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With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which You

With the amount of attention around this outage, it feels like YouTube has become completely ubiquitous in modern society. I can't imagine a future in which YouTube just ceases to exist. The company has already become tied to the livelihoods of so many people, and has spawned too many significant subcultures. It's a strange feeling to be alive just after all of the significant technology companies were created and started to gain traction. YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. The demand that has arisen in people to watch videos online is probably not reversible so long as maintaining a video streaming service is still physically possible. If not YouTube, something else would probably fill in such a void if it ever appears, barring the Apocalypse. It gives me a lot of conflicting feelings. Twenty years ago, few people would have known they wanted the unique content that YouTube offered that wasn't available at the time, like livestreamers or swathes of content about every single plane crash or minor video game mechanic that can be talked about. But now, thousands have become hooked on them. I can't remember the details, only that I've watched them at some point. I wonder where the time would have went if we were not enterprising enough to invent big data and portable streams and engagement metrics. And for me personally, I can say that I "like" a lot of content, but I'm reasonably certain that's the kind of thing some portion of drug addicts would say about their habits. Not much of it actually helps me.

Lammy 6y ago
It's an incredible surveillance system in so many ways. Only a few DASH video segments ever get cached locally, so even re-watching an old favorite video involves making requests that give away my identity, geographic location, and current interest.
- tsomberi 6y ago
  Right. What youtube does to the audience is disgusting. What it does to creators is much worse. When a channel does well, the channel owner starts thinking, he can quit his day job and go fulltime as a youtuber. They borrow money and invest huge sums in building a studio. Then, they realize that they need to post not just regularly but often. You can feel that they are getting burned out. Sometimes, there will be a post titled "life update" where they will hint at it but will soon succumb to the fact they have no way out. They have to post a rate that is worse than torture. Sometimes, Youtube gets upset or somebody takes offense and makes a complaint. The channel suffers a steep fall in traffic. The channel owner complains but gets no response.
  - partingshots 6y ago
    This sounds a bit personal. Are you currently dealing with this burnout?
redis_mlc 6y ago
Youtube has some fundamental trust issues resulting in huge free speech problems: - YT music takedown system, resulting in musicians usually earning nothing each month - YT SJWs very aggressively censoring right, COVID-19 and MRA content. As a viewer, YT is great. As a content creator, it's awful.
eat_veggies 6y ago
The notion of media that "actually helps" you is itself just as constructed as YouTube. Interrogate where it comes from and what sort of cultural work it's doing. Does "help" mean that it makes you a better worker? Why doesn't YouTube help you, and is that a bad thing? Second, the good old days of "before" we were enterprising enough to invent big data etc. is retroactively constituted, and not apparent until its demise. Before YouTube it was television and radio, magazines and books, and even writing itself. On the technology of writing, Plato said "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." These constructions create the appearance of the industry's indestructibility -- certain consequences (the before, the help, or the livelihoods or subcultures you mention) are taken to axiomatic or self-evident, creating a logical construction that is bulletproof in its circular vacuousness. YouTube will die, just as websites before it have died, and technologies before it have died. What comes next might be better or worse. That is to say, just enjoy your videos if they make you happy.
- falcolas 6y ago
