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I really hope this backfires spectacularly on YouTube and the zealots who pushed for this change are held professionally accountable. I already click on fewer v

I really hope this backfires spectacularly on YouTube and the zealots who pushed for this change are held professionally accountable. I already click on fewer videos in search results and recommendations because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch. The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels. I can't be alone and knowing that YouTube takes recommended content so seriously, I have to imagine this is going to panic plenty of product managers at YouTube.

1_player 5y ago
Youtube doesn't f*** care. Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Oh, they only upload on our platform? Thought so. They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user. In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.
- potamic 5y ago
  What's stopping publishers from publishing to multiple platforms? Publishing is free, why wouldn't you cast a wide net to increase reach as much as possible?
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view. Over time this should put pressure on them to be open to a better platform and make the move as soon as such platform exists.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    No, I just explained that nobody will move out of the platform because everybody's there. Where are you going to watch your favourite USB gadget reviewer that only uploads on YT? Over time means nothing until there's actually competition, and there's nothing on the horizon that can compete to the scale of YouTube. Your content creator is not moving anywhere any time soon.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Competition can only appear if there's a selling point and demand for it. If creators get paid on YT, they have less incentive to seek out an alternative. If they stop getting paid (because people like you cancel their Premium subscription) they become potential customers for an upcoming alternative that does pay them.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view." That's why I choose to reward them through non YouTube platforms like Patreon. I've also noticed a huge trend in content creators making sponsorship deals that they embed in their own videos. I sense that canceling your YouTube premium won't hurt them as much as it used to in the past. Plus, you can give a portion of your subscription to them directly, should you so choose.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    I use Patreon for 10 different creators, but I watch at least 50 different ones on YouTube in a given month I might want to support. Some perhaps only for that month. And I don't want to spend $500/mo in Patreon either. Monthly donations are cool but limited as they only distribute the money among few people because they're expensive and a commitment. My dream, if I had the patience to build it, would be a platform that distributes some amount of budget among every content creator you have watched. Out of my $100, everybody gets $2. A bit like Brave Rewards, without the crypto stuff.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    Do you know of any recent reports or tweets of YT Premium CPM vs ad-supported? The only report I have is from 2016 when YT Red was even smaller than what Premium is now: https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-payout/ https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
- rfrey 5y ago
  It may stop people exploring as much outside their current favourite creators. The issue is quickly judging the quality of unknown channels. So no, they probably won't lose "users", but they may lose "engagement," however they're measuring that at the minute.
- Hamcha 5y ago
  Not related to the dislike feature in particular, but Youtube is definitely losing the next generation of creators. Plenty of people are using TikTok as their main platform nowadays, as it has bigger reach for their markets.
  - 1_player 5y ago
    TikTok is targeting a different type of content, there is no competition with YouTube as we know it, which is videos longer than 10 minutes.
    - travisd 5y ago
      YouTube now has “shorts” but it’s definitely not the same since they aren’t able to emulate the TikTok culture.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        Same thing as Facebook/Instagram Reels, another attempt to blatantly clone a rival platform.
        stjohnswarts 5y ago
        Like TikTok cloning Vine? :)
        FjgdymdjttdjG 5y ago
        Monkey see, monkey do, as the saying goes.
        brendoelfrendo 5y ago
        Which Twitter bought and promptly shit down. I never understood it; Vine was hugely popular (I was in college at the time, such things tend to spread pretty rapidly on a college campus), even getting celebrity attention. I really questioned the idea that Twitter couldn’t make the product work when we see TikTok doing just that. I guess Vine was, literally, ahead of its time.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? A lot of them are cross-posting to Odysee, and some are also on Nebula.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    2 platforms I have never heard of before this post. It's like saying Mastadon is a replacement for _______. Yeah, no it/they are not replacing. Those sites are like the catch can for those willing to step away from THE place. Until those creators actually leave YT to 100% commit to other places by no longer posting to YT, then the masses are not leaving YT (or FB/Twit/etc). Edit: Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? If not, then they are not really convinced of their staying power themselves.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? Yes. EEVblog mentions Odysee all the time, and many many channels mention Nebula when shilling Curiosity Stream. They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        > They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma. Why so? Are these other platforms unable to payout as much as YT? Seems natural that ad revshare would not be the same on a site that nobody has heard of compared to the numbers available from YT. Doesn't seem too enticing for creators to go to other platforms where there is less revenue potential. I'm just not seeing the prisoner's dilemma here. I just see people placating a noisy herd by offering content on other sites while still firmly attached to the teet of YT.
