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What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. As an aside, I'm seeing the same pattern at Amazon. People thought they were opening a b

What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. As an aside, I'm seeing the same pattern at Amazon. People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful. Businesses there are now devolving into repackaging jobs. Now Youtube is doing the same. They used focus on being a search and distribution mechanism. Now they produce content, allow sponsorships, have more ads per minute of viewing then television, ... jobs there are again, repackaging jobs. Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips... They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff? Nowhere. There's no other amazon. Ebay? The flea market of the internet? That's where people who wanted to sell to wal-mart go. The only place for them to go would be to create their own online store, or their own website where people can watch their movies. Then you have to be found through... ... that's right, Google. Nope. That won't work either, because only AdWords sponsored content appears in Google searches anymore. Google wants you adding data snippets to google.com so people won't even visit your website. The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days. The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers. It's just gross. So sad.

anticensor 7y ago
> only AdWords sponsored content appears in Google searches anymore. Wrong, AdWords sponsored results are promoted (just in a less obvious manner than before), but other websites also appear.
- JonathonW 7y ago
  In normal web searches. For product searches, there's also Google Shopping-- this started out (as Froogle and Google Product Search) indexing any shopping sites Google found, but, as of the rebranding to Google Shopping in 2012, exclusively shows paid listings. Google Shopping also gets more prominent placing in web searches for products than the actual web results do.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  What I meant was that only websites that have google adwords embedded in their content show up in Google results. If you aren't generating revenue through google advertising blocks on your content, google doesn't show the content. Google things new, updated content on large sites is more relevant, but it's not. That content is recreated from older content on the web that doesn't have ads on it. I'm sure it's just that google requires more and more work from webmasters to easily find searchable content, meta tags, modern HTML, etc, but the way new content is being produced now is under the guise of ultimately getting the content reader to buy a product. The old internet was, "Omg, I can share my knowledge with people." Now it's, "Omg, I can make money with ads."
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    I have been running an ad-free web site about a niche hobby since 2002. I've never attempted to do any optimization for search. My site still shows up in the first page of Google results for relevant search terms.
    - anon1m0us 7y ago
      For you because you click on your links a lot. Your first page of relevancy is totally different for someone else -- from a different country, or county... or even just prior click history. Google knows you want to click on that link. If your niche hobby had an ehow article how to do it, that'd be first for me I bet, unfortunately.
      - philipkglass 7y ago
        I tested again just now using the TOR browser bundle. After some tedious captcha-solving, the same search term again brings up my site in the first page of Google results.
mrec 7y ago
> The internet has turned to garbage. The ad-supported internet has turned to garbage. The academic and hobbyist internet is fine, and not that much different from the old days. The governmental internet depends a lot on where you are, but .gov.uk is really rather good, and vastly better at what it does than snailmail and Post Offices were in the old days.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  I went to a government website the other day. 5 pages of forms I filled out several times. Each time on the final page, "system error, cannot proceed." I called the agency, they said, "You should print out the PDF, fill that out and bring it to our office." Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that.
  - bovermyer 7y ago
    You should have a look at the work that the USDS is doing. You should also look at volunteering with Code for America.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    > Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that. There are enough. There certainly are in the US and likely so other places. It's that government often pays peanuts compared to private sector and adds poor management and poor advancement prospects on top. If people aren't willing to work for you because your working conditions suck, it might be worth considering better ones.
    - blackflame7000 7y ago
      Being a contractor is where it's at, it's just hard to win the contracts sometimes because you gotta know people. Once you do, it's not unusual to see a $3 million budget to build a basic website.
    - 7y ago
peter_l_downs 7y ago
You know, a lot of the amazing parts of the internet that people reminisce about are still there. The things that _have_ disappeared are often not technically complex or expensive to reproduce. Defeatism is boring, start building things and telling your friends about them.
- wtetzner 7y ago
  I think the biggest change is that you can't easily find the good parts of the internet through Google anymore.
  - anon1m0us 7y ago
    That's exactly right! It's like the only stuff I can find anymore are ehow.com, pinterest, houzz, etc. I feel more and more like searching through google is like perusing the covers of the magazines at the checkout aisle. Lots of low quality recycled content, filled with ads and referencing other content also filled with ads. It's a huge drink the google kool-aid cult. If you want to be on Google, you need to have adwords bringing people to your site, ads on your content, popups for the ad-targeters, click-bait at the bottom, tons of overlays. Why is that all there is anymore, I don't get it. What happened to the good content? Why can't I find it anymore?
  - arkades 7y ago
    Some of us predate Google. Come, lovely summer child, we will teach you to survive the winter.
