4 ms·

YouTube is already Google's killer social network. Over a billion users a month.

by ipsum2 5y ago

sircastor 5y ago
This I think is the observation that many people miss. YouTube, while not identical to Facebook in its approach, is a massive social network, and massively successful, with a lot more goodwill than Facebook gets.
- ExtraE 5y ago
  I think the good will comes from YouTube doing something useful for the user with the collected info (video recommendations).
  - zerr 5y ago
    And without ad-blocker circumvention.
mkj 5y ago
Is Youtube actually a social network or a broadcast medium with a very narrow feedback medium? All the big channels I know about (only briefly) have forums etc external to youtube.
- ipsum2 5y ago
  In my view, a social criteria needs to have the following criteria: - anyone can make a post (video, text, image, etc), either to an individual (instant messaging) or to a group (public or selected people) - people can reply to other people's posts - communities form automatically from the above two interactions
slightwinder 5y ago
Youtube is more a para-social than a social network. Social networks are all about interaction on equal terms, but on youtube the focus is strongly shifted to creating videos and let them concumed by their peers. Proper interaction hardly happens there. And didn't they even remove the means for private communcation some years ago? So it's all just public now. The only somewhat social interaction happens between the content creators, not between any user of the site. And those creators seem to care more about beefs and making money.
- thatfunkymunki 5y ago
  I see creators engaging with comment writers all the time, as well as commenters engaging with each other on a community level, particularly in more niche communities
  - slightwinder 5y ago
    Indeed, but that is on the level of any other comment-section. You can't follow other commenters and subscribe to their comments. Videos and comment-section are different worlds, with the comment-world having network at all on the technical level.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Social vs. parasocial is simply a matter of the scale of any one node. An individual (or organisation) can only maintain so may relationships. Dunbar's Number is a pretty good proxy. Ultimately, what each relationship is competing for is time, and that is a nonfungible resource. Ultimately, our relationships are defined largely by arity, the number of connections between parties and communications, the n:m relationships: 1:1, n:1, 1:m, n:m. The vital groups I've been involved with have been 1) highly curated and 2) about 40--50 people, of whom maybe 10--20 were highly active. (One such group was a privat G+ community. Whilst it lasted it was excellent. I ultimately opted to kill it off due to concerns with the platform.) A person, or a group, with more than a few hundred followers, can at best devote only a few minutes or seconds to each. Over an 80 year life, the time you can devote to individual members of a group (assuming you sleep 8 hours/day) is roughly: 10: 5 years 100: 6 months 1,000: 20 days 10,000: 47 hours 100,000: 5 hours 1,000,000: 28 minutes 10 million: 3 minutes 100 million: 17 seconds 1 billion: 2 seconds 10 billion: 1/4 second Google+ existed for slightly less than 8 years, and had (generously) 3.3 billion profiles. Each user could interact with each of the others for ... 0.05 seconds. If we rely on a more realistic estimate of about 100 million actively-engaged profiles, that engagement increases considerably to ... 1 2/3 seconds. In a parasocial relationship the fandom devotes a significant portion of its life to the star (often minutes or hours per day). The star ... cannot devote much time to individual fans. The largest followings on G+ tended to be around the 10 million mark, allowing about 17 seconds of star attention per fan if the star devoted every waking hour to such relationships. My more modest 2,000 or so followers might have received a days' attention from me, were I particularly obsessed with such engagement. In practice, most of my engagement was with 20--100 or so people. Several of those I've continued to stay in touch with. We seem to be under the delusion that technology allows us to scale intimacy. That's a fundamental impossibility, as true intimacy (measured in both time and distance) simply cannot be mediated. The problem isn't just the arity mentioned above, but context, expectations, understandings, intentions, and more. Intermediated communications quickly gets quite complex. Intimacy does not scale. https://joindiaspora.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c70002590d8e506 https://joindiaspora.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c70002590d8e...

