribe to off the site, and removing videos. It would be nice if it were more censorship resistant

I do not have a youtube account. I never sign in. If I go to watch a video and I get confronted with a puzzle to solve then I immediately close my browser and go do something else. This has led to a personal trend of using youtube less frequently.

I agree that it is a mostly well managed product, but I can think of a lot of things when it was in the news for something bad. Most controversial is probably the increase in the amount of Ads, unskippable ads, then there was multiple problems with Youtube kids, e.g. how bad people get really bad videos there. There was an outcry when the dislike button was removed, and so on..

YouTube comment section can offer more like reddit. Where extended multiple level discussions can happen on the video with user profile and karma and all.

I think if anyone disrupts it, its going to be over money.

Either reducing the number of ads (they really have increased quite a lot) or give a bigger piece of the advert pie to creators.

The problem is that if youtube is ever threatened its trivial for them to do both those things, and they can almost certainly outlast any up and coming competitor in a price war.

I agree, it's one of the few last places on the Internet where the content is not just rage bait or AI slop. These things are trying to creep in but so far they failed to dominate unlike other places.

My issues with YouTube are usually limited to some UI problems. I think I can even list them all:

1) Thumbnails autoplay but the disclaimer about paid content is so large that often I click to watch the video and get the paid content info page.

2) Translates stuff depending on my browser language and IP. Very annoying

3) The add to queue button sometimes doesn't work and just plays the video right away. Very annoying

4) When I'm listening to songs, sometimes I just let it auto play the next song it picks and often it picks 2 hours long video of songs sticked one after another. Very annoying

5) The share button adds som ID that I have to remove every time, it's probably to track my sharing behavior. Annoying

6) When chromecasting, tapping on a video or receiving it through airdrop used to give me an option to add it to the queue or play it right away. Now just plays right away. Annoying

7) If I navigate from a page and go back I'm presented with a different page and often the video I noticed previously isn't there.

Besides that, I think I don't have much issues with YT. Best money spent on a premium subscription ever.

> I can’t remember the last time it was in news for something bad

It was a few days ago for the AI auto-filter and also Beato copyright claims.

Oh? I remember countless times it's been in the news (well, our news) for copyright abuse, appeals processes that are either an AI pretending to be human or a human pretending to be AI. The de-facto only way to clear up rampant abuse like mass claiming of videos over use of public domain music, is to have clout in social media.

Then there's the issue of AI slop channels, and pre-AI slop directed at children like the infamous Elsa and Spiderman spam.

Every so often they also are in the news for AB testing some anti-adblock measure. And people used to adblock who see it with ads for the first time in a while seem to always be shocked at the level of ads for pure fraud or malware.

YouTube seems to be a terrible place if you put anything up there that you actually care about. But I agree on one thing: it's not "ripe for disruption". Google sank so much losses into it for so many years just to have this monopoly, so it's not going to be easy to replace.

Sometimes the answer really is: it is a monopoly and it doesn't matter what they do.

They have all the eyeballs. All creators that got fucked over YT stay on the platform if their accounts are restored. And who can blame them, where are they going to go, Vimeo?

I don't think "the news" matters here as much as how it works, and it really doesn't work that well if you compare it to how it used to work.

If I open the Youtube app on my phone, I have to click through 3 menus before I can even see the newest video from the users I'm subscribed to, and then I have to watch 2 ads that change the entire layout of the app to present me more information about those ads - or I can pay $30 a month to skip those ads.

If I have spotty connectivity, I also can't buffer a video to watch anymore. I have to wait for some minimal percent to load, watch that part, then wait again. If I skip ahead, the earlier part is lost and has to be re-buffered.

Furthermore, not of immediate consequence to me, but still insufferably annoying is that creators I follow are regularly suspended from earning income on YouTube due to false copyright strikes, or saying a "bad word" that has no clear enforcement guidelines and seems to be different from person to person or day to day, and thus have begun to produce less content or found other platforms to move their videos to first.