        nitrogen 5y ago
        The (reverse, sort of) prisoner's dilemma comes from the perceived risk of being banned by YT for promoting competitors on their site. If a single creator defects (from YouTube) too early, that creator loses, so creators have to cooperate. I assume this is less of a risk now than it used to be, because more creators are promoting alternative sites, and I'm even seeing ads for TikTok on YouTube itself.
- webdoodle 5y ago
  I'd like to see torrent hosting become a thing. I don't like to leave my computer\network connected to the internet all the time, but would like to make video/audio I've produced available. A hosting provider that lets me upload my content and host it as a torrent would solve many of the problems we currently face with private gatekeepers deciding what can and can't be hosted, displayed, voted on, commented on etc.
  - codezero 5y ago
    Maybe not what you want/need, but I suspect you could accomplish this by just buying a seedbox, then seed your content into it so it's always online, then just make sure you use an open tracker. This isn't an area I've done much in so I may just not be thinking in the right direction :)
  - saurik 5y ago
    The generalization of the premise of Bittorrent to easy file hosting is IPFS, and there in fact are IPFS hosting providers (and decentralized protocols for such, including Filecoin).
    - dylan604 5y ago
      When the best example of something is a coin, then I'm not really impressed as a file store/share platform.
      - remexre 5y ago
        Filecoin is only for paying others to host your content; you can host it yourself (as I do) or on a VPS and ignore Filecoin, and IPFS still works great.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    You don't need a full sized computer to be connected 24/7, Just grab a Raspberry PI or any (sometimes even cheaper and less power hungry) equivalent, flash the smallest OS of your choice that does what you want: serving videos and files, seeding torrents, hosting a node of your favorite communications platform, etc. You can keep the system on SD then use two USB drives for data, the second rsynced to the first, so you have some sort of redundancy without RAID. Total cost less than $100, possibly a lot less if you already have some parts (used hard drives and USB enclosures, SD card, etc). SSD drives would be overkill and more costly. If well tuned (drives spinning down when not used after a safe limit, say 2 hours, efficient CPU throttling, etc) It could draw less energy than the smallest lamp in our house: totally sustainable. About the software, I have a dream (tm): NNTP expanded so that it can be integrated with other services, include small binaries natively, or magnet links when above a certain size, the torrent being automatically created, seeded and linked by the originating user's client, employ enough security to become troll/vandal proof, etc. The infrastructure is already here, but the protocol is too tied to the limitations of the Internet in the 70s and 80s and takes for granted that everyone is a gentleman, which makes it hardly usable today.
- moritonal 5y ago
  Bit hostile. I pay £30 a year for RoosterTeeth, who are a company that put their content on YouTube (with ads) and their own site without. YouTube is becoming the place you find content, not necessarily though where you spend money. They're going to start caring about this.
- sqrt17 5y ago
  Some of the more well-known YouTube creators are also on - Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop) - LBRY/odysee (DistroTube) - FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips) None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)
  - SllX 5y ago
    Your list also doesn’t have a single YouTuber I actually watch. Well known or not, viewers have very fractured tastes.
