> point fingers at YouTube for something they weren’t involved in

YouTube monetizes based on view count. They also send the data to the client. That client data is in anyway involved, and could be blocked, is YouTube’s design problem.

YouTube immediately pointed fingers at creators by saying that certain audiences are more likely to use ad blockers.

:)

If Dirty Stan spends an hour making guests uncomfortable at your house, some of those guests might come to think of you as a bad host even though Stan's behavior was the issue.

I think it's reasonable to attribute moral responsibility to the entity that owns and has the most control over the platform, even if the technical details aren't quite so simple. Doubly so in this case since YouTube is a profitable business. Given [0], it sounds like this bug with view counts is a direct result of YouTube choosing to start an arms race against users who run ad blockers.

[0]: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/issues/22375#issuecomme...

At this point the "peanut gallery" of the web is essentially just a firehose of misinformation, best avoided. Not two minutes before this I read some comment confidently stating that the last time Apple offered iPhone leather cases was for iPhone 11.

Makes no sense whatsoever. It’s a view counter. People want to know how much it was watched, not how much money YouTube made off of it. They’re pretending people care about their internal metrics, when people really do not. Maybe the creator, but again, they’re probably also just interested in eyeball counts.

It’s dumb in almost every direction I can imagine. The only one that makes sense is if you’re simply at war with adblockers and you’re trying to turn the public tide of opinion against them.

The comment you replied to explained that nothing was changed on the YouTube side. This was an adblocker choosing to start block a non-ads, non-tracking, samesite API call that had probably been in place for like a decade.

So it's quite amazing that even with that context you still managed to hijack that into a discussion about the merits of what Google did with this "balanced approach" bait. This isn't a balanced approach! It's not an approach at all!

It is the ad blocker willfully choosing to break totally normal and benign site functionality. Google had no agency in this, and doesn't have much recourse.

There is no balancing happening here. YouTube needs to make an API call to attribute a view to a video, and easylist started blocking that API call. YouTube was perfectly happy a month ago to count views for users that were blocking ads, and presumably remains happy to do so.

The only thing that changed is easylist blocked the API.

You can still have in-video sponsor spots, in fact, most of the creators have them. Viewership is an important metric to those sponsors.

This looks like an additional incentive to channel owners to somehow convince their audience against the ad blocker use. Makes sense, better than trying to win an unwinnable arms race against the blocker maintainers.

It's wild to me that advertisers are willing to use first party metrics. In any other media business you'd have a certified third party ratings agency to give "audience size" metrics some legitimacy.

Youtube has no incentive to accurately report this data and no apparent accreditation in their methodology.

The automated “Skip Ahead” button (which I use daily) is already hostile to sponsorships. I would not be at all surprised to see them hitting sponsors on multiple fronts.

Surely YT know if a video has sponsored content and so can refuse to play the video - or even not suggest it - if the user is using adblockers?

I pay for youtube. Payments from my views should come from my subscription payment. Ad blocking should be irrelevant in my case.

They impact individual channel revenue because so many channels have gone to sponsored ads, which automatic ad-blockers can't block (yet (1) ). The calibre of sponsor a channel can attract is impacted by the reported views from YouTube.

(1) Hey, imagine I had a plugin that monitored the behavior of several viewers of each video and could collate where most people skipped a big chunk of video, then, oh I don't know, offered a feature where if lots of people skip one chunk, it'll automatically skip it for you when you're playing the video....

Prior to getting Premium, YouTube was able to detect that I was watching a video (and nag me about premium as a way to get rid of ads). Since getting Premium, I haven't gotten the nag message.

I run AdGuard (on a Mac). It has a filter log feature.

Poking at the log while playing a video, I do see calls to ttps://{{clusterid?}}.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1758173247&...

However, this call is not being blocked.

I suspect that this is the "keep watching" feature that tracks where I am in various videos (switching from one logged in device to another keeps the same position). Watching the video all the way through, I don't see any requests relating to this getting blocked while on Premium. This feature is also likely more than sufficient data to attribute a view (and monetization of the view).

There was also a call to ttps://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/log_event?alt=json that was not blocked.

I do see some doubleclick.net links being blocked, thought that could be from any number of other pages I've got open.

Going to an incognito session and pulling up the same video (Once Around Trappist 1)...

