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"Their content quality is worse than ours. They seem focused on home video/community space while we want to be more like iTunes/TV" 16 years later, home video
by arnaudsm 5y ago
"Their content quality is worse than ours. They seem focused on home video/community space while we want to be more like iTunes/TV"
16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube, yet they are still trying to push overproduced shows and TV while mistreating original creators.
It's literally killing the golden goose.
- ninkendo 5y agoI noticed this with one of my favorite channels, Vsauce… they were one of the pilot channels to be “upgraded” to YouTube Red, back when that was a thing; the series was called “Mind Field”. I never subscribed to it when it was premium, but when YouTube Red shut down it all became free. I tried watching a few episodes of the ostensibly “higher quality” format of Mind Field, and it was demonstrably worse in most aspects. Bloated, way more filler, way more pointless behind the scenes stuff of the host interacting with the guests, and an overall much slower pace of interesting material. It felt a lot more like a cookie cutter Nat Geo show instead of the denser, faster paced material of Vsauce. Overall I think that the smaller, self-produced (or minimally produced with small teams) format is the future and I’m glad to see that YouTube is failing to change that despite their efforts.
- JCharante 5y agoTo be fair Vsauce ruined itself a long time ago. Obviously the next step for a popular channel is to turn it into a company that churns out content for money, but it kills the charm and quality. Should just stick to (relative to big orgs) low budget and take in those views. Phillip DeFranco's stuff was good until he started a million offshoots and it wasn't personal anymore. Then it was just mediocre unorganic (as in how pop bands are formed by talent scouts) stuff.
- cblconfederate 5y agoAll channels will eventually burn out and fade, but the youtube model guarantees that there will always be new shiny content.
- ethbr0 5y agoWhich is another way of staying that YouTube will leave a wake of burned out and faded creators behind it.
- cblconfederate 5y agoJust like all social media
- Razengan 5y agoJust like all human art and celebrity culture.
- ta2234234242 5y agoWe loved the Bee Gees, then we hated them, then we loved them again... My favorite band from that time is ABBA, if only because they totally rocked these cat dresses, which would have made a killing on etsy if the internet existed back then. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/27/abba-announce-first-new-songs-for-35-years https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/27/abba-announce-...
- Razengan 5y agoI mean even if love art and artists from thousands of years ago, their celebrity did fade away. But we can still enjoy their best works, same with contemporary artists who produce good shit for a while and then decline (or revert back) into mediocrity.
- wincy 5y agoI mean Pewdiepie still mostly just makes dumb videos of him and gets an absurd number of views, and has over 100m subscribers.
- JCharante 5y ago
- bradlys 5y agoThis is also probably just survivor bias at work too. I will say that vsauce still made some good content even after mindfield. I just had to avoid the mindfield stuff.
- jjcon 5y agoI thunk vsauce has still put out some great content after mindfield but it has been pretty sparse. I think Michael could totally reclaim it but it would take time.
- silexia 5y agoYouTube has been pushing garbage "woke" videos into my feed. I have been having to click not interested on them. I just want to watch the home made construction videos like Essential Craftsman in peace without an ideology being shoved down my throat.
- scrollaway 5y agoI thought Mind Field was really cool. Obviously a very different feel to the normal vsauce videos but … I dunno, I don't see what's wrong about going that route. Derek of Veritasium is trying to go that route by himself. He released some documentaries of his own (which actually were of lower quality than his regular material, I thought). Wendover is also releasing some long-form documentaries. He's much better at it, actually.
- raihansaputra 5y agoWhat's interesting is maybe the different incentive structures. I don't know how Derek is doing it, but Wendover seems like to get the funding mainly from Nebula/other sources. In the case of Vsauce, YouTube Red probably has agreements to let outside people manage it to be more "commercially-safe".
- cartoonworld 5y agoI watched some Mind Field and thought it was ok, but thought it was not as engaging as vsauce regular content. I figured that vsauce is good at making videos he makes. They gave him a cable format & crew and it didn't really translate his appeal. Someone like Veritasium or Wendover might be able to get very proficient in a documentary format, it sounds like they might have good ideas.
- sampo 5y agoI think I have watched more Alex (French guy cooking) and Guga (Sous vide everything), than I have watched real commercial studio-produced cooking shows.
- dharmab 5y agoBabish is a go-to when I need to learn to make something new.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoMake sure you check out Epicurious and Ethan Chlebowski
- schmorptron 5y agoCheck out my name is andong, his Presentation style is incredible.
- dzhiurgis 5y agoI wonder if someone here tried all of the premium stuff like CuriosityStream, Nebula and whats that other one?
- mandliya 5y agoI know what you mean. I loved Vsauce when it originally came out. I remember getting an “oh! Wow!” reactions with amazing first season when Michael would explain things. Later when it moved, it was all too much fluff and little core material I originally loved. I completely lost touch eventually.
- bazooka_penguin 5y agoI think that's just a result of trying to be more inclusive towards a general audience.
- Ajedi32 5y agoYeah, many of the YouTube premium series felt overproduced. I wouldn't exactly describe modern YouTube channels as "home video" but it's certainly a different feel from the network TV shows many of the premium series tried to emulate. There were a couple premium series that did work out pretty well though, in my opinion. The Slo Mo Guys had a bunch of episodes which were basically just their usual content, but with a higher budget and a team of people available to set up the scenes they were filming. Those videos were excellent.