  So, I think there's one (or two) easily carved exceptions to your "YouTube doesn't actually help you" statement. One, Veritasium. Content like this didn't (perhaps even couldn't) exist before YouTube. The science TV shows and even many books don't go into as much user-friendly depth as this does. You'd have to go to college and pay to get content even remotely close (and still, based on prior experience, not as good). Two, any one of many How To DIY channels. They show you how to do things you're unlikely to find elsewhere. Where else will you find someone willing to tell you how to change your oil and filter on a [random year & model] car for free? How to wire up a light switch to code? How to clean your sink drain? Certainly not the paid professionals.
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    On that note, channels like AvE and Real Engineering come from two different ends of the spectrum in terms of production quality but have a similar feel in terms of how much I learn per minute of content. There are also channels like the Sampson Boat Company that take a project that would've just ended up turning an old boat into scrap after a while into one of my favorite carpentry/woodworking things to watch, better even than old episodes of the Woodwright's shop or This Old House.
mdoms 6y ago
> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries Get a grip. Media companies come and go. They always seem unassailable at their apex.
- DogOfTheGaps 6y ago
  Can you give an example of a major media company that no longer exists? CBS,NBC,ABC,Fox, etc have existed for ages.
  - jccooper 6y ago
    There's tons that no longer exist as independent entities. Of the Big 5 movie studios, only MGM is still independent. 20th Century Fox is under Disney, Paramount is under CBS, and Warner Bros is under AT&T, though they retain some identity still. But RKO is just straight up dead, which I don't think anyone would have called in 1943, its 15th year. 1946 would be its most profitable year. It was gone in 1957.
    - Crusoe123 6y ago
      And Youtube is under Google since 2006.
- rvz 6y ago
  That would be the case if YouTube wasn't acquired by Google and totally an independent company, it would most likely be dead by now. Like other social networks and media companies, they come and go with the times. An example of a non-media company wanting to exist for 'centuries', I guess Evernote is dreaming to join the ranks of IBM, Nintendo, etc when they still want to be a 100 year old startup. [0] I think reality says other wise. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/evernotes-quest-to-become-a-100-year-old-startup https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/evernotes-quest-to-becom...
trentdk 6y ago
On the flip side to your closing statement, YouTube has been a boon to DIY. What used to be trade secrets are now on display by people all all professions. Anecdotally, I’ve remodeled nearly my entire house over they past ten years with YouTube.
- jtxx 6y ago
  yeah, the democratization of knowledge was 100% worth it. the only thing we can do from here is try to make it better
friendlybus 6y ago
Youtube is a metaphysical sun bursting out with multiple different interpretations of any given topic, 90% of them subtlety wrong. Very few have anything original to say. They pad their ten minute timer with history, use youtube's suggested topics and only 1-2 minutes of the episode covers what you want, and usually from such a limited perspective that the little details will still trip you up. For every Ben Eater, there's thousands of poorly aimed videos that clog up your brainspace. There's also people deliberately misrepresenting knowledge for clicks & selling products. Micheal Crichton was right not to be concerned about the fall of journalism. He said (to effect) anybody can write whatever they want. The value is in the edited content. Which he meant by mainstream, validated press agencies that used to control most intepretation. The concept still applies, most of youtube will not be missed.
- viraptor 6y ago
  If you're after better explainer/education content without that kind of pressure on creators, check out Nebula. Paid and adfree, money goes proportionally to people you watch. It's not a super smooth experience sometimes, but I'm a happy subscriber.
- ballenf 6y ago
  I think Crichton was only half right. The value is not in the edited content, it's in having a single narrative going through society. Even if that narrative is partially wrong. I feel like society is in the midst of restructuring itself to the reality that there will never be a single narrative again. And I think that's ok because we're reverting back, societally, to a time before mass media. So we know it's possible for societies to function without a single overarching narrative. (Not to go too far off, but the same thing seems to be coming as a result of deep fakes -- reverting to a time where 1st person accounts from a reputable person were the only reliable evidence. [Where reputation was something of an organic page rank algorithm.])
VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. > AOL has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. Things change. No one can predict how, or why. But time marches on.
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  Yes, I guess it's a bit arrogant to suggest that this one form of media is somehow different from all the others that came before it, and we've somehow finally reached the optimum because YouTube is special for some reason. Nobody can really pretend to know this at present. Maybe I was more imagining what the future would be like if it were true, looking back on the present. Although, when AOL was around you could only practically use the Internet from a large desktop machine, but now you can access a massive amount of information from almost anywhere using a smartphone. And we're being introduced to computers at a younger age, and are spending more time with them. But that might not be indicative of what happens in the future.
  - Shugarl 6y ago
    The situation isn't quite the same though. Youtube is backed by one of the biggest company on earth. They have the means to either buy their competition, copy them or destroy them.
toomanybeersies 6y ago
I can imagine a world without YouTube. People would just watch videos on Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Netflix, etc. etc.
baby 6y ago
This. People like to complain about facebook, but I spend way more times watching youtube and getting political ads there. If you live in california it’s awful (prop 22, prop 23, I will die if you don’t vote for it!) or san diego (BARBARY BrIE WAS ASLEEP on THE JoB). Then there is the obvious “the algorithm can dictate what you watch” that tik tok was so critiqued for.
dorkwood 6y ago
The saddest thing about YouTube disappearing would be losing the vast trove of educational content that has amassed over the years. We live in a unique time in history when you can go online and learn how to do absolutely anything you want for free. I feel like the majority of people still hugely underestimate how valuable this is. Granted, there's a lot of junk to wade through. But the information is out there.
- storkhill 6y ago
  I completely agree. I'm apart of a generation that grew up with technologies like YouTube, Facebook, etc. I think the majority of my generation sees the internet as a platform to project themselves, rather than a very valuable tool. I've learned countless things on the internet for free that I would've had to pay thousands for without it. I wish people would realize this.
- nonbirithm 6y ago
  One more thing I was thinking about is that I don't think people are uploading things to YouTube just to have YouTube be declared as outdated in a few decades in preparation for the next form of media. The implicit expectation that most casual producers have is that the videos will remain on YouTube "forever," which really means some vague amount of time that doesn't have to be thought about in the short-term. This is a major difference from television because YouTube can be used for personal expression, major productions broadcast on television are archived by the studios because the finished product is not restrictively large in terms of data, and I don't think people would be happy if the millions of hours spent producing their independent content will be all for nothing in a few decades. To keep all of that content alive in the future, YouTube either needs to continue to exist or the content needs to be mass-migrated to the next form of media. But what would that form of media be, and what would be the justification for creating an entirely new media platform to succeed YouTube? I find it difficult to imagine what it would look like at this point in time. People made a big deal about archiving Usenet when everyone started moving away from it. If YouTube has to be archived I don't see how it can be completely accomplished without people who have used youtube-dl in the past gathering up whatever they happened to save before it went down. There's hundreds of millions of hours of video already on YouTube, and unlike Usenet archives only a few large entities have the money and infrastructure to warehouse the entirety of that data. Saying that YouTube will pass on because media companies always pass on almost sounds as if YouTube is a ticking a time bomb, and after enough time passes we'll inevitably lose a lot of things that brought us value en masse, and the scale of loss will be far greater than in the past because of the breadth of content and the sheer ubiquity of YouTube.