There's now a call (that has gotten blocked) to ttps://www.youtube.com/api/stats/watchtime...

That call was not something that I saw when logged into premium. This rule is described as "@@||www.youtube.com^$generichide (AdGuard Base filter)"

If this leads to lower quality videos, due to change in incentives, for certain segments, then I would consider it a WIN for users. For the portion of users for whom the lower quality is not palatable, they will get their time back to spend on other things in life.

This is all completely subjective of course.

Your presumptions are akin to gaslighting and YouTube has successfully pitted the viewers against creators this time. Ad blocking will never stop no matter what creators and monopolists have to say.

> I know some here are like "go get a REAL job, influencers are scum"

Signing up for the creator's patreon or buying merch is the more widely adopted reaction by the those actually enjoying the content.

Those buying baked in ads just need to find other ways to verify value. This is nothing new, no large company buys ads without checking how they really work (though many small companies would). There is someone who checks all those "how did you hear about us" responses asked at checkout - they want to know if the ad really provided value. Sure the TV stations tracked and reported ratings, but that is only one of the signs ad buyers look at, and it is one they only trust because they check and so would catch if it is manipulated.

The ad business is far older than the internet and there is a lot of old knowledge that apples directly to the internet. Those buying backed in ads should be aware of and tracking such efforts.

YouTube didn't change anything. The ad blockers recently started blocking the metric call for whatever reason.

nobody's ever accused youtube of being too transparent with creators

That was also my take when I first saw the FBI advice about using an adblocker. Like, yeah, it's good advice, but also why is no one being prosecuted for acting as an accessory if not accomplice to fraud? They're labeling their product as a search tool and then taking money to funnel users away from the thing they're searching for to scammers instead. Surely they are aware of their pure negligence in vetting business partners if the government is issuing warnings to citizens about their behavior?

30% of my YouTube ads are now a large fart sound followed by an AI generated old doctor talking for 15 minutes about some sketchy diet modification

People in general have stopped trying to hold people accountable and have just accepted defeat.

> If ads could be relevant, vetted, non-intrusive, and ancillary to the experience, all actions that are required to be performed by the ad platform Youtube/Google, then you wouldn't have much moral leg to stand on.

Even if ads were all of those things, ads are psychological manipulation, and I there is no moral imperative that says I have to subject myself to that.

Sure, you could say, "well then instead just don't use YouTube", and I would say... "yeah, maybe, but... I'm a selfish human and want to, and unless YouTube is going to give me a way to exchange something else for a better experience, tough shit on them."

But anyway, they do give me that option, and I pay for Premium, so it's not a problem.

No, no, no.

Morally you should stop using youtube.

It's incredible how people mental gymnastics there way into a solution that provides themselves all the benefit and pat themselves on the back for being morally righteous.

When you don't like something, you don't use it. It sends a clear message that you don't like the product/service. Using it and not compensating for it (because you actually do like it, just on your terms) is not moral or a good signal in anyway way, shape, or form.

You would think Google having all this amazing AI could moderate their YouTube ads....

But those crypto scams make them money.

100%. They are trying to get YouTube a exclusion from the list, or make the list the non-default. I already know the next step is that the "community" is going to fork the list, and the forked list is going to be heavily advertised on YouTube channel as a way to support the channel.

> Oh, that one is easy to understand. They want to change the sentiment to "adblockers are bad, it's basically stealing"

Ah yes, the good old "don't copy that floppy" argument.

The advertising industry brought this upon themselves. The web is straight up unusable without an ad blocker. Between malicious ads, drive-by-downloads, content shifting, and other dark patterns, websites are now more ads than content.

It's like in the days of streaming (when it was still good and not enshitified) reducing piracy rates - companies can get me to disable my ad blocker if they start becoming good citizens actually make their site or service usable without it.

Get rid of the invasive tracking, dark patterns, un-dismissable modals, etc. Stop jamming your content so full of ads and SEO spam and maybe I wouldn't need an ad blocker as much.

You wouldn't steal a car.

Well I definitely would if I could torrent it. Facebook would have too.

Regarding recommendations. I recently disabled history and recommendations and the subscribed tab has everything I’d expect. No more surprises and no more political garbage.

> I understand that they've massively reduced the compensation creators receive from monetization.

Do you have any article about that? How much did the monetization drop for?

