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YouTube reportedly working on TikTok competitor called Shorts
- oefrha 7y agoYouTube is getting more annoying for me by the day. Recently I’ve been bombarded by YouTube ads from a shady fake news publication — one is dressed up as an infomercial, another is straight-up lies, etc. (Not gonna give them free publicity by naming them here.) Really distressed to see such crap next to COVID-19 info videos. You could argue that I should subscribe, but I typically only watch maybe one YouTube video every few days (more frequently these past few weeks though) so I don’t feel subscribing. They really need to clean up their act before making another product focused on teens and young adults.
- russdpale 7y agoIt's that algorithm, you gotta keep it tightly controlled or it goes off the rails. I watched about 6 tiny home videos with my wife and now my ENTIRE recommended list is tiny homes. So now I do a tiny home video or two, then a dog video or something, then perhaps reuters news, then back to tiny homes (or whatever kick im on at the moment). Before this, I had accidentally left my you tube playing on DnD ambient sound videos, and it wrecked my recommendation lists lol.
- oefrha 7y agoMy recommendations are okay as long as I turn off watch history. Mostly just celebrity bullshit and stuff. I don’t watch what’s recommended anyway. Now the ads are another story. I already turned off personalizations and YouTube claims to base the ads on my location and the current video, which, if true, means a lot of people in the area watching COVID-19 related videos is being led to this very publication.
- chongli 7y agoHave you tried removing tiny home videos from your YouTube history? That might help.
- russdpale 7y agoThat's a good idea!
- pxtail 7y agoAbsolutely, if I want to watch something unusual/new or out of my interests then I'm opening it in incognito tab. Few tiny mistakes and my feed could look like "Trending" tab shudders
- izzydata 7y agoI feel like they could have come up with a better name.
- PopeDotNinja 7y agoWhen Alphabet shuts it down... "YouTube craps its Shorts."
- brummm 7y agoLike...Vine maybe
- egfx 7y agoPants?
- egfx 7y agoOr even better. Briefs!
- jdoliner 7y agoI would have liked to see YouStraw, or maybe YouNanoTube.
- Fluid_Mechanics 7y agoCOVID-20
- onetimemanytime 7y agoDoesn't matter, not like is going to last long.
- Akinato 7y agoHey, it'll work out for at least one food/recipe blogger when they get the channel "Eat my shorts".
- abledon 7y agoz on the end instead of s. To follow misspelling like Tik tok... nvm doesn’t feel as good typing it on keyboard
- eganist 7y agoThey could've literally just bought Byte...
- drusepth 7y agoConsidering Byte was made by the original Vine founder after he said he regretted selling Vine to Twitter, I'm not sure he'd be in the market to sell a successor quite so quickly.
- birdyrooster 7y agoThe Wikipedia for Vine makes it look like they wrote Vine in the summer and then sold it for $30 million in the fall.
- bduerst 7y agoByte doesn't have the user numbers, and the acquisition transition to Youtube would be a nightmare compared to just building in house.
- seneca 7y agoJust about anything is better than a company beholden to the Chinese government getting a strong hold in global social media, but Alphabet isn't too far off the list of worst options. We badly need some new blood in the upper echelons of technology.
- orky56 7y agoThat potential new blood is just years away from being acquired or morphing into the same poor options.
- seneca 7y agoYou are very, painfully, right. The patterns that tech has fallen into around finance and acquisitions is a poison pill for disruption.
- wilg 7y agoI would love to do something in this space and would love to know if anybody has ideas for or examples of a sustainable, scalable corporate structure that is less susceptible to these antipatterns and isn't focused on an exit. But that can still compete with the big players. Product is obviously a big part of it, but I think there needs to be some structural changes.
- jasonv 7y agoThought experiment I had with some friends recently: How would you compete (with/out Google) as [("search engine + ads") + privacy)] if you started now? I do Google & Facebook -free marketing with clients... I believe it's a realm worth considering more.
- sharkmerry 7y agosomething like a public benefit corporation? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation
- 7y ago
- bduerst 7y agoBigger question is when is TikTok going to get revenue sharing for it's content creators? I've found that TikTok is increasingly becoming a promotion channel for people's youtube channels or ig accounts.
- CydeWeys 7y agoThis is what killed Vine too. If YouTube Shorts has the same revenue-sharing model as YouTube Normal, then this could be a serious advantage for them.
- rtx 7y agoNot till they roll out longer upload options. Nobody is getting paid for 60 second clips.
- CydeWeys 7y agoWhy not? What makes you think that? I frequently see 5 second ads on YouTube; why couldn't you play one of those every so often between <=60 second videos? Or have interstitial static ads in the scroll like Instagram does?
- bduerst 7y ago5-second video snippets is the new medium, just as tweets were to blogs.
- drusepth 7y agoAs someone who just jumped from Byte to TikTok, I'm excited to see what new innovations Shorts brings to the table. Correct me if I'm wrong, but YouTube is pretty much #1 in video management/processing/distribution/etc online and Google has _amazing_ photo+video analysis/editing/search. I have high hopes for new kinds of filters (filters might be the wrong word, but TikTok has a lot of innovations in this area over the traditional Snapchat-esque "filters") and better search/recommendations, which should both go a _long_ way toward enabling the kind of creative videos that made TikTok blow up and also get them to the eyeballs that actually want to see them. Some kind of seamless integration with YouTube would also be pretty amazing, since most of my friends only watch TikToks via YouTube compilations anyway and there's a lot of back-and-forth interactions (liking, following, commenting, viewing related videos, etc) that would make sense if both platforms were under the same roof.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoIf anyone wants to make money from Social Video, they're on YouTube. You have the MEGA Influencers who have been making insane amounts of money on Facebook (mostly from Instagram). But even big Influencers with 1M+ followings are having trouble monetizing their following to make $100k+ per year. Vloggers on YouTube can do this pretty easily with 1/10th-1/20th the following. Marketing spend for Influencers is gonna dry up faster than anything else. If Shorts can provide a real revenue stream (YouTube has everything in place for this), it will be extremely well positioned during this time.
- pram 7y agoI’m sure its lifespan will be as short as the videos themselves
- master_yoda_1 7y agoIn line with google tradition this gonna be another yafp( Yet another failed project)
- tyingq 7y agoShould be interesting to see if Google learned some lessons with G+.
- Leary 7y agoPaul Graham taught me to not think of new products that remind me of old products as mere copycats. By that token, I am sure that the fact that Youtube could leverage its existing library of music will trump any network effects that Tiktok might have.
- pmlnr 7y agoI feel the Google+ vibes.
- effingwewt 7y agoOK, so G/YT are ok with using licensed music for this specific platform, but almost any video of any length with music or vid whether fair use or not will get pulled at the 1st complaint, even if bogus on YT? I legitimately do not understand their position. edit: word.
- Traster 7y agoTheir position is "In order to become a dominant force in short video we need to infringe copyright, so we're going to do that until we're dominant, then we're going to act shocked and outraged that people are infringing copyright on our plaform and start attacking the content creators that gave us our success in the first place". Problem is that first stage is much harder if you're a multi-billion dollar company.
- xnx 7y agoI love the content on Tik-Tok (America's youths are hilarious!), but I'm also excited for anything that will get YouTube off it's ruinous path of forcing creators to stretch a video that should be ~2 minutes into something 10 minutes long.
- _bxg1 7y agoTaking bets on how many months it'll be before Google kills the project?
- kindly_fo 7y agoI thought better of hn users. Apparently much of them uses tik tok, which is overhyped shit for teens.
- throwawaymanbot 7y agoEat my Shorts. What a terrible name.