    - sqrt17 5y ago
      Probably i don't watch any of the YouTubers you're watching either - the long tail is exactly why people watch YouTube (and maybe a handful of 10k-1M subscriber channels) rather than, or in addition to, TV programme and streamable shows that are modeled after it that are less niche. The main point of that list was: there are multiple platforms that try to be a "YouTube for people who don't like YouTube, for a point in time when YouTube gets horrible", with some people creating content there, and e.g. odysee lets creators sync their videos so you get exactly the same videos from them on YT and on Odysee. But for most creators this is still additional work for little benefit since their main audience is on YT.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    Firstly, the entire point of YouTube for me is the long tail. I don't watch any of those channels you listed, and the only two I've heard of are Linus and Adam Neely. But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experience than YouTube, especially since there would almost certainly be huge variation in the features and quality of their various web, mobile, and TV apps.
    - slackson 5y ago
- inChargeOfIT 5y ago
  I cancelled my premium, unsubscribed from all my channels, and have stopped browsing YouTube (which I did daily for years). Basically, I've stopped using YouTube as a source for finding new content. If I get linked to a video from a trusted source (here, reddit, etc), then I'll watch the video, but they lost me as a member of the community.
  - FjgdymdjttdjG 5y ago
    Gotta pay the Premium, or burn 1500 mAh / hour because you can't turn your screen off without Premium. You and about 4 billion others can't afford the Google toll, so pay for electricity instead. One way or another, you will pay. Gotta get that gold. If only I could calculate the total electricity burn planet wide because 4 billion people can't turn their screens off. I wonder how a 4 billion screenburn compares to 1 million Bitcoin miners, or whatever the total is. I listen 95% of the time, lectures, opera, podcasts, other stuff, and there are multitudes of data that don't need me to be staring at my screen.
    - noisem4ker 5y ago
      Check out NewPipe.
    - thedrbrian 5y ago
      You could always side load something. Better cercube for iOS?
- NDizzle 5y ago
  Where do I go to watch their videos? Rumble.
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  >Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Rumble and Rokfin, where more and more them are moving. History is littered with bankrupt companies who thought they were untouchable because people had nowhere else to go.
  - narrator 5y ago
    Rumble is going public soon via a SPAC[1]. They have 30 million active users, up from 1 million a year ago. 50% of the voting public who voted for Trump is a pretty good demographic for starting a big new Internet company. It's as if Microsoft in the 90s said they wouldn't sell software to Republicans or something and everyone had to switch to Apple. I think it's unprecedented in the history of American business that a company would alienate such a large demographic purposefully. [1]https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-spac-partner-cf-acquisition-shares-spike-on-donald-trump-partnership-what-investors-should-know-1031023929 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-spac-...
- kristopolous 5y ago
  > In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest Long running project of mine. "Corporate change bounties". Customers leave some supplier and then state why and somehow demonstrate how much cash has exited with them as a customer. Here's an example. Let's say att lobbies hard against net neutrality and customers were fed up and left. They could go to this site and somehow select "att + net neutrality + i will return if they support it" and then through some black magic prove that they were a long time att customer that paid $X/month that just cancelled. There's a way to avoid the black magic by making it a "crowd funding" style site but in many conversations effectively zero people would want to give, say Nestle or Walmart, a gift in return for them not being an evil prick. So there's gotta be some kind of balance. A number representing potential money on the table that can be captured if a policy change happens. I made two versions of it a while back but new ideas are hard so oh well. But maybe a third time it will work, who knows
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    New ideas aren't a hard sell. Cumbersome ideas that cost more than the benefit are a hard sell.
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      I believe it was one of Steve Blank's fairly complicated books that differentiated different kinds of new[1] Simplifying dramatically, there's new solutions to acknowledged problems and unacknowledged problems. What you say satisfies the first one. The unacknowledged problem requires you to first connect desperate ideas and consolidate them together in the prospect's mind. Then you need to convince them that it's a suboptimal state of affairs. Then you need to convince them that an amelioration is attainable. Then you need to convince them that you provide it. Contrast this to the first one. The prospect knows things are suboptimal, has a current insufficient remedy and is open to a better one. You need to convince them that you provide it. That's way way easier - like orders of magnitude, a "completely different problem domain" kind of easier (It's worth noting that elevator pitch templates address the easier type of new) Next task, solve the first one in under 5 or so seconds of exposure: connect ideas, show it's a problem, demonstrate the mechanism, and propose a plausible solution that's easy to participate in. Maybe that's trivial for you but I personally have very little aptitude for that and struggle immensely with it [1] all those startup books become a giant soup after you read a bunch so sorry if this was like Moore or Christensen, I think it's Blank. If anyone remembers exactly where this was I'd love to find it again.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  If they don’t care, why do anything?