Honestly I'm willing to bet that the contacts/account managers at Google genuinely didn't know that easyprivacy had added their view tracking to the blocklist, and reached out to some people internally who's job is implementing youtube and not anti-adblock features who correctly said they didn't change anything, and would have no reason to know that easyprivacy had changed anything.

Then the AMs just issue vague statements to the youtubers as it feels more like saving face than admitting they have no idea

Why would most creators be pro ad blocking in the first place? Don’t most of them want to earn money via advertising?

Uploaders can disable mid-roll adverts, ie ones that appear in the middle of the content.

> against adblocking

And extensions such as SponsorBlock [1], which help user skipping sponsored sections or useless intros in videos.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

I don't think YouTube needed to do anything. The change influenced creators' bottom line so they are motivated on their own to mobilize their viewers against this change.

Morally indefensible. Adblockers are used as a response to Google externalizing/ignoring the cost of proper ad platform curation.

This was my exact thought when I read about it. YouTube clearly has a record of what I’ve watched, because it’s in my watch history.

What they are missing is proof I’ve watched the ads - which I haven’t.

Ads are how they get paid until they're big enough for alternative revenue generation.

Sounds fair? Both creators and YouTube have the same goal of having people watch ads (or pay not to).

It seems like server-side would suffer from issues due to buffering lookahead and autoplay. A client can request a video that is skipped within seconds, but if buffering causes it to request five minutes worth, the server only sees five minutes were requested, whereas the client can clearly tell how much of that was actually watched.

Server-side tracking would be the easiest thing in the world to spoof.

But why would I, as a user of Easy Privacy, care about this? It is protecting my own privacy. Someone trying to get more money on the internet isn't really my concern.

> So this is only harmful to the creators, and not YouTube.

Pretty sure this is harmful to youtube as well as it lowers the value (less personalization data) for advertisers. Also the knock-on effect of impacting creators, meaning less investment in creating content.

That being said, I've always hated this business model. It's created so many other problems in our society. Resulting in a shift to authoritarian leadership in many countries.

Aren't many channels funded by the companies they pretend to get sponsorship from? If you look at the OSINT and Natsec adjacent topics there are many who have had the same sponsor for years: ground.news ... many pretend that they are indie content creators when they are just the marketing / growth hacking arm of the sponsor.

Examples: Caspian report, Warfronts, Geopolitics decoded, ...

Many of them (the content creator) are even located in the same city.

Eventually the whole system will rebalance. TV ads were shown to people even though you couldn't if any single person was watching or not.

Where does line go? If a future "Adblocker 3000" don't let advertisers capture you eyemovements in realtime 30 times per second, would that be sad?

Seems the ball is with Youtube. They can compensete and pay out more. Or not.

That still isn't an issue for the end-user. It is Youtube's problem to keep their content creators happy and not mine.

Personally I would even prefer anything that allows for a Youtube alternative to do better.

Why do YouTube creators deserve special treatment compared to any other entity whose analytics are impacted by adblockers?

Every publisher on the internet has been bleating for years about how adblockers negatively impact their business and their ability to provide [some value] to customers.

If your ability to generate value is hitched to surveillance capitalism then that’s a choice, whether you’re a folksy mom and pop YouTube creator or a multinational publisher.

Oh, really, are you sure? They still charge advertisers the full amount? My understanding was that they're only charged if there is evidence of an "ad impression" which there shouldn't be if the request was blocked

That's a rule defined by YouTube and/or advertisers in their relationship with content creators. By defining that rule, YouTube and/or advertisers have chosen to drag my participation into that relationship. My participation does not belong in their relationship. The only thing I can do to communicate my opinion on the matter is to do precisely what this "bug" entails.

Isn't it likely that Google charges the advertisers for each time an ad is shown? So lower view counts mean lower ad views which means lower revenues for both Google and the content creators. (And, if the advertisers are counting on the views to drive their own business, it could mean lower revenues for them to go with the smaller ad bills.)

The thumbs downs on Yuki's responses are baffling. It is a privacy filter, improving privacy. There is a strong para-social relationship with many younger internet users, so maybe people really do feel strongly about affecting their favorite youtube star's view count? Or it could be youtube creators who are worried. I can't think of any other reasons a user would be on the side of youtube here.

Right or wrong you don't think it was unduly combative right off the bat? Manners cost nothing.