iliketosleep 6y ago
> Not much of it actually helps me. This is an excellent point. With the multitudes of content competing for our attention, it's important to be very selective and deliberate with usage. Otherwise, it can very easily turn into an addiction - you'll be mindlessly enjoying the dopamine hits of watching "interesting" videos whilst life passes by.
benlivengood 6y ago
Youtube and similar platforms were preceded by cable, broadcast television, newspaper, radio, rental media, and books. Presumably if any of those had suddenly disappeared people would similarly feel lost without them, but as time goes on it becomes possible to replace or augment the older technologies without missing them or getting rid of them entirely. Probably youtube will be the same. Hopefully archivists can rescue all the content before its eventual demise.
ardy42 6y ago
> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. Is YouTube profitable yet? I really doubt YouTube will last for centuries, or even twenty or thirty more years. There was a point where it seemed like Geocities was ubiquitous and would be around forever, and now it's gone. Internet services don't have a great track record for longevity. When YouTube finally goes kaput, much of its content will likely be lost, since I don't see Google going through the effort of offering archivists a dump. Though, I'm kinda skeptical that even much digital data will last for centuries, unless formats and storage media ossify at some point on some long-term stable standard. The trend towards cloud storage makes things even more precarious.
- iptrans 6y ago
  > Is YouTube profitable yet? Google doesn't disclose that. Only that Youtube have revenues of $15 billion last year.
burgertime 6y ago
I didn’t notice it was down. Now if HN were down...
Fej 6y ago
> Not much of it actually helps me. Neither do TV or movies for the most part; there are many examples of high art in those formats but the most popular examples thereof are hardly at all intellectually gratifying, educational, or otherwise "helpful", as you put it (a good descriptor). It's entertainment - it's there for fun, and in many cases, it's there for the sake of art. (That's not to say that e.g. popcorn flicks don't have any artistic qualities, just that they're aiming for the former, not the latter.) The issue is more in the ways that YouTube tries to keep you watching, like the other massive social media sites. No one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions, and even potentially make a career out of it. No, it's not common, there's a ton of work involved with no immediate payout, and it requires at least a bit of luck with the dreaded "algorithm", but it's probably more merit-based than what we had before, and that's a wonderful thing. (I'm not entirely certain about that last bit, hence "probably". How merit-based was/is TV and film, precisely? I just find it hard to believe that they're better than YouTube, given the quantity of quality creators on it who could never find a slot, much less an audience, on any other platform or format that has ever been.) With regard to the ubiquity: given the lack of competitors, apparently the capital requirements are so high and the lock-in effects so strong that there aren't any companies willing to give it a go. The closest thing we have, Twitch, filled a niche that YouTube wasn't technically capable of at the time, grew large enough before YouTube decided to try to enter that market so Twitch was able to acquire those same lock-in effects, and was bought by Amazon who provides the capital to ensure a smooth experience (Twitch prior to the acquisition was far more prone to performance issues).
Gravityloss 6y ago
There was demand and there were video services on the internet way before youtube, there have been others in parallel existence with youtube, and there will be others in the future, whether youtube exists or not. Out of habit, I do go to youtube if I need to search a video of something.
wodenokoto 6y ago
> I wonder where the time would have went if we were not enterprising enough to invent big data and portable streams and engagement metrics. Do remember channel surfing on your dumb, terrestrial, flow TV? Hours spend clicking "next channel" on the remote, cycling the same 5-10 channels, passing by the same program, again and again. That's where the time would have gone.
- Shugarl 6y ago
  Sounds like a nightmare. Thank God for Netflix and YouTube, even though they bring their own set of problems.