- tomrod 5y ago
  Yes, that's a common attitude that is corrected with antitrust legislation.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ItsMonkk 5y ago
  The important aspect is less of where the video is hosted, but where people are looking for content discovery. With the removal of dislikes, YouTube is actively making their content discovery worse. On the margin people should be looking for new content discovery options. You might see people drift to Reddit, you might see people drift to DIY StackExchange. That's the message we should be pushing in these conversations as a result of this, you should be changing your behavior. Once you move the discovery off YouTube, it becomes trivial to move the content to another video host. The discovery is the lock-in.
- Terry_Roll 5y ago
  Peertube, Patreon, Netflix, Sky.... do I need to list more?
- ronnier 5y ago
  TikTok will be what takes down youtube. It'll happen.
- nostromo 5y ago
  Content creators are already moving to TikTok. YouTube has a weaker position now than they’ve ever had. You may be a HN TikTok skeptic (there are many) but TikTok is already expanding to things you’d find on YouTube historically, like tutorials, DIY, arts and crafts.
- _jal 5y ago
  I just don't subscribe. It isn't even about incentives or trying to punish or whatever. Paying for the privilege of interacting with some shitty thing I don't like to be entertained.... doesn't seem entertaining to me.
- soheil 5y ago
  I think if you feel like YT is in the wrong and still care about your favorite creators the right thing to do is to cancel your Premium membership. The greater good here is to team up against YT since in the long run removing dislikes is bad for majority of YT users including the creators.
- Epitom3 5y ago
  > youtube premium lmfao
etchalon 5y ago
The chance this change was pushed without data, and tests, seems antithetical to what we know about the change and how it was rolled out. They did this with an understanding of its impact on engagement.
Metricon 5y ago
I've heard of a number of Youtube creators that are also placing their content on Odysee as a potential backup. I first heard of this site from Dave at EEVblog: https://www.youtube.com/c/EevblogDave/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/EevblogDave/videos https://odysee.com/@eevblog:7 https://odysee.com/@eevblog:7
- jjcon 5y ago
  Interesting - I first heard of odysee this week too from a VR channel I follow - it seems like a decent setup
- aronpye 5y ago
  “Welcome to odyssey: we have dislikes”, this made me smile
- officeplant 5y ago
  Doesn't give me a lot of hope with Dave being in the top list on odysee surrounded by alt-right creators who escaped there from other platforms. Plus his recent shilling of the crypto currency connected to odysee on twitter. I get that creators want to be paid and need a better home than youtube, but none of this bodes well to me yet.
  - willis936 5y ago
    He's been dropping dogwhistles in his recent videos. It feels very mercenary, like he's saying controversial things because it makes his engagement numbers go up. It's fascinating to see the gears of the machine moving. Any gaps in the narrative "attention economy monopolists are profiting off divisive misinformation" are sewn shut in one picture.
- matt123456789 5y ago
  Maybe I live under a rock, but I’ve never heard of odysee. I’m definitely checking them out. I love that their tag line is “welcome, we have dislikes.”