No, but feedback goes into the machine in odd ways. This has a 1000x higher factor of being considered and thought of more than any other forum.

A deepfake version of Mark Carney keeps trying to get me to sign up for scam crypto exchanges. Clicking the report link does nothing.

With all the money that Google has plowed into AI, they clearly could solve this problem if they want to. The fact that it's still an issue means they don't care, or are happy to take the ad money from the fraudsters.

I endorse the view that everyone should use an ad blocker, but for what it's worth I keep seeing this techcrunch article and the original advice offered by the FBI [1] is actually much more limited.

> Use an ad blocking extension when performing internet searches. Most internet browsers allow a user to add extensions, including extensions that block advertisements. These ad blockers can be turned on and off within a browser to permit advertisements on certain websites while blocking advertisements on others.

So the specific recommendation is that you turn on an ad blocker while performing searches. Why are they so concerned about searches? It's because of a specific form of fraud, where someone purchases an ad pretending to be the business you're searching for, but actually takes you "to a webpage that looks identical to the impersonated business’s official webpage" - that is, a phishing scam.

That's way more limited than the "FBI recommends ad blocker" statement would lead you to believe. From the FBI's point of view, pitching a bullshit supplement in an ad (what you're talking about) is an entirely legitimate business practice, and selling supplements is legal in the US so long as you don't make certain medical claims or imply FDA approval.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221222162340/https://www.ic3.g...

I see it as part of the same general package. The censoring for any reason at all (including real time, via AI, in the comments, which were already! ruined by Google+ integration going back years)

Youtube Rewind 2018 - before they got rid of dislikes, to make ad videos harder to spot - was one of (was the?) most disliked videos in Youtube history

A very far cry from the halcyon days of ~10 years earlier

100%. I can't count the amount of times I've seen an AI-generated Elon Musk promoting a Tesla coin lol. I've lost count.

There is middle-ground: anti- ad-blocker changes cause a large number of ad-blockers to fail entirely.

It would make sense too, Youtube wouldn't care to make their videos viewable to a large number of ad-blockers, and ad-revenue would be near steady because ad-blockers were not generating any ad revenue.

The people using ad-blockers were not watching ads, so it would not make a difference to revenue streams. If anything, profit would go up because Youtube server capacity is not being used as much by ad-block users.

This is the last thread I would ever have expected to see those little striped monsters mentioned.

Not sure about the chainsaw analogy, but I guess Aedes Aegypti is a fair metaphor for the cumulative effect of the tiny daily (hourly?) annoyance of the free-with-ads model.

For quite a few people, they would have had to manually pull in an updated ad-blocker change. This would be the case if they run the source release, or have disabled updates.

Have you looked at https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV ?

I imagine watch history view tracking and view count view tracking and possibly even ad impression view tracking are three disconnected systems. Google is still going to update your history view even if it thinks you're a bot so you don't know you're being filtered out for example. The data to power that UI can also be partitioned by user while the ad and view count data needs to be aggregated performantly across large numbers of users in different slices. On the other hand your watch history doesn't keep multiple entries if you watch the same video multiple times in a day (say a music video on loop) but does want to charge for each ad impression seperately.

They probably use a combination of the API and raw server requests due to how easy it would be otherwise to spoof viewership for ad revenue fraud. Would not surprise me anyway.

View count is used to guide to price embedded sponsors, so in the short term matters while things get recalibrated.

Only YouTube can tell, that's the fun part.

afairc sub-100 views are not counted in realtime anyway.

Because Google still can't count that low, amirite?!

40-50% of desktop users on my channel, heh.

I don't hold it against anyone. YouTube's ads are horrible, and overstuffed into videos.

I use premium and know not everyone can afford it, but one concern I have is premium views are also not counted if someone still uses the adblocker while logged into YouTube premium. (So you miss out on the view and on that extra bit of premium revenue).

Laughs in patched YT.

Not around the TV right now, but they increased the size of the thumbnails in the first row of "Recommended" content to the point where only one is visible fully. (Not unlike new Netflix UI)

I might be in some A/B test tho.

That's not quite what the github issue says? There appear to be several potentially contributing changes in the time window, and one of them actually re-enables a previously blocked YouTube analytics endpoint

Hell, YouTube even added that feature where it'll autoskip commonly skipped section so it's basically a built in SponsorBlock at this point (no doubt helped powered by those who skip via SponsorBlock). I'm surprised I haven't seen any controversy from people who are having their sponsors pay less because of this.