Lammy 6y ago

It's an incredible surveillance system in so many ways. Only a few DASH video segments ever get cached locally, so even re-watching an old favorite video involves making requests that give away my identity, geographic location, and current interest.

tsomberi 6y ago
Right. What youtube does to the audience is disgusting. What it does to creators is much worse. When a channel does well, the channel owner starts thinking, he can quit his day job and go fulltime as a youtuber. They borrow money and invest huge sums in building a studio. Then, they realize that they need to post not just regularly but often. You can feel that they are getting burned out. Sometimes, there will be a post titled "life update" where they will hint at it but will soon succumb to the fact they have no way out. They have to post a rate that is worse than torture. Sometimes, Youtube gets upset or somebody takes offense and makes a complaint. The channel suffers a steep fall in traffic. The channel owner complains but gets no response.
- partingshots 6y ago
  This sounds a bit personal. Are you currently dealing with this burnout?

redis_mlc 6y ago

Youtube has some fundamental trust issues resulting in huge free speech problems: - YT music takedown system, resulting in musicians usually earning nothing each month - YT SJWs very aggressively censoring right, COVID-19 and MRA content. As a viewer, YT is great. As a content creator, it's awful.

eat_veggies 6y ago

The notion of media that "actually helps" you is itself just as constructed as YouTube. Interrogate where it comes from and what sort of cultural work it's doing. Does "help" mean that it makes you a better worker? Why doesn't YouTube help you, and is that a bad thing? Second, the good old days of "before" we were enterprising enough to invent big data etc. is retroactively constituted, and not apparent until its demise. Before YouTube it was television and radio, magazines and books, and even writing itself. On the technology of writing, Plato said "They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." These constructions create the appearance of the industry's indestructibility -- certain consequences (the before, the help, or the livelihoods or subcultures you mention) are taken to axiomatic or self-evident, creating a logical construction that is bulletproof in its circular vacuousness. YouTube will die, just as websites before it have died, and technologies before it have died. What comes next might be better or worse. That is to say, just enjoy your videos if they make you happy.

falcolas 6y ago
So, I think there's one (or two) easily carved exceptions to your "YouTube doesn't actually help you" statement. One, Veritasium. Content like this didn't (perhaps even couldn't) exist before YouTube. The science TV shows and even many books don't go into as much user-friendly depth as this does. You'd have to go to college and pay to get content even remotely close (and still, based on prior experience, not as good). Two, any one of many How To DIY channels. They show you how to do things you're unlikely to find elsewhere. Where else will you find someone willing to tell you how to change your oil and filter on a [random year & model] car for free? How to wire up a light switch to code? How to clean your sink drain? Certainly not the paid professionals.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  On that note, channels like AvE and Real Engineering come from two different ends of the spectrum in terms of production quality but have a similar feel in terms of how much I learn per minute of content. There are also channels like the Sampson Boat Company that take a project that would've just ended up turning an old boat into scrap after a while into one of my favorite carpentry/woodworking things to watch, better even than old episodes of the Woodwright's shop or This Old House.

mdoms 6y ago

> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries Get a grip. Media companies come and go. They always seem unassailable at their apex.

DogOfTheGaps 6y ago
Can you give an example of a major media company that no longer exists? CBS,NBC,ABC,Fox, etc have existed for ages.
- jccooper 6y ago
  There's tons that no longer exist as independent entities. Of the Big 5 movie studios, only MGM is still independent. 20th Century Fox is under Disney, Paramount is under CBS, and Warner Bros is under AT&T, though they retain some identity still. But RKO is just straight up dead, which I don't think anyone would have called in 1943, its 15th year. 1946 would be its most profitable year. It was gone in 1957.
  - Crusoe123 6y ago
    And Youtube is under Google since 2006.
rvz 6y ago
That would be the case if YouTube wasn't acquired by Google and totally an independent company, it would most likely be dead by now. Like other social networks and media companies, they come and go with the times. An example of a non-media company wanting to exist for 'centuries', I guess Evernote is dreaming to join the ranks of IBM, Nintendo, etc when they still want to be a 100 year old startup. [0] I think reality says other wise. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/evernotes-quest-to-become-a-100-year-old-startup https://www.fastcompany.com/3012870/evernotes-quest-to-becom...

trentdk 6y ago

On the flip side to your closing statement, YouTube has been a boon to DIY. What used to be trade secrets are now on display by people all all professions. Anecdotally, I’ve remodeled nearly my entire house over they past ten years with YouTube.

jtxx 6y ago
yeah, the democratization of knowledge was 100% worth it. the only thing we can do from here is try to make it better

friendlybus 6y ago

Youtube is a metaphysical sun bursting out with multiple different interpretations of any given topic, 90% of them subtlety wrong. Very few have anything original to say. They pad their ten minute timer with history, use youtube's suggested topics and only 1-2 minutes of the episode covers what you want, and usually from such a limited perspective that the little details will still trip you up. For every Ben Eater, there's thousands of poorly aimed videos that clog up your brainspace. There's also people deliberately misrepresenting knowledge for clicks & selling products. Micheal Crichton was right not to be concerned about the fall of journalism. He said (to effect) anybody can write whatever they want. The value is in the edited content. Which he meant by mainstream, validated press agencies that used to control most intepretation. The concept still applies, most of youtube will not be missed.