  - 5y ago
charcircuit 5y ago
As a heavy YouTube user the removal of the dislike count didn't effect me at all since the number was always useless to me. >because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch. That is YouTube's job. Their recommendation algorithm will try and suggest videos that are worthwhile for you to watch. The order that videos are recommend is how know which videos are likely more worthwhile for you to watch. After clicking on a video most people judge the video be just watching the first few seconds an opposed to looking at the likes. They will switch to a different video if they didn't find that one interesting. Another common behaviour is just skimming through a video.
dathinab 5y ago
I stopped using YT recommendations a while ago, not I only go back to the same channels and if any new channel gets added it's not from a YT source. Stupid "I don't want to think" content got replaced by twitch, even through many twitch streams contain hardly any interesting "content" they are sadly stile miles better then most/close to all "dump" YT content (because "dump" YT content has gotten pretty bad). And high quality YT content often gets demonetized and seldomly recommended, because its either not advertisement friendly enough or doesn't cover a wide enough audience spectrum.
rpowers 5y ago
From my experience the ones pushing for these ideas are the fresh grad PMs trying to do something big for "perf". The whole platform feels like Waymo, driverless.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  This is ridiculously. Major changes like this are decided at the top.
mitchdoogle 5y ago
I'm really puzzled why anyone cares about this so passionately. I'm not a YouTube diehard but I use it pretty regularly to watch a handful of channels I like, maybe 2-3 hours per week watching videos on the site. Occasionally I'll search for how to video and click on whatever is in the top few results on Google. I've seen several posts now across different sites lamenting this change, but I've yet to see anything remotely persuasive that this is a bad thing. Sometimes I think it's just people being grumpy about any change at all, the way some people will grumble about a logo change despite it having no real consequence of how things work. In my personal experience, I rarely even noticed the dislike count. Sometimes I'd wonder who the few unfortunate people were who disliked a video with about 1000x as many likes. It reminded me of the 1 star reviews you see on Amazon complaining about the postman for a product that otherwise has a stellar record. I just assume something is wrong with those peoples computers which made their video glitch out or something. I don't really trust negative feedback that much when it is paired with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for the same thing. And I don't think I ever encountered a video with anywhere near the number of dislikes as likes, let alone more dislikes. I personally have never disliked a video. If I'm watching something new, I'll just watch part of the video myself, and decide if I want to watch the rest or click away to something else. When I heard the announcement of removing the count as an effort to combat brigading, it made a lot of sense to me. I've seen the growth of negativity across the internet in the last few years. People are actually addicted to outrage these days, so anything that can help eliminate that seems like a good idea to me. The fact they kept the button there and still show the count to the uploader seems like they've at least tried to appease the diehards who appreciate having that dislike button - pretty fair if you ask me. You may challenge the assumption that only diehards care about this, but I've just looked at a few videos in my feed to see the number of likes and it's abysmal. 40k likes for a video with 4M views. 18k likes for a video with 800k views. They're all like that. The like/dislike metric just doesn't have much engagement. While you predict dire consequences for YouTubes future and panic among their employees, I am thinking that casual users probably have not even noticed at all.
- ford_o 5y ago
  No idea what HOW TO videos you watch, but in my domain, 80% are garbage, where the dislike ratio saves me minutes of watch time on each.
emodendroket 5y ago
I think hanging out in places like this is drastically altering your perception of how much anybody noticed or cared about this change.
- ddingus 5y ago
  I agree and do take time to ask others about this stuff. Right now, I enjoy having a broad mix of people, young, old, men, women... to talk to. One thing I love is when they bring me stuff to discuss. The trick is to express an interest and make those conversations fun, real gives and takes. The numbers on people seeking news outside the established media are pretty high. YT and the White House did that public beta and that was noticed! Brought to me by others who probably would not otherwise. "Why hide dislikes for POTUS?" Why indeed! The people saying few care about the details like the HN crowd usually does are not wrong. But there is more to this than that. Discussing whether dislikes is useful to understand potential video quality is a mixed bag like proponents of that idea say. And in some instances, say for how to videos, it is a great metric, like those proponents say too. A higher order look at this is more like what normies are into. They ask how come this became an issue after POTUS, CNN and Fauci got ratioed non stop? They ask, "who decides what is misinformation? Is it the same people getting RussiaGate wrong for years, and who always seem excited about endless wars?" I can make a case for how hanging out here alters perceptions in like kind. Maybe more people talking outside their comfort zone, with a more diverse set of people and contexts is a good thing. Having done it for a while, I sure think so. People do not care too much about the details. They care a lot about being managed, essentially told they need to be guided in this way.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    It sounds a lot like the people you're talking to are Republican partisans who view most events through that lens.