- brandnewlow 5y agoAdvertisers of note strongly prefer to put their ads next to the second type of content, not the first.
- sorenjan 5y ago> 16 years later, home video is still the core value of YouTube Is it? I guess it depends on what you mean by home video. Is it "Me at the zoo"[0], or independent content creators like PewDiePie or Veratassium? Compared to Hollywood most if not all Youtube channels are completely different, but when I think of home video and early Youtube I think of personal family trips, not NileRed. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
- PKop 5y ago"Home video/community space" obviously encompasses independent content creators, wherever and whatever they're creating. I mean, 90% of PewDiePie's videos are him at home. Why does the venue of a zoo define the category? In any case, independent creators going out in the world, zoos or elsewhere, creating content is representative of the divide between big studio content and independents.
- sorenjan 5y agoIt's a matter of target audience. Maybe I've misunderstood something, but I thought home videos where made for friends and family, not millions of people.
- krisoft 5y agoI think you misunderstand the difference between “Me at the zoo” guy and Veratassium. It’s not that one is at the zoo while the other isn’t. :) The dude in the zoo video is dab smack in the middle of what i would call “home video”. Some person with a video recoding device points it at their life withouth much thinking about what is that they want to say or how. It’s clearly not a nature documentary, though there are elephants on the picture. Veratassium videos are much more intentional. The content creator clearly has thought about what they want to talk about, and how they want to talk about it. They hired a camera person and very often special cameras or drones to shoot the best footage to illustrate the content. Each video is a mini documentary about a fascinating topic, with expert interviews, experiments and models. I think it is a disservice to call this second type of video “home video”. Doesn’t make sense to mix these two together in any sense of the word.
- afarrell 5y agos/literally/directly/ The word “literally” has no synonyms and if it dies it will leave a massive lexical gap.
- co2benzoate 5y ago'Nonfiguratively' would work.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoand in our era, "disfiguratively", "unfiguratively" and "infiguratively" would likely make an appearance ...
- wyldfire 5y agoAre you afraid for the expressiveness of future English speakers? Fear not, if the word 'literally' no longer had its meaning we'd make a new one to take its place.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y agoThe problem is, if I want to use the term "literally" in a literal sense now, nobody will recognize its literal meaning, and everybody will assume it's being used metaphorically. You literally can't use "literally" in the literal sense of the term anymore.
- teawrecks 5y agoMeanwhile, natural language isn't formal language, and people understand meanings of statements just as much as they did yesterday.
- Stupulous 5y agoIf people raise objections, that suggests that they are having issues with understanding. I know I've been confused by it before, and I usually feel compelled to use modifiers to distinguish between 'literally millions' and 'actually, no-exaggeration, literally millions' when I want to be understood. That doesn't necessarily mean we're moving in the wrong direction. Language evolves to satisfy speakers' criteria, so it will gradually improve median utility. But any change is going to have cost, and confusion could be the price we pay for progress. Alternately, you can imagine a situation where 1% of the population derives a huge amount of utility from a word, while 99% only get a small benefit from another definition. Improvements to the median in that scenario can have negative consequences in aggregate. Or you can see that this particular usage has been confusing people for a hundred years, and the cost of change may outweigh any potential benefit. I think the position that natural language will just take care of itself is just a touch hand-wavey. Human interests and linguistic-evolutionary movement are often coaligned, but sometimes diverge- the same as with human interests and economic growth.
- cblconfederate 5y ago"one day ... we'll become like iTunes and TV"
- mdoms 5y agoThe overproduction of "home content" is killing it for me. As soon as Youtubers get a whiff of success suddenly all of the authenticity drops out of the channel and absolutely everything becomes sponsored content.
- bobsil1 5y agoIf you can fake authenticity, you’ve got it made
- doopy1 5y agoIs it really home video if a DIY youtuber spends 10's of thousands of dollars on a setup to have high quality production value?
- baby 5y agoThe worse thing is that they’re trying to do both. They should just go 100% into something like netflix that’s not related to youtube.
- PostThisTooFast 5y agoGoogle is so inept AND arrogant, it's galling. Their branding sucks shit. Their UIs suck shit. Their attitude sucks shit. "Google Video" failed utterly because nobody even realized that they could CONTRIBUTE to it. It seemed to be merely a search engine for online video. So instead of fixing that, they paid 1.6 billion for a shitty site with only slightly less-shitty branding. Think about it: "YouTube?" Really? OK grandpa, nobody calls it "the tube" anymore... in 2005 or even 1995. Fuck Google. Amazon and Google are legitimate targets of the current "anti-big-tech" hysteria. Facebook is a has-been, and Apple doesn't deserve to be lumped in because they're not a heavy online presence. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." FUCK YOU, Hacker News. There's no excuse for letting people type out a question or comment and THEN tell them NOPE! AFTER THE FACT. Who the fuck do you think you are?
- Abishek_Muthian 5y agoThey are back into home video with 'Shorts' after TikTok showed them how valuable it is.