viraptor 6y ago
If you're after better explainer/education content without that kind of pressure on creators, check out Nebula. Paid and adfree, money goes proportionally to people you watch. It's not a super smooth experience sometimes, but I'm a happy subscriber.
ballenf 6y ago
I think Crichton was only half right. The value is not in the edited content, it's in having a single narrative going through society. Even if that narrative is partially wrong. I feel like society is in the midst of restructuring itself to the reality that there will never be a single narrative again. And I think that's ok because we're reverting back, societally, to a time before mass media. So we know it's possible for societies to function without a single overarching narrative. (Not to go too far off, but the same thing seems to be coming as a result of deep fakes -- reverting to a time where 1st person accounts from a reputable person were the only reliable evidence. [Where reputation was something of an organic page rank algorithm.])

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. > AOL has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. Things change. No one can predict how, or why. But time marches on.

nonbirithm 6y ago
Yes, I guess it's a bit arrogant to suggest that this one form of media is somehow different from all the others that came before it, and we've somehow finally reached the optimum because YouTube is special for some reason. Nobody can really pretend to know this at present. Maybe I was more imagining what the future would be like if it were true, looking back on the present. Although, when AOL was around you could only practically use the Internet from a large desktop machine, but now you can access a massive amount of information from almost anywhere using a smartphone. And we're being introduced to computers at a younger age, and are spending more time with them. But that might not be indicative of what happens in the future.
- Shugarl 6y ago
  The situation isn't quite the same though. Youtube is backed by one of the biggest company on earth. They have the means to either buy their competition, copy them or destroy them.

toomanybeersies 6y ago

I can imagine a world without YouTube. People would just watch videos on Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Netflix, etc. etc.

baby 6y ago

This. People like to complain about facebook, but I spend way more times watching youtube and getting political ads there. If you live in california it’s awful (prop 22, prop 23, I will die if you don’t vote for it!) or san diego (BARBARY BrIE WAS ASLEEP on THE JoB). Then there is the obvious “the algorithm can dictate what you watch” that tik tok was so critiqued for.

dorkwood 6y ago

The saddest thing about YouTube disappearing would be losing the vast trove of educational content that has amassed over the years. We live in a unique time in history when you can go online and learn how to do absolutely anything you want for free. I feel like the majority of people still hugely underestimate how valuable this is. Granted, there's a lot of junk to wade through. But the information is out there.

storkhill 6y ago
I completely agree. I'm apart of a generation that grew up with technologies like YouTube, Facebook, etc. I think the majority of my generation sees the internet as a platform to project themselves, rather than a very valuable tool. I've learned countless things on the internet for free that I would've had to pay thousands for without it. I wish people would realize this.
nonbirithm 6y ago
One more thing I was thinking about is that I don't think people are uploading things to YouTube just to have YouTube be declared as outdated in a few decades in preparation for the next form of media. The implicit expectation that most casual producers have is that the videos will remain on YouTube "forever," which really means some vague amount of time that doesn't have to be thought about in the short-term. This is a major difference from television because YouTube can be used for personal expression, major productions broadcast on television are archived by the studios because the finished product is not restrictively large in terms of data, and I don't think people would be happy if the millions of hours spent producing their independent content will be all for nothing in a few decades. To keep all of that content alive in the future, YouTube either needs to continue to exist or the content needs to be mass-migrated to the next form of media. But what would that form of media be, and what would be the justification for creating an entirely new media platform to succeed YouTube? I find it difficult to imagine what it would look like at this point in time. People made a big deal about archiving Usenet when everyone started moving away from it. If YouTube has to be archived I don't see how it can be completely accomplished without people who have used youtube-dl in the past gathering up whatever they happened to save before it went down. There's hundreds of millions of hours of video already on YouTube, and unlike Usenet archives only a few large entities have the money and infrastructure to warehouse the entirety of that data. Saying that YouTube will pass on because media companies always pass on almost sounds as if YouTube is a ticking a time bomb, and after enough time passes we'll inevitably lose a lot of things that brought us value en masse, and the scale of loss will be far greater than in the past because of the breadth of content and the sheer ubiquity of YouTube.