chillacy 7y ago
> Ebay? The flea market of the internet? You disregard ebay but ebay actually has economic alignment with its sellers. The buyer experience isn't as good as Amazon's, but the seller experience is better in that you can control your destiny more. But this apparently makes it a flea market? There's going to be a tradeoff between curation and producer freedom. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
- hirundo 7y ago
  Apparently you took the flea market comparison as disparaging and it was intended that way. Why? What's wrong with flea markets? I shop there regularly and have sold there many times. I usually get great deals there on either side of the transaction. I can say the same about Ebay. For Ebay to be a kind of vast internet flea market seems like a good thing.
  - msla 7y ago
    > Why? What's wrong with flea markets? Low-quality goods and the increased possibility of scams.
    - hirundo 7y ago
      I get plenty of low quality goods at Walmart and Amazon too, and plenty of scams as well. Sometimes it's the cheap goods I'm there for, and I don't expect high quality for that. Caveat emptor applies everywhere. The problem comes when you don't realize you're digging through crap looking for pearls and imagine that it's all pearls.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    It reads even more disparaging with context: > Nowhere. There's no other amazon. Ebay? The flea market of the internet? That's where people who wanted to sell to wal-mart go. If I wanted to make it sound good I'd call it a bazaar or something.
- vangelis 7y ago
  Ebay is the real long tail of selling anyways. I can almost always find the obscure thing I'm looking for.
asperous 7y ago
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. The problem is the economics won't be any better anywhere else. Youtube is the way it is because of all the many stakeholders (viewers responding to clickbait, politicians, copyright holders, bad actors etc). Any other platform would eventually have the same problems and either cave into them, or be sued into oblivion. As for the ad-related issues Youtube isn't profitable, and it's clear people aren't yet willing to pay for it. The reason for "Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips" is because that's what people want to view quite simply. Those videos have millions of views. Youtube certainly could do a lot better, but you have to at least understand the factors that pour into why it's struggling. Managing communities is hard. Managing a platform where 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute is very hard.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  Most large video makers these days get pathetic amounts of ad revenue (less than $100 for a video with a few million views) and instead are making a vast amount more on patreon or similar sites. Its those creators that have the most to gain at an alternate site, the restrictions of youtube are all downsides, and they receive no money directly from it, the only real upside youtube offers is audience reach.
  - mattmar96 7y ago
    Off by an order of magnitude on ad revenue, more like several thousand $ per million views.
    - coldpie 7y ago
      I'd be interested to see a source for either of these claims. I've always wondered what the revenue was like for varying amounts of views.
    - throwaway2048 7y ago
      That was true perhaps a few years ago, it isn't anymore.
patrioticaction 7y ago
What is also both gross and sad is your contemptuous description of YouTube videos as being “Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sport clips” Setting aside derivative works, which it sounds like you are attacking the value of, there is shit tons of purely original content on YouTube that carries a lot of negotiating power.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  Repackaged content a huge part of yt's bread and butter. I acknowledge there are excellent content creators at youtube making their own stuff. That's who I was talking about in the first sentence of my OP. They should go somewhere else. It's the same thing with Uber and airbnb, etc. Big corporations are making billions while those doing the real work that is valuable to the consumer are making pennies. Sharecropping. This is not a new concept. It wasn't ever an equitable model and yet, here we are right back in it. It feels like a lot of big corporations are taking advantage of a lot of people who hope to change their lives. It's a fraud. It's not ... right. I want it to be right. It takes hours of filming, lots of equipment, courage, etc. Each one of the content creators -- those creating original content -- are taking as much risk as the founders of YouTube, even more really in the big scheme of things and yet they and now Google are making billions, while the people they make those billions off of are making pennies. Why does it work this way? I don't know why it works this way. I might be having a philosophical break down atm or something, idk, but it feels like there's a huge fraud being perpetrated out there in internet land and I don't like it one bit.
avocado4 7y ago
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. You can post digital content on multiple platforms at the same time.
- wtetzner 7y ago
  But that doesn't do as much to put pressure on YouTube.
msla 7y ago
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. That's the only "strike action" they have, in fact; if they just stop producing, others will rise and they'll be forgotten. If they move, they might shed some audience but they have a chance at keeping enough to impact Google and making a non-YouTube platform a success.
munificent 7y ago
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. This will have almost no effect. YouTube does not have a quantity problem. They have enough content that every YouTube user could watch YouTube 24 hours a day for the rest of their lives and never see the same video twice. They wouldn't even have to go deep into their back catalog. Worse, viewers have relatively little attachment to any particular content producer. They obviously love some YouTube celebrities, but if a given artist disappeared, people would get over it quickly. It's not, like, say books where people really want access to the last Harry Potter book.
- ryacko 7y ago
  But the content creators don’t use Youtube for engagement (except for some cases where video comments are used). The problem is that they aren’t sysadmins, and they have no idea if any change would lead to a long-term improvement (which won’t be hard since Google takes 45% (?) of ad revenues).