YouTube is already Google's killer social network. Over a billion users a month.

by ipsum2 5y ago

YouTube is already Google's killer social network. Over a billion users a month.

This I think is the observation that many people miss. YouTube, while not identical to Facebook in its approach, is a massive social network, and massively successful, with a lot more goodwill than Facebook gets.

ExtraE 5y ago
I think the good will comes from YouTube doing something useful for the user with the collected info (video recommendations).
- zerr 5y ago
  And without ad-blocker circumvention.

mkj 5y ago

Is Youtube actually a social network or a broadcast medium with a very narrow feedback medium? All the big channels I know about (only briefly) have forums etc external to youtube.

ipsum2 5y ago
In my view, a social criteria needs to have the following criteria: - anyone can make a post (video, text, image, etc), either to an individual (instant messaging) or to a group (public or selected people) - people can reply to other people's posts - communities form automatically from the above two interactions

slightwinder 5y ago

Youtube is more a para-social than a social network. Social networks are all about interaction on equal terms, but on youtube the focus is strongly shifted to creating videos and let them concumed by their peers. Proper interaction hardly happens there. And didn't they even remove the means for private communcation some years ago? So it's all just public now. The only somewhat social interaction happens between the content creators, not between any user of the site. And those creators seem to care more about beefs and making money.

thatfunkymunki 5y ago
I see creators engaging with comment writers all the time, as well as commenters engaging with each other on a community level, particularly in more niche communities
- slightwinder 5y ago
  Indeed, but that is on the level of any other comment-section. You can't follow other commenters and subscribe to their comments. Videos and comment-section are different worlds, with the comment-world having network at all on the technical level.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Social vs. parasocial is simply a matter of the scale of any one node. An individual (or organisation) can only maintain so may relationships. Dunbar's Number is a pretty good proxy. Ultimately, what each relationship is competing for is time, and that is a nonfungible resource. Ultimately, our relationships are defined largely by arity, the number of connections between parties and communications, the n:m relationships: 1:1, n:1, 1:m, n:m. The vital groups I've been involved with have been 1) highly curated and 2) about 40--50 people, of whom maybe 10--20 were highly active. (One such group was a privat G+ community. Whilst it lasted it was excellent. I ultimately opted to kill it off due to concerns with the platform.) A person, or a group, with more than a few hundred followers, can at best devote only a few minutes or seconds to each. Over an 80 year life, the time you can devote to individual members of a group (assuming you sleep 8 hours/day) is roughly: 10: 5 years 100: 6 months 1,000: 20 days 10,000: 47 hours 100,000: 5 hours 1,000,000: 28 minutes 10 million: 3 minutes 100 million: 17 seconds 1 billion: 2 seconds 10 billion: 1/4 second Google+ existed for slightly less than 8 years, and had (generously) 3.3 billion profiles. Each user could interact with each of the others for ... 0.05 seconds. If we rely on a more realistic estimate of about 100 million actively-engaged profiles, that engagement increases considerably to ... 1 2/3 seconds. In a parasocial relationship the fandom devotes a significant portion of its life to the star (often minutes or hours per day). The star ... cannot devote much time to individual fans. The largest followings on G+ tended to be around the 10 million mark, allowing about 17 seconds of star attention per fan if the star devoted every waking hour to such relationships. My more modest 2,000 or so followers might have received a days' attention from me, were I particularly obsessed with such engagement. In practice, most of my engagement was with 20--100 or so people. Several of those I've continued to stay in touch with. We seem to be under the delusion that technology allows us to scale intimacy. That's a fundamental impossibility, as true intimacy (measured in both time and distance) simply cannot be mediated. The problem isn't just the arity mentioned above, but context, expectations, understandings, intentions, and more. Intermediated communications quickly gets quite complex. Intimacy does not scale. https://joindiaspora.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c70002590d8e506 https://joindiaspora.com/posts/4bdf7470aa0301394c70002590d8e...