4 ms·

I don't know whether you are right, but I don't find your argument persuasive. You could have made a parallel argument, before Youtube, about how people wanted

by feral 8y ago

I don't know whether you are right, but I don't find your argument persuasive. You could have made a parallel argument, before Youtube, about how people wanted only professional content, why a service for user created content would never work etc, because that's all that had worked, up to that point. Just because all the decentralized projects have failed so far doesn't mean they are doomed. Its really early days yet. Youtube is just over a decade old. HBO is 5 decades old. Clearly decentralized services are harder to build and get right. But that means there's still plenty to figure out, and plenty of potential. > YouTube's audience doesn't care about anything at decentralized network has to offer. It's just entertainment for them. They just want to watch videos and shitpost in the comments. People change, they grow in sophistication. E.g. look at Facebook - at the start it was full of spammy viral activity notifications for crappy games. People got sick of that and it was forced to change. Now its full of other crappy stuff, but which people are getting sick of now too.

themagician 8y ago
We grow down in sophistication in tech. Everything goes to the lowest common denominator, then it falls further. The web used to be sophisticated and it was only for nerds.
- feral 8y ago
  I think your argument is mostly running into selection issues. If its the middle ages and the only people who have learned to read are the very most educated part of the the population, then the average printed material is going to be intellectual. As the reading population expands over the next 1000 years, and the average book hence becomes less scholarly, you might naively conclude that everything is becoming 'lowest common denominator'. But overall, education standards + sophistication are rising hugely. Sure, when only nerds could access the web, it was super sophisticated. And it had to get easier to go mainstream. But that doesn't mean the mainstream trend is to always dumb down forever, as you are arguing. Apple mouse used to have only one button, but now look at the power of the multitouch UX almost everyone uses on their smartphone daily. Look at Gmail compared to Hotmail v1, Youtube compared to cable TV etc. Its easy to forget how powerful and sophisticated they are. People have learned to do really sophisticated things, create, communicate etc. Sure, things dumbed down since only CS grad students used the Internet. But now that growth is slowing, I bet tastes are going to increase in sophistication again.
  - api 8y ago
    That's great. A simpler way of explaining it is that sophistication tends to follow a U-shaped curve: initial complexity for the early adopter set, simplification for mass adoption, then a different kind of sophistication as the masses become more educated and savvy in the use of the new system. This only applies to surface complexity though. Under the hood the web today is many orders of magnitude more complex than the web in the 1990s.
- murjinsee 8y ago
  What do you mean? Should refinement equal surface complexity?
antt 8y ago
>You could have made a parallel argument, before Youtube, about how people wanted only professional content, why a service for user created content would never work etc, because that's all that had worked, up to that point. I remember in the early days people in the entertainment industry dismissing youtube as a useless piracy website which could never deliver any worth while content by itself. This was in 2006 when the only real use for youtube was to watch music videos because of the 10 minute video limit. A lot can change in 10 years once the base technology is in place.
- InternetUser 8y ago
  YouTube, launched in early 2005, actually instated the 10-minute limit in 2007 or 2008; I remember watching plenty of full TV shows in the first couple of years, and I remember that one of the most popular and constantly recommended were episodes of "Chappelle's Show" (noted in the Viacom lawsuit that could have destroyed YouTube, had Google not owned it by them) and there were also uploads of the Comedy Central version of "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" and 1980s and '90s SNL episodes. Then there was the 10-minute limit, then 15 [0]--and there were tons of broadcast-TV uploads that were divided up in such segments (such as the very popular "MoxNewsDotCom" channel's uploads of the 2008 U.S. election debates)--and then by the end of 2010, YouTube started allowing videos of any length, and I recall seeing novelty videos of some repeating loops for several or dozens of hours [1][2]. [0] Undated, but still showing up: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/71673?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/71673?hl=en&co=GEN... [1] "THE LONGEST VIDEO ON YOUTUBE - 596.5 HOURS" - Dec 14, 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04cF1m6Jxu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04cF1m6Jxu8 https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=EgIYAkIECAESAA%253D%253D&search_query=longest+video https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=EgIYAkIECAESAA%253D%253D&...

by feral 8y ago

themagician 8y ago

We grow down in sophistication in tech. Everything goes to the lowest common denominator, then it falls further. The web used to be sophisticated and it was only for nerds.

feral 8y ago
I think your argument is mostly running into selection issues. If its the middle ages and the only people who have learned to read are the very most educated part of the the population, then the average printed material is going to be intellectual. As the reading population expands over the next 1000 years, and the average book hence becomes less scholarly, you might naively conclude that everything is becoming 'lowest common denominator'. But overall, education standards + sophistication are rising hugely. Sure, when only nerds could access the web, it was super sophisticated. And it had to get easier to go mainstream. But that doesn't mean the mainstream trend is to always dumb down forever, as you are arguing. Apple mouse used to have only one button, but now look at the power of the multitouch UX almost everyone uses on their smartphone daily. Look at Gmail compared to Hotmail v1, Youtube compared to cable TV etc. Its easy to forget how powerful and sophisticated they are. People have learned to do really sophisticated things, create, communicate etc. Sure, things dumbed down since only CS grad students used the Internet. But now that growth is slowing, I bet tastes are going to increase in sophistication again.
- api 8y ago
  That's great. A simpler way of explaining it is that sophistication tends to follow a U-shaped curve: initial complexity for the early adopter set, simplification for mass adoption, then a different kind of sophistication as the masses become more educated and savvy in the use of the new system. This only applies to surface complexity though. Under the hood the web today is many orders of magnitude more complex than the web in the 1990s.
murjinsee 8y ago
What do you mean? Should refinement equal surface complexity?

antt 8y ago

>You could have made a parallel argument, before Youtube, about how people wanted only professional content, why a service for user created content would never work etc, because that's all that had worked, up to that point. I remember in the early days people in the entertainment industry dismissing youtube as a useless piracy website which could never deliver any worth while content by itself. This was in 2006 when the only real use for youtube was to watch music videos because of the 10 minute video limit. A lot can change in 10 years once the base technology is in place.

InternetUser 8y ago
YouTube, launched in early 2005, actually instated the 10-minute limit in 2007 or 2008; I remember watching plenty of full TV shows in the first couple of years, and I remember that one of the most popular and constantly recommended were episodes of "Chappelle's Show" (noted in the Viacom lawsuit that could have destroyed YouTube, had Google not owned it by them) and there were also uploads of the Comedy Central version of "Who's Line Is It Anyway?" and 1980s and '90s SNL episodes. Then there was the 10-minute limit, then 15 [0]--and there were tons of broadcast-TV uploads that were divided up in such segments (such as the very popular "MoxNewsDotCom" channel's uploads of the 2008 U.S. election debates)--and then by the end of 2010, YouTube started allowing videos of any length, and I recall seeing novelty videos of some repeating loops for several or dozens of hours [1][2]. [0] Undated, but still showing up: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/71673?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/71673?hl=en&co=GEN... [1] "THE LONGEST VIDEO ON YOUTUBE - 596.5 HOURS" - Dec 14, 2011 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04cF1m6Jxu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04cF1m6Jxu8 https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=EgIYAkIECAESAA%253D%253D&search_query=longest+video https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=EgIYAkIECAESAA%253D%253D&...