- patrioticaction 7y ago
  By that logic who needs YouTube when we can stare at the endless content of clouds moving in the sky.
  - pwinnski 7y ago
    This doesn't match the original statement, and doesn't reflect reality. People leave YouTube all the time, and crowds don't tend to follow them anywhere. They just watch different YouTubers who fill a similar niche. It's as if the cloud you were really enjoying blew away, but there were plenty of new clouds, so you didn't get into a car to follow the old ones.
    - patrioticaction 7y ago
      You are arguing that there is anything resembling a perfect market for YouTube video content. Talk about a departure from reality.
stcredzero 7y ago
People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful. Isn't this a pattern with big tech companies and their walled gardens? "App devs thought they were starting a business on the bigco app store, selling direct to users. Then bigco started making their in-built versions of the popular apps themselves... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful."
- pwinnski 7y ago
  This is a pattern with every such environment I can think of. Most people are unlikely to stop at a random house on a street with a sign out front saying "Stuff for sale," and will instead meet that same seller with that same stuff at a flea market, because the flea market provides some small aura of respectability. But not a ton, so even more people will only shop at a "real store." The marginal cost of selling out of your house is essentially zero, but your market size is tiny. The flea market costs a little bit, but gives you a little bigger potential market. Getting into a retail store or a big online store like Amazon costs even more, but gives your a much bigger potential market. So as a seller, you do it, but of course all such outlets eventually try to maximize their own profits at the expense of the sellers, and so it continues.
shredprez 7y ago
>The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers. Predatory practical monopolies and outdated labor laws functioning as intended. This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of capitalism: the profit motive encourages the unscrupulous to surface ethical holes in the market. If only we were principled enough to do something with this information.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  Yes! That's what I'm getting at! The reality of Youtube is that it made it easier to upload videos. The amount of time it takes to learn how to do that and build your own content distribution mechanism isn't really that hard. Most of us around here could do it in a day or two using FFMPEG and amazon buckets. It actually does in fact take less time to build something to share your own content than it does to create the content itself. That's why I don't understand why does airbnb take 10% of the transaction? They are just a website. Why does Apple take 30%? They are just a search engine. And google makes something like $1.2 million per employee. How much of that on average does the google employee get to keep? Is it more or less than content creators?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
aylmao 7y ago
> Now Youtube is doing the same. They used focus on being a search and distribution mechanism. Now they produce content, allow sponsorships, have more ads per minute of viewing then television, ... jobs there are again, repackaging jobs. Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips... This. I remember when getting a single ad in YouTube was news. Or an unstoppable ad. Now I've bumped into videos that have close to an ad a minute. Moreover, you can feel how in order to keep up with the algorithm YouTubers have forsaken creativity and landed in just clickbaity thumbnails and repeating their formulas. I know YouTubers have been saying this for years, but it finally hit me like cold water recently. There used to be so much clever, creative content on YouTube but now so much of what I see in my home page is content that's shallow and uninspired at best from channels I'm not subscribed to. And YouTubers have to make this sort of content! If your lively-hood and/or relevance depends on putting videos out every day, you're just gonna find an idea that worked "well enough" and repeat it for weeks. > They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff? I wish other platforms like IGTV or Vimeo had taken off. I think there's things Snapchat and Twitter could try for video. Snapchat could experiment with longer-form, edited content for blogs, as a compliment to stories. Twitter is already where personalities are and there's already plenty of video content uploaded there. Facebook seems to want to have a solid go at video, but it feels like they're completely lost. What is Facebook Watch? It has random content from pages but also shows trying to compete with Netflix? > The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days. The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers. As much as I dislike a lot of what the internet has become, I still don't think this is the case. I don't remember the time of old as better days, TV was (and kinda still is) pretty terrible. The internet is also for much more than just entertainment. Sure, read a book instead of going on YouTube, I agree with that. I'm also very thankful that I am not limited to what's in a library to learn about random topics because I can just click through science sites or Wikipedia. Though there's certainly a lot the ambition for money and building empires has changed for the worse.
- josteink 7y ago
  > This. I remember when getting a single ad in YouTube was news. Or an unstoppable ad. Now I've bumped into videos that have close to an ad a minute. If it bothers you so much, just pay up for Youtube Premium and the problem goes away. These days paying for ad-free actually is an option. So if what you want is ad-free youtube either pay up or admit to being a hypocrite.
cma 7y ago
> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. Everyone would have to coordinate it at the same time, and a massive capital outlay would be needed to create a service everyone could switch to at once. If it is done piecemeal Youtube's strong lock-in though things like driving traffic through recommendations on other videos etc. would win out and punish the early switchers too much.