It's pretty terrible, from my point of view. It's a bad service where a good service used to be, surviving on the dregs of goodwill and familiarity from its heyday.

> I feel that the FTC might have been better off trying to separate YouTube from Google rather than Chrome.

On what joy? The biggest mistake that DoJ did was asking to court to divest Android & Chrome. Judge took grave offense at that (read the court's opinion) and there's a school of thought that said it distracted from the whole thing.

Once you start being imprecise, all your arguments fall apart.

I am so fascinated by the different worlds everyone lives in.

I haven’t watched a video hosted on YouTube in years. But I hate amateur video. I never watch anything that I can possibly get through reading.

So in my tiny corner of user space, it’s really as if YouTube doesn’t exist except as an annoying thing Google puts at the top of searches I have to scroll past, reminding me to configure this device to use a different search engine.

That phenomenon is called network effects, if you’d like to read more about it.

Have you heard about Russia? Why bother of doing multi-platform if they can just prohibit anything Western and build their own digital platform for everything.

The solution that will actually work, then, is to build a platform that has the YouTube content. Don't try to convince creators to sign up for your new multiplatform thing - just rip it directly from YouTube. Now you're thinking like a VC-backed startup. Yes, it's illegal, so make sure to scale rapidly and become rich before they have time to sue you. Facebook did this to Myspace. Doordash did this to restaurant phone orders.

My first thought when I read AI search was that people might use it for instructions rather than tutorials and troubleshooting videos.

Could it be related to mandatory Widevine encryption?

On my phone, the mobile site (m.youtube.com) has introduced Widevine a couple of weeks ago (last week of August IIRC). No idea if I’m just unlucky and part of a shitty A/B experiment, but I definitely had to recompile libc (being on Linux) with patches from Chromium and install Widevine so I could watch videos again.

Whenever I replace my patched libc with the unpatched original, then the Widevine plugin crashes everytime I try to play back a video on m.youtube.com. And it used to work before.

While I have no idea, I just think it would be funny if this is YouTube blocking a massive number of bots/scrapers.

My pet theory is the war on ad blocking aka manifestv2 deprecation: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/develop/migrate...

I wouldn't think google search is a significant source of views anyway. Last I saw, the top platform for youtube usage is TVs.

Anecdotal, but for a while it felt like YouTube had decent content on whatever I was looking for. I trusted product reviews on there ever so slightly more than text content because of the relatively higher cost of producing videos. Nowadays there’s a glut of low quality stuff. Anything from low-effort videos to outright text-to-speech, non-videos that snare you using a promising thumbnail. The search results only surface about 5-10 relevant videos followed by things that have specious relevance. On top of that, they jammed Shorts into prominent screen real estate. It screams “hey while I’ve got you here, about a few of these distractions!”

So, I stopped going there as much. They stopped respecting visitor intentions. Just like every other platform, they just want to keep you on the site for as long as possible sifting through a feed of dopamine slop.

Apparently very few people use the subscriptions list and rely on the videos they subscribe and watch to appear on the Youtube homepage. And youtube changed what videos they put there. Instead of new videos by people you watch and related ones they show:

videos you just watched

videos you watched 10 years ago

auto dubbed videos on topics you are not interested

clickbait videos with 10 views

anything, but what you are used to watching

As TFA says, you can't even be sure what constitute "a view" and if Youtube keeps that consistent.

> they should have forced them to spinoff YouTube and other non-search monopolies google has that are insanely profitable.

I dont think I follow the logic. Having a successful business is not grounds for "forcing" to spin out. Airpods are extremely successful, and does that mean it needs to be a separate company? MacBooks are extremely profitable, so should they be a different company? Azure is widely popular, should they be too?

Have you heard an anecdote about the cat and the mustard?

> Just because something has market dominance does not make it a monopoly.

Isn't that the definition of a monopoly though? Just because something is a monopoly, that doesn't mean it necessarily has anti-competitive practices or meddles in government. (though that usually follows)

For what it's worth I agree that YouTube isn't abusing their market position, but it's important the semantics are clear.

TikTok and Instagram seem to be doing just fine..