    - ddingus 5y ago
      Not at all. I have a solid mix, and have cultivated that over a considerable time too. Started a decade ago. Indies, Dems, GOP, you name it. I enjoy politics and culture. No judgement, just frank talk. More people than you know find that to be high value and it is not easy. Those questions are not partisan. They do speak to class though.
lhorie 5y ago
> The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels Isn't that good for them though? Generally speaking, it's a lot easier for youtube to do a few red carpet partnership shenanigans with the ssniperwolfs and mrbeasts in the top ranks and screw the long tail. That story has played again and again all over the entertainment media industry. If everyone does what you're doing, they can potentially even get away with having to do less content moderation, or quietly "disappearing" channel categories, etc. You're already getting sort of played by relying on recommendation systems in the first place. People seem to think recommendations scour the deep web to cater to them personally, but the Occam's Razor take is that you get shown whatever the algorithm determines is clickbaity enough for your general flavor of hivemind.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
soheil 5y ago
I'm so confused why would hiding the dislike count impact the internal recommendation engine that has access to the dislike count?

1_player 5y ago

Youtube doesn't f*** care. Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Oh, they only upload on our platform? Thought so. They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user. In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.

potamic 5y ago
What's stopping publishers from publishing to multiple platforms? Publishing is free, why wouldn't you cast a wide net to increase reach as much as possible?
Nextgrid 5y ago
> while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view. Over time this should put pressure on them to be open to a better platform and make the move as soon as such platform exists.
- 1_player 5y ago
  No, I just explained that nobody will move out of the platform because everybody's there. Where are you going to watch your favourite USB gadget reviewer that only uploads on YT? Over time means nothing until there's actually competition, and there's nothing on the horizon that can compete to the scale of YouTube. Your content creator is not moving anywhere any time soon.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    Competition can only appear if there's a selling point and demand for it. If creators get paid on YT, they have less incentive to seek out an alternative. If they stop getting paid (because people like you cancel their Premium subscription) they become potential customers for an upcoming alternative that does pay them.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view." That's why I choose to reward them through non YouTube platforms like Patreon. I've also noticed a huge trend in content creators making sponsorship deals that they embed in their own videos. I sense that canceling your YouTube premium won't hurt them as much as it used to in the past. Plus, you can give a portion of your subscription to them directly, should you so choose.
- 1_player 5y ago
  I use Patreon for 10 different creators, but I watch at least 50 different ones on YouTube in a given month I might want to support. Some perhaps only for that month. And I don't want to spend $500/mo in Patreon either. Monthly donations are cool but limited as they only distribute the money among few people because they're expensive and a commitment. My dream, if I had the patience to build it, would be a platform that distributes some amount of budget among every content creator you have watched. Out of my $100, everybody gets $2. A bit like Brave Rewards, without the crypto stuff.
- judge2020 5y ago
  Do you know of any recent reports or tweets of YT Premium CPM vs ad-supported? The only report I have is from 2016 when YT Red was even smaller than what Premium is now: https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-payout/ https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/totalbiscuit-youtube-red-p...
rfrey 5y ago
It may stop people exploring as much outside their current favourite creators. The issue is quickly judging the quality of unknown channels. So no, they probably won't lose "users", but they may lose "engagement," however they're measuring that at the minute.
Hamcha 5y ago
Not related to the dislike feature in particular, but Youtube is definitely losing the next generation of creators. Plenty of people are using TikTok as their main platform nowadays, as it has bigger reach for their markets.
- 1_player 5y ago
  TikTok is targeting a different type of content, there is no competition with YouTube as we know it, which is videos longer than 10 minutes.
  - travisd 5y ago
    YouTube now has “shorts” but it’s definitely not the same since they aren’t able to emulate the TikTok culture.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Same thing as Facebook/Instagram Reels, another attempt to blatantly clone a rival platform.