anticensor 7y ago

> only AdWords sponsored content appears in Google searches anymore. Wrong, AdWords sponsored results are promoted (just in a less obvious manner than before), but other websites also appear.

JonathonW 7y ago
In normal web searches. For product searches, there's also Google Shopping-- this started out (as Froogle and Google Product Search) indexing any shopping sites Google found, but, as of the rebranding to Google Shopping in 2012, exclusively shows paid listings. Google Shopping also gets more prominent placing in web searches for products than the actual web results do.
anon1m0us 7y ago
What I meant was that only websites that have google adwords embedded in their content show up in Google results. If you aren't generating revenue through google advertising blocks on your content, google doesn't show the content. Google things new, updated content on large sites is more relevant, but it's not. That content is recreated from older content on the web that doesn't have ads on it. I'm sure it's just that google requires more and more work from webmasters to easily find searchable content, meta tags, modern HTML, etc, but the way new content is being produced now is under the guise of ultimately getting the content reader to buy a product. The old internet was, "Omg, I can share my knowledge with people." Now it's, "Omg, I can make money with ads."
- philipkglass 7y ago
  I have been running an ad-free web site about a niche hobby since 2002. I've never attempted to do any optimization for search. My site still shows up in the first page of Google results for relevant search terms.
  - anon1m0us 7y ago
    For you because you click on your links a lot. Your first page of relevancy is totally different for someone else -- from a different country, or county... or even just prior click history. Google knows you want to click on that link. If your niche hobby had an ehow article how to do it, that'd be first for me I bet, unfortunately.
    - philipkglass 7y ago
      I tested again just now using the TOR browser bundle. After some tedious captcha-solving, the same search term again brings up my site in the first page of Google results.

mrec 7y ago

> The internet has turned to garbage. The ad-supported internet has turned to garbage. The academic and hobbyist internet is fine, and not that much different from the old days. The governmental internet depends a lot on where you are, but .gov.uk is really rather good, and vastly better at what it does than snailmail and Post Offices were in the old days.