Grayjay can neutralize the network effect

Youtube pretty aggressively blocks automated usage now. If you connect via a VPN it won't show any videos until you log in. Considering that ad income and real engagement seems unchanged, it possibly is just that they started blocking bots better. Something you wouldn't strictly expect a public announcement over.

This. Email and text is one of those things were you are not stuck to a single provider. Anything closed and proprietary is a problem. I'd say this is also the case for banking. Banks often require Google Play or iOS, severely constraining the user. Governments somehow need to put a stop to this, especially in the EU where we are becoming a US colony due to all our IT being in the hands of US companies. We need to take back control!

I prefer Vimeo, as a content publisher, but I don’t monetize, nor have I posted many vids. I’ve simply used the “pro” option, which I have recently let lapse.

I just feel that Vimeo’s video quality is better, and it gives more direct control of the content.

But I do so little video work, that it hasn’t been worth it to maintain the subscription.

It's a hard question to answer for products that rely on user created content like this.

Rumble and vimeo provide basically the same service, but if you got fed up with YouTube and wanted to take your money (eyeballs) elsewhere, you can't, because rumble and vimeo don't have the same content at all. And if you were a creator you can't take your content elsewhere because there's no viewers.

They aren't a tier 1 but they also aren't paying for most of their bandwdith. They peered very liberally in the past so have zero settlement peering to most networks and if you're a big enough eyeball network you can request a caching server from them where you pay for rack space, power and network and google just pays for the server hardware. [0]

[0]: https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809

Let me find some Blender and Unreal Engine tutorials on this Netflix site, thanks for directing me to this indieweb marvel! :)

(maybe a tear-down of my washer is there too!)

I watch my son grow up learning to DIY from youtube videos. I'm marveling at the wealth of instructional video he has easy access to, and I wish I had it too when I had my first home, learned to work on my first car, etc.

Have no idea what your last sentence means.. But that said - if you're claiming that YT search is broken I wholeheartedly agree. I don't understand how search on YT can be so bad given that it's owned by a search engine company.

Then again, their search engine is also subpar nowadays.. :)

Likes and comments are steady, apparently. How do you reconcile the reduced views with that? Anyway, nearly one-third to one-half of my video suggestions are bot videos. Honestly quite distasteful. They should just ask the users to flag them, instead of employing even more bots who're ever so enthusiastic to kick out those who do not belong to their race.

Heh, maybe haven't watched some of their deeper cuts; back in the day they were a lot more edgy especially with series like Plinkett Reviews. They've toned it down a bit, but they're definitely not a 'family friendly' channel in some of the content they release (not in a bad way, just... I wouldn't put on a random RLM video at a grade school function!).

Out of the box, I agree. I've got my feed well-curated at this point such that I get very little of that type of garbage pushed my way. I recently viewed the YouTube main page in an incognito window and, good lord, the default experience is an absolute cesspool of AI-generated nonsense, ragebait, and straight-up spam.

I'm not sure it's a hot take. I don't learn as easily from video as I do from text, but I seem to have curated my video recommendations to videos that I do like to watch as 'infotainment'.

e.g, Veritasium is a channel I quite like for their longer 'mini-documentary' like videos. And then there are just entertainment channels like Linus Tech Tips.

Not _everything_ has to be micro-optimized in my life, so I don't mind occasionally just sitting in the sofa watching a video that could have been a 3 minute blog :)

> ... a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time

It's even worse sometimes, googling some "how to" queries returns links to yt-videos. Even if the video is 5 minutes, it's a waste of time, because I'm usually in the middle of an ongoing process when dozens variants are evaluated and an average dedicated time for a single one is much shorter.

Transcripts sometimes help. But not the native (no diarization as long as I remember). An example, Lex Fridman podcast is a good source of anecdata from famous science/tech/non-tech people and provides good transcripts on the site (but only starting some point in the past). For transcripts before this point v1.transcript.lol covered many, but amongst other glitches no names for diarization (Speaker 1/ Speaker 2).