I find it incredibly difficult to shed any sympathy for youtube "content creators". Youtube was most entertaining, or at least most interesting before anyone was monetizing the platform. Same goes for most of thr rest of the web but I digress

If views aren't being counted, it will still hurt their revenue from YouTube Premium subcribers. Premium views pay out a lot more than ad revenue from "free" views so that can hurt a lot.

YouTube is quoted in the article.

> Viewers Using Ad Blockers & Other Content Blocking Tools: Ad blockers and other extensions can impact the accuracy of reported view counts. Channels whose audiences include a higher proportion of users utilizing such tools may see more fluctuations in traffic related to updates to these tools.

I believe the metrics are before the sponsorship is made, like a company will only sponsor a creator if that creator has more than a number of views

They told me I couldn't run ad blocker/anti-virus software on my computer while watching their videos. So I stopped watching their videos. (Technically, the videos aren't theirs, but belong to the creators. Many of them provide the same (or better) content on other platforms),

Presumably Louis wants to reach as many people as possible and would like to know how many people he's reaching though.

Rossman has a separate business to support him.

I've found that "Not Interested" does either nothing or sends an engagement signal to show me more of the same. "Don't recommend channel" does seem to work with that channel, at least.

It's possible that the YTers complaining about this are affected once you bring the algorithm into it.

Anecdotally I am watching less. Not because of sponsorships, but because more and more content is AI-generated slop or copied (stolen) from other channels and reposted.

> but this should roughly tell us how much is lost to adblockers.

not really, because watching videos without ad blockers would be quite painful

I think you're not understanding. The claim is that view counts are down but revenue is not because people using ad-block previously did not contribute to revenue but did contribute to view count, and now they are not counted as either. So view counts are down and creators are getting the same ad money because they already earned no money from the adblocking people.

When channels are claiming their view count is dropping 30% but still earning the same amount of money, that would indicate that they are losing out on 30% of their potential revenue because of ad blockers.

The views didn't count in the first place, that's why the money stayed the same.

Creators can now though, knowing how much they make per view on avg, and slot in the avg number of view that were missing, work out how much they are missing out on due to ad-blocking.

For large creators, it's likely in the tens of thousands of dollars per video assuming most are seeing the same ~20-25% drop.

Eventually the "morally pure" internet will need to reconcile it's habit of not compensating creators.

If you don't like random/inexplicable changes in your income, you probably shouldn't have youtube involved.

If Apple were to include an ad blocker by default in Safari it would be the greatest thing they've done for users in the past 5 years. Their privacy/anti-tracking stuff is good but it's largely invisible to the end user. People would never want to go back to the raw internet once they experience it without ads.

The interesting question is how/if this impacts the recommendation engine. If it does impact recommendations, then that will directly penalize channels with more adblock users.

> The fact that ad revenue didn't change means they do have robust ad tracking

Ad tracking is usually done client-side too, so ad revenue being stable just means that the missing view counts are probably limited to the users who already weren't viewing ads.

Not necessarily. Youtube makes extensive use of third-party CDNs. A lot of the videos aren't coming from their servers at all. I believe that's also why it's so hard for them to embed the ad directly in the video. They instead having to rely on splicing the ads client-side, which makes it possible to block.

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not at Youtube and have no idea how things work really. This is just based on some info I read online.

YouTube has a crazy CDN. They very well might not be able easily attribute exactly what the client requests to specific accounts.

The other commenters point out more prosaic problems with CDN architecture, but a more product-focused answer for this is "because users execute Javascript but bots don't". Using client side counting is an easy way to filter out simple automated traffic.

Also, with segmented MP4 streams, the files on the backend won't necessarily be easy to match up 1:1 with videos. How do you count the views if someone watches a video, and then skips back to watch the middle section a few times, and then doesn't finish it? Because that would show up as (1, 1, 4, 3, 0) in your database for the different files involved. Now imagine doing that for ~500 people on a shared IP address for their high school. And now your minimum threshold for view counting is tied to the size of your MP4 chunks, or range requests. And now you've put this view counting logic into the hot path of serving terabytes of data.