anon1m0us 7y ago
I went to a government website the other day. 5 pages of forms I filled out several times. Each time on the final page, "system error, cannot proceed." I called the agency, they said, "You should print out the PDF, fill that out and bring it to our office." Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  You should have a look at the work that the USDS is doing. You should also look at volunteering with Code for America.
- Kalium 7y ago
  > Can you believe that?? There aren't enough programmers to make the .gov stuff work right because FAANG is buying them all. So, I'm not sure you are right on that. There are enough. There certainly are in the US and likely so other places. It's that government often pays peanuts compared to private sector and adds poor management and poor advancement prospects on top. If people aren't willing to work for you because your working conditions suck, it might be worth considering better ones.
  - blackflame7000 7y ago
    Being a contractor is where it's at, it's just hard to win the contracts sometimes because you gotta know people. Once you do, it's not unusual to see a $3 million budget to build a basic website.
  - 7y ago

peter_l_downs 7y ago

You know, a lot of the amazing parts of the internet that people reminisce about are still there. The things that _have_ disappeared are often not technically complex or expensive to reproduce. Defeatism is boring, start building things and telling your friends about them.

wtetzner 7y ago
I think the biggest change is that you can't easily find the good parts of the internet through Google anymore.
- anon1m0us 7y ago
  That's exactly right! It's like the only stuff I can find anymore are ehow.com, pinterest, houzz, etc. I feel more and more like searching through google is like perusing the covers of the magazines at the checkout aisle. Lots of low quality recycled content, filled with ads and referencing other content also filled with ads. It's a huge drink the google kool-aid cult. If you want to be on Google, you need to have adwords bringing people to your site, ads on your content, popups for the ad-targeters, click-bait at the bottom, tons of overlays. Why is that all there is anymore, I don't get it. What happened to the good content? Why can't I find it anymore?
- arkades 7y ago
  Some of us predate Google. Come, lovely summer child, we will teach you to survive the winter.

chillacy 7y ago

> Ebay? The flea market of the internet? You disregard ebay but ebay actually has economic alignment with its sellers. The buyer experience isn't as good as Amazon's, but the seller experience is better in that you can control your destiny more. But this apparently makes it a flea market? There's going to be a tradeoff between curation and producer freedom. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

hirundo 7y ago
Apparently you took the flea market comparison as disparaging and it was intended that way. Why? What's wrong with flea markets? I shop there regularly and have sold there many times. I usually get great deals there on either side of the transaction. I can say the same about Ebay. For Ebay to be a kind of vast internet flea market seems like a good thing.
- msla 7y ago
  > Why? What's wrong with flea markets? Low-quality goods and the increased possibility of scams.
  - hirundo 7y ago
    I get plenty of low quality goods at Walmart and Amazon too, and plenty of scams as well. Sometimes it's the cheap goods I'm there for, and I don't expect high quality for that. Caveat emptor applies everywhere. The problem comes when you don't realize you're digging through crap looking for pearls and imagine that it's all pearls.
- chillacy 7y ago
  It reads even more disparaging with context: > Nowhere. There's no other amazon. Ebay? The flea market of the internet? That's where people who wanted to sell to wal-mart go. If I wanted to make it sound good I'd call it a bazaar or something.
vangelis 7y ago
Ebay is the real long tail of selling anyways. I can almost always find the obscure thing I'm looking for.

asperous 7y ago

> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. The problem is the economics won't be any better anywhere else. Youtube is the way it is because of all the many stakeholders (viewers responding to clickbait, politicians, copyright holders, bad actors etc). Any other platform would eventually have the same problems and either cave into them, or be sued into oblivion. As for the ad-related issues Youtube isn't profitable, and it's clear people aren't yet willing to pay for it. The reason for "Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips" is because that's what people want to view quite simply. Those videos have millions of views. Youtube certainly could do a lot better, but you have to at least understand the factors that pour into why it's struggling. Managing communities is hard. Managing a platform where 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute is very hard.

