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> I've ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f'd up cars they get to servic

> I've ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f'd up cars they get to service, to farrier and sheep shearing videos to a guy who does comedy about weird animal facts. I bet some of the uptick in quality of content on tiktok vs youtube is based on the length of videos. If they only have three minutes, all the interesting things will be shoehorned into the available time. Whereas youtube creators are incentivized by the payment structure to lengthen their content to increase their adshare pay so they extend their content to 10 minutes + leading to a lot of filler and "heyyyyy guys let me tell you about my day blah blah blah before we jump into the meat and potatoes" etc.

hirako2000 5y ago
It's exactly where the issue is. It's no mistake, product management at Google isn't dumb.. here is how it works. YouTube, for years even post acquisition made no money, kept bleeding to aquire users. At one point a revenue stream is implemented, which must keep growing to recoup the large investments. Not to mention, pure greed. The algorithm isn't designed to promote quality content to enhance the user experience and love for the product. It's designed to keep users engaged, while allowing for as much ads time possible. So, the 10 or or 16 mins length was identified as sweet spots to allow for at least one ad placement without loosing engagement. Click bait videos aren't demoted, they work. They keep users engaged as they get promoted to watch yet another video, until brain saturation. They maximised profit, they didn't strike the right balance, perhaps too naive to imagine competition could steal from their market share. Here we have tiktok, knowing very well they would need to be order of magnitude better to gain traction, at least where the market was already taken up by YouTube. They created an app making it easier and faster to push well cut content, with better tech, better suited UI and overall UX proven to be attracting younger audiences who tend to make trends with their creativity. Take a good look at the YouTube app, despite the few visual improvements it feels like a decade old library system with auto play, ported to mobile phones. Look at tiktok, it's mobile first, it's fluid and design for touch interaction, the social features are right there, not outside the video in the form of two thumbs button and a thread of text blobs. Google clearly don't understand or refuses to understand trends. They build minimalist systems , boring to look at but that perform very well, and it is now capitalist greed that set the direction of the company, the bottom line is to squeeze more and more money before the competitions finishes them. They got a few years to go on like that.
- john_minsk 5y ago
  Please. I don’t want social features in my video library app. I unsubscribed from YouTube since I can’t remove “shorts” from the interface. I’m not going to pay for them to lobotomize me…
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    The social aspect is on YouTube as much as it is on tiktok, one got it work better in term of UX. As for shorts, the same critic can be made of Twitter, which I despite but the content is forced concise for the reason mentioned in another comment. Shorts on YouTube and Facebook are some poorly implemented afterthought, in playing catch up, I also find it sad we can't hide them altogether.
- theshrike79 5y ago
  > better suited UI and overall UX proven to be attracting younger audiences who tend to make trends with their creativity The funny thing is that most of the people I follow on TikTok are over 30, a good portion is over 40 =)
  - hirako2000 5y ago
    Of course. You are probably in that age range yourself so that's your circle, and barely content creator I would assume. Youngsters innovate, the previous generations tend to follow.
    - theshrike79 5y ago
      Yea, it's a bit of a meme on TikTok how "old people" took over the app during Covid :D
webmobdev 5y ago
Yeah, it's very irritating, and one of the first thing I do when watching a Youtube video is to increase the Playback speed to 1.5x or 2x.
- randycupertino 5y ago
  I like watching makeup videos and product reveals and I've just started straight away immediately skipping to the ~3:30min mark because that is when they actually start showing the damn palette.

hirako2000 5y ago

It's exactly where the issue is. It's no mistake, product management at Google isn't dumb.. here is how it works. YouTube, for years even post acquisition made no money, kept bleeding to aquire users. At one point a revenue stream is implemented, which must keep growing to recoup the large investments. Not to mention, pure greed. The algorithm isn't designed to promote quality content to enhance the user experience and love for the product. It's designed to keep users engaged, while allowing for as much ads time possible. So, the 10 or or 16 mins length was identified as sweet spots to allow for at least one ad placement without loosing engagement. Click bait videos aren't demoted, they work. They keep users engaged as they get promoted to watch yet another video, until brain saturation. They maximised profit, they didn't strike the right balance, perhaps too naive to imagine competition could steal from their market share. Here we have tiktok, knowing very well they would need to be order of magnitude better to gain traction, at least where the market was already taken up by YouTube. They created an app making it easier and faster to push well cut content, with better tech, better suited UI and overall UX proven to be attracting younger audiences who tend to make trends with their creativity. Take a good look at the YouTube app, despite the few visual improvements it feels like a decade old library system with auto play, ported to mobile phones. Look at tiktok, it's mobile first, it's fluid and design for touch interaction, the social features are right there, not outside the video in the form of two thumbs button and a thread of text blobs. Google clearly don't understand or refuses to understand trends. They build minimalist systems , boring to look at but that perform very well, and it is now capitalist greed that set the direction of the company, the bottom line is to squeeze more and more money before the competitions finishes them. They got a few years to go on like that.

john_minsk 5y ago
Please. I don’t want social features in my video library app. I unsubscribed from YouTube since I can’t remove “shorts” from the interface. I’m not going to pay for them to lobotomize me…
- hirako2000 5y ago
  The social aspect is on YouTube as much as it is on tiktok, one got it work better in term of UX. As for shorts, the same critic can be made of Twitter, which I despite but the content is forced concise for the reason mentioned in another comment. Shorts on YouTube and Facebook are some poorly implemented afterthought, in playing catch up, I also find it sad we can't hide them altogether.
theshrike79 5y ago
> better suited UI and overall UX proven to be attracting younger audiences who tend to make trends with their creativity The funny thing is that most of the people I follow on TikTok are over 30, a good portion is over 40 =)
- hirako2000 5y ago
  Of course. You are probably in that age range yourself so that's your circle, and barely content creator I would assume. Youngsters innovate, the previous generations tend to follow.
  - theshrike79 5y ago
    Yea, it's a bit of a meme on TikTok how "old people" took over the app during Covid :D

webmobdev 5y ago

Yeah, it's very irritating, and one of the first thing I do when watching a Youtube video is to increase the Playback speed to 1.5x or 2x.

randycupertino 5y ago
I like watching makeup videos and product reveals and I've just started straight away immediately skipping to the ~3:30min mark because that is when they actually start showing the damn palette.