iliketosleep 6y ago

> Not much of it actually helps me. This is an excellent point. With the multitudes of content competing for our attention, it's important to be very selective and deliberate with usage. Otherwise, it can very easily turn into an addiction - you'll be mindlessly enjoying the dopamine hits of watching "interesting" videos whilst life passes by.

benlivengood 6y ago

Youtube and similar platforms were preceded by cable, broadcast television, newspaper, radio, rental media, and books. Presumably if any of those had suddenly disappeared people would similarly feel lost without them, but as time goes on it becomes possible to replace or augment the older technologies without missing them or getting rid of them entirely. Probably youtube will be the same. Hopefully archivists can rescue all the content before its eventual demise.

ardy42 6y ago

> YouTube has only existed for fifteen years, but it might continue to exist for centuries. Is YouTube profitable yet? I really doubt YouTube will last for centuries, or even twenty or thirty more years. There was a point where it seemed like Geocities was ubiquitous and would be around forever, and now it's gone. Internet services don't have a great track record for longevity. When YouTube finally goes kaput, much of its content will likely be lost, since I don't see Google going through the effort of offering archivists a dump. Though, I'm kinda skeptical that even much digital data will last for centuries, unless formats and storage media ossify at some point on some long-term stable standard. The trend towards cloud storage makes things even more precarious.

iptrans 6y ago
> Is YouTube profitable yet? Google doesn't disclose that. Only that Youtube have revenues of $15 billion last year.

burgertime 6y ago

I didn’t notice it was down. Now if HN were down...

Fej 6y ago

> Not much of it actually helps me. Neither do TV or movies for the most part; there are many examples of high art in those formats but the most popular examples thereof are hardly at all intellectually gratifying, educational, or otherwise "helpful", as you put it (a good descriptor). It's entertainment - it's there for fun, and in many cases, it's there for the sake of art. (That's not to say that e.g. popcorn flicks don't have any artistic qualities, just that they're aiming for the former, not the latter.) The issue is more in the ways that YouTube tries to keep you watching, like the other massive social media sites. No one else, ever, has had a platform where an independent video creator could start with a handful of viewers and build up to millions, and even potentially make a career out of it. No, it's not common, there's a ton of work involved with no immediate payout, and it requires at least a bit of luck with the dreaded "algorithm", but it's probably more merit-based than what we had before, and that's a wonderful thing. (I'm not entirely certain about that last bit, hence "probably". How merit-based was/is TV and film, precisely? I just find it hard to believe that they're better than YouTube, given the quantity of quality creators on it who could never find a slot, much less an audience, on any other platform or format that has ever been.) With regard to the ubiquity: given the lack of competitors, apparently the capital requirements are so high and the lock-in effects so strong that there aren't any companies willing to give it a go. The closest thing we have, Twitch, filled a niche that YouTube wasn't technically capable of at the time, grew large enough before YouTube decided to try to enter that market so Twitch was able to acquire those same lock-in effects, and was bought by Amazon who provides the capital to ensure a smooth experience (Twitch prior to the acquisition was far more prone to performance issues).

Gravityloss 6y ago

There was demand and there were video services on the internet way before youtube, there have been others in parallel existence with youtube, and there will be others in the future, whether youtube exists or not. Out of habit, I do go to youtube if I need to search a video of something.

wodenokoto 6y ago

> I wonder where the time would have went if we were not enterprising enough to invent big data and portable streams and engagement metrics. Do remember channel surfing on your dumb, terrestrial, flow TV? Hours spend clicking "next channel" on the remote, cycling the same 5-10 channels, passing by the same program, again and again. That's where the time would have gone.

Shugarl 6y ago
Sounds like a nightmare. Thank God for Netflix and YouTube, even though they bring their own set of problems.