Isn’t a monopoly just a market leader that leverages its dominant position in anti-competitive ways? The article does make a (weak, IMO) argument that YouTube is using its position to screw creators out of revenue by gaming metrics.

Do you agree that Google is a monopoly? Calling Google just a market leader is the situation when the words became too blurred to carry some meaning.

What's your definition of monopoly?

They're something like 75% of video hosting, and if you exclude vimeo for being paid-only then it's over 90%. That sounds like a monopoly to me.

Microsoft was never a monopoly in the personal computer market by this logic.

Yes basically all it does is remove ads. Those of us who are happy with it are those of us who don’t feel entitled to unlimited video streaming for free. Most people think YouTube should just be free and have no ads for some reason, and they probably wouldn’t say Premium is such a great deal.

The new thing that YouTube Premium includes is the one button press to skip over "commonly skipped parts of the video"- typically the in-video promotions. This just showed up last week on my nVidia shield connected to my TV. So finally there is a way to remove ads for real. It would be nice if it did it automatically.

The creator is getting paid more from my Premium subscription, so I definitely do not want to see their own ads.

YouTube music being included effectively replaces an additional music streaming service. From that perspective the family oriented plans in particular carry a lot of value.

I imagine most people have the same value prop I do

1) I watch youtube more than any streaming service

2) I really really value not having ads in my life

So the price for ad-free youtube really seems phenomenal. None of the other features really matter to me - ad free dominates all value discussions.

On top of removing ads and giving you a couple extra minor features, it also has a way better rev split with creators (last I heard). Half of the sub gets divvied up to the people you watched that month, portioned out via watch time.

You also get youtube music, instant skipping over sponsor sections, and the ability to play videos in the background

Full disclousure: I work for Google, but nowhere near YT/YT music. Opinions are my own and I am actually a customer as I pay for YT premium with a family plan for me, my wife, and our son.

While I agree YT without Ads is great, you also get YT music which is really good and for us it replaced Spotify completely.

Personally, though, I don't have a problem with search (maybe because I set a lot of channels as "do not recommend/show"). Shorts, however, they are really annoying.

I use Brave and it's the premium experience already.

Absolutely, If premium sorted out all those problems and generally treated creators better i'd have a subscription.

I come to youtube for the *creators*, the actual platform where I have watch history off and use extensions to block the aggressively pushed slop as it currently stands is not something I want to put money towards.

I'm already a patreon to a few creators and have a Nebula subscription; adding it up it's probably slightly more than a premium subscription.

The other useful Youtube Premium feature is the ability to offline download videos to your device. Useful for long plane rides and elsewhere where internet is limited or nonexistent.

You should be paying (or taking some other action) to extricate ads from your life as much as possible.

Yeah it's hard to compete with Ublock Origin and youtube-shorts-block.

Here's an unrelated post by the video game content collective Second Wind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpVnx4_yqTo

Here's a post from another youtuber about a recent video getting restricted: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxcapSFGmm6m59kSEn62RGOZsmUEK...

I wrote up notes here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45180555 but this wasn't coordinated. As I mentioned in the first paragraph of the post, I was following a thread on Bluesky where Adrian and Jeff were chatting. I posted the article there. I didn't know Jeff had posted on Hacker News about this already, and I didn't know he would post my piece. I definitely would have done another editing pass if I had known!

Two articles is "astro-turfing" and "coordinated"? We're going to need some stronger evidence than that.

Uh, there have been dozens of videos of senior YouTube creators who have independently voiced alarm about this within the past few days. It's now been long enough since the algorithm change that statistical time series analyses can detect it. It is no coincidence or surprise that there should be several concerns raised here today. Many livelihoods depend on this. It's pretty serious for certain "celebrities".

Not to be rude, but this is one of several accusations of astroturfing I've seen on HN lately. They have all been so clearly off the mark that it makes me wonder if there was some event that triggered users here to be so paranoid?

This article specifically mentions and links to Geerling’s piece.

Another yter mailed out to his Patreons saying his views were down. Within the last week. Ze Frank.