From a product perspective, you can see why "A video view is counted the first time the user presses the play button and watches for at least 30 seconds" is a much more desirable definition, both technically and for stakeholders (video creators, advertisers, etc) to understand.

The computers serving advertisements should also know how much data has been delivered. Alphabet should be able to expect more from a CDN they have a business relationship with, than the people watching YouTube.

because distributed CDN means it doesn't necessarily hit a backend?

Mine's still stuck on recommending me culvert uncloging videos after I watched one way back. I switched to Freetube and imported my subscriptions, and that made things much better, since now I can't even accidentally see what my recommended videos would be.

Log out and you’ll be even more ashamed.

Trending page[0] is gone for non logged-in users as of couple months now. (No idea if it's still up for logged-in users) As a result my YouTube consumption went down (not complaining).

https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending

My recommendations are generally aligned with my interests as derived from my view history, likes, and subscriptions. But more and more of it is AI-generated or videos copied from the original creator and reposted by someone else. I try to use "don't show me videos fron this channel" on those but more and more just appears. I think there must be bots creating new channels and copying/generating content faster than I can block them.

And please, let me opt out of Shorts permanently. I keep telling them I don't want shorts but they always come back. I pay for a Premium account, so they should resepect my wishes on this.

Same. My recommended feed is relatively ok, but I'm fairly ruthless with the "I don't want this" and "Don't recommend this channel" buttons. Meanwhile I've been off Facebook for years in large part because their feed appeared to be unsalvageable.

On the computer attached to my stereo YouTube shows me almost 100% conservative, boring, safe but good music recommendations -- all things I've liked before, it rarely tries to show me anything new or challenging.

On another browser it shows me mostly videos about stereo equipment.

One yet another it shows me a mix of videos aimed at someone who listens to The Ezra Klein Show. That browser and the previous browser sometimes get a burst of videos about "How Brand X has lost its way" or "Why Y sucks today".

One time on shorts I clicked on a video where an A.I. generated woman transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and then after that it wanted to show me hundreds of A.I. slop videos of Chinese girls transforming into just about anything on the same show with the same music and the same reaction shots.

If you click on a few Wheat Waffles videos you might quickly find your feed is nothing but blackpill incel videos and also videos that apply a blackpill philosophy to life such that not only is dating futile but everything else is futile too.

The conclusion I draw from it is that you can't easily draw conclusions about the experience other people have with recommenders, it's one reason why political ads on social are so problematic, you can tell baldfaced lies to people who are inclined to believe them and skeptical people will never see them and hold anyone to account.

I did an experiment where I really invested in my YouTube suggestions, and you can definitely groom your recommendations, and then they can be pretty good. But then you have an issue where you get into a new hobby or a new interest, and so you watch some videos attributed to that, your recommendations spiral back out of control. So you can do a whole bunch of grooming work, but probably they just go back to being like 80% wrong. I got vaguely interested in the piano, and now 80% of my recommendations are music related, but not actually things I care about, and they've just gone back to being total trash.

Here's my experience of recommendations right now: videos I've already seen, videos on topics I have no interest in, or a completely empty page.

How much do you think advertisers would be willing to pay for ads on the side, relative to what they're currently paying? You can see how people wouldn't be willing to pay the same amount for that, right?

They also do this (or did?). But I guess on mobile this is not working well, because of limited screen estate, and people will obviously not focus much on them.

I agree that video ad experience on YouTube isn't great, but they do offer a subscription to remove ads at least.

I don't think they'd be interested in fixing this. I suspect YouTube is trying to create a double bind for users of adblockers by pitting them against creators' incentives. People in the thread were discussing ways of disabling uBO filters to restore view reporting.

The work to do this isn't free. YouTube already has their code working, but they don't expect browsers to be blocking arbitrary requests or injecting their own javascript into the page. These kind of breakage are not free for YouTube to fix and often YouTube is the one taking the reputational hit for their site being broken. It ultimately is antisocial behavior to be breaking other's sites even if technically they can workaround the bugs being added.

Not OP (and I don't use it for this case), but I suspect that the instructional "how do you do X" videos that supplanted the "look up the blog post" of even longer ago.

"How do you start a react application" and going to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=How+do+you+star... (incognito or private session suggested to avoid search history getting you react application suggestions for the next several months) and watching those videos.

For many people looking for a guide, they've switched to an LLM which gives them a more tailored experience.