throwaway2048 7y ago
Most large video makers these days get pathetic amounts of ad revenue (less than $100 for a video with a few million views) and instead are making a vast amount more on patreon or similar sites. Its those creators that have the most to gain at an alternate site, the restrictions of youtube are all downsides, and they receive no money directly from it, the only real upside youtube offers is audience reach.
- mattmar96 7y ago
  Off by an order of magnitude on ad revenue, more like several thousand $ per million views.
  - coldpie 7y ago
    I'd be interested to see a source for either of these claims. I've always wondered what the revenue was like for varying amounts of views.
  - throwaway2048 7y ago
    That was true perhaps a few years ago, it isn't anymore.

patrioticaction 7y ago

What is also both gross and sad is your contemptuous description of YouTube videos as being “Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sport clips” Setting aside derivative works, which it sounds like you are attacking the value of, there is shit tons of purely original content on YouTube that carries a lot of negotiating power.

anon1m0us 7y ago
Repackaged content a huge part of yt's bread and butter. I acknowledge there are excellent content creators at youtube making their own stuff. That's who I was talking about in the first sentence of my OP. They should go somewhere else. It's the same thing with Uber and airbnb, etc. Big corporations are making billions while those doing the real work that is valuable to the consumer are making pennies. Sharecropping. This is not a new concept. It wasn't ever an equitable model and yet, here we are right back in it. It feels like a lot of big corporations are taking advantage of a lot of people who hope to change their lives. It's a fraud. It's not ... right. I want it to be right. It takes hours of filming, lots of equipment, courage, etc. Each one of the content creators -- those creating original content -- are taking as much risk as the founders of YouTube, even more really in the big scheme of things and yet they and now Google are making billions, while the people they make those billions off of are making pennies. Why does it work this way? I don't know why it works this way. I might be having a philosophical break down atm or something, idk, but it feels like there's a huge fraud being perpetrated out there in internet land and I don't like it one bit.

avocado4 7y ago

> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. You can post digital content on multiple platforms at the same time.

wtetzner 7y ago
But that doesn't do as much to put pressure on YouTube.

msla 7y ago

> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. That's the only "strike action" they have, in fact; if they just stop producing, others will rise and they'll be forgotten. If they move, they might shed some audience but they have a chance at keeping enough to impact Google and making a non-YouTube platform a success.

munificent 7y ago

> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. This will have almost no effect. YouTube does not have a quantity problem. They have enough content that every YouTube user could watch YouTube 24 hours a day for the rest of their lives and never see the same video twice. They wouldn't even have to go deep into their back catalog. Worse, viewers have relatively little attachment to any particular content producer. They obviously love some YouTube celebrities, but if a given artist disappeared, people would get over it quickly. It's not, like, say books where people really want access to the last Harry Potter book.

ryacko 7y ago
But the content creators don’t use Youtube for engagement (except for some cases where video comments are used). The problem is that they aren’t sysadmins, and they have no idea if any change would lead to a long-term improvement (which won’t be hard since Google takes 45% (?) of ad revenues).
patrioticaction 7y ago
By that logic who needs YouTube when we can stare at the endless content of clouds moving in the sky.
- pwinnski 7y ago
  This doesn't match the original statement, and doesn't reflect reality. People leave YouTube all the time, and crowds don't tend to follow them anywhere. They just watch different YouTubers who fill a similar niche. It's as if the cloud you were really enjoying blew away, but there were plenty of new clouds, so you didn't get into a car to follow the old ones.
  - patrioticaction 7y ago
    You are arguing that there is anything resembling a perfect market for YouTube video content. Talk about a departure from reality.

stcredzero 7y ago

People thought they were opening a business on amazon selling retail. Then amazon started selling the profitable products themselves, storing the products themselves, ... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful. Isn't this a pattern with big tech companies and their walled gardens? "App devs thought they were starting a business on the bigco app store, selling direct to users. Then bigco started making their in-built versions of the popular apps themselves... basically doing more and more of the work and taking more control and taking money from the people who helped them become powerful."

pwinnski 7y ago
This is a pattern with every such environment I can think of. Most people are unlikely to stop at a random house on a street with a sign out front saying "Stuff for sale," and will instead meet that same seller with that same stuff at a flea market, because the flea market provides some small aura of respectability. But not a ton, so even more people will only shop at a "real store." The marginal cost of selling out of your house is essentially zero, but your market size is tiny. The flea market costs a little bit, but gives you a little bigger potential market. Getting into a retail store or a big online store like Amazon costs even more, but gives your a much bigger potential market. So as a seller, you do it, but of course all such outlets eventually try to maximize their own profits at the expense of the sellers, and so it continues.

shredprez 7y ago

>The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers. Predatory practical monopolies and outdated labor laws functioning as intended. This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of capitalism: the profit motive encourages the unscrupulous to surface ethical holes in the market. If only we were principled enough to do something with this information.

anon1m0us 7y ago
Yes! That's what I'm getting at! The reality of Youtube is that it made it easier to upload videos. The amount of time it takes to learn how to do that and build your own content distribution mechanism isn't really that hard. Most of us around here could do it in a day or two using FFMPEG and amazon buckets. It actually does in fact take less time to build something to share your own content than it does to create the content itself. That's why I don't understand why does airbnb take 10% of the transaction? They are just a website. Why does Apple take 30%? They are just a search engine. And google makes something like $1.2 million per employee. How much of that on average does the google employee get to keep? Is it more or less than content creators?

deleted 7y ago

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aylmao 7y ago

> Now Youtube is doing the same. They used focus on being a search and distribution mechanism. Now they produce content, allow sponsorships, have more ads per minute of viewing then television, ... jobs there are again, repackaging jobs. Repackage scenes from movies, previews, upload documentaries, sports clips... This. I remember when getting a single ad in YouTube was news. Or an unstoppable ad. Now I've bumped into videos that have close to an ad a minute. Moreover, you can feel how in order to keep up with the algorithm YouTubers have forsaken creativity and landed in just clickbaity thumbnails and repeating their formulas. I know YouTubers have been saying this for years, but it finally hit me like cold water recently. There used to be so much clever, creative content on YouTube but now so much of what I see in my home page is content that's shallow and uninspired at best from channels I'm not subscribed to. And YouTubers have to make this sort of content! If your lively-hood and/or relevance depends on putting videos out every day, you're just gonna find an idea that worked "well enough" and repeat it for weeks. > They both grew through the expansion of the long tail. The reality is: where are people in the long tail going to go to sell their repackaged stuff? I wish other platforms like IGTV or Vimeo had taken off. I think there's things Snapchat and Twitter could try for video. Snapchat could experiment with longer-form, edited content for blogs, as a compliment to stories. Twitter is already where personalities are and there's already plenty of video content uploaded there. Facebook seems to want to have a solid go at video, but it feels like they're completely lost. What is Facebook Watch? It has random content from pages but also shows trying to compete with Netflix? > The internet has turned to garbage. You're better off going to the library like the old days. The internet has been ruined by the mainstream and the money grubbers. As much as I dislike a lot of what the internet has become, I still don't think this is the case. I don't remember the time of old as better days, TV was (and kinda still is) pretty terrible. The internet is also for much more than just entertainment. Sure, read a book instead of going on YouTube, I agree with that. I'm also very thankful that I am not limited to what's in a library to learn about random topics because I can just click through science sites or Wikipedia. Though there's certainly a lot the ambition for money and building empires has changed for the worse.

josteink 7y ago
> This. I remember when getting a single ad in YouTube was news. Or an unstoppable ad. Now I've bumped into videos that have close to an ad a minute. If it bothers you so much, just pay up for Youtube Premium and the problem goes away. These days paying for ad-free actually is an option. So if what you want is ad-free youtube either pay up or admit to being a hypocrite.

cma 7y ago

> What they should do is collectively take their content somewhere else. Everyone would have to coordinate it at the same time, and a massive capital outlay would be needed to create a service everyone could switch to at once. If it is done piecemeal Youtube's strong lock-in though things like driving traffic through recommendations on other videos etc. would win out and punish the early switchers too much.