      - stjohnswarts 5y ago
        Like TikTok cloning Vine? :)
        FjgdymdjttdjG 5y ago
        Monkey see, monkey do, as the saying goes.
        brendoelfrendo 5y ago
        Which Twitter bought and promptly shit down. I never understood it; Vine was hugely popular (I was in college at the time, such things tend to spread pretty rapidly on a college campus), even getting celebrity attention. I really questioned the idea that Twitter couldn’t make the product work when we see TikTok doing just that. I guess Vine was, literally, ahead of its time.
nitrogen 5y ago
Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? A lot of them are cross-posting to Odysee, and some are also on Nebula.
- dylan604 5y ago
  2 platforms I have never heard of before this post. It's like saying Mastadon is a replacement for _______. Yeah, no it/they are not replacing. Those sites are like the catch can for those willing to step away from THE place. Until those creators actually leave YT to 100% commit to other places by no longer posting to YT, then the masses are not leaving YT (or FB/Twit/etc). Edit: Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? If not, then they are not really convinced of their staying power themselves.
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? Yes. EEVblog mentions Odysee all the time, and many many channels mention Nebula when shilling Curiosity Stream. They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      > They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma. Why so? Are these other platforms unable to payout as much as YT? Seems natural that ad revshare would not be the same on a site that nobody has heard of compared to the numbers available from YT. Doesn't seem too enticing for creators to go to other platforms where there is less revenue potential. I'm just not seeing the prisoner's dilemma here. I just see people placating a noisy herd by offering content on other sites while still firmly attached to the teet of YT.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        The (reverse, sort of) prisoner's dilemma comes from the perceived risk of being banned by YT for promoting competitors on their site. If a single creator defects (from YouTube) too early, that creator loses, so creators have to cooperate. I assume this is less of a risk now than it used to be, because more creators are promoting alternative sites, and I'm even seeing ads for TikTok on YouTube itself.
webdoodle 5y ago
I'd like to see torrent hosting become a thing. I don't like to leave my computer\network connected to the internet all the time, but would like to make video/audio I've produced available. A hosting provider that lets me upload my content and host it as a torrent would solve many of the problems we currently face with private gatekeepers deciding what can and can't be hosted, displayed, voted on, commented on etc.
- codezero 5y ago
  Maybe not what you want/need, but I suspect you could accomplish this by just buying a seedbox, then seed your content into it so it's always online, then just make sure you use an open tracker. This isn't an area I've done much in so I may just not be thinking in the right direction :)
- saurik 5y ago
  The generalization of the premise of Bittorrent to easy file hosting is IPFS, and there in fact are IPFS hosting providers (and decentralized protocols for such, including Filecoin).
  - dylan604 5y ago
    When the best example of something is a coin, then I'm not really impressed as a file store/share platform.
    - remexre 5y ago
      Filecoin is only for paying others to host your content; you can host it yourself (as I do) or on a VPS and ignore Filecoin, and IPFS still works great.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  You don't need a full sized computer to be connected 24/7, Just grab a Raspberry PI or any (sometimes even cheaper and less power hungry) equivalent, flash the smallest OS of your choice that does what you want: serving videos and files, seeding torrents, hosting a node of your favorite communications platform, etc. You can keep the system on SD then use two USB drives for data, the second rsynced to the first, so you have some sort of redundancy without RAID. Total cost less than $100, possibly a lot less if you already have some parts (used hard drives and USB enclosures, SD card, etc). SSD drives would be overkill and more costly. If well tuned (drives spinning down when not used after a safe limit, say 2 hours, efficient CPU throttling, etc) It could draw less energy than the smallest lamp in our house: totally sustainable. About the software, I have a dream (tm): NNTP expanded so that it can be integrated with other services, include small binaries natively, or magnet links when above a certain size, the torrent being automatically created, seeded and linked by the originating user's client, employ enough security to become troll/vandal proof, etc. The infrastructure is already here, but the protocol is too tied to the limitations of the Internet in the 70s and 80s and takes for granted that everyone is a gentleman, which makes it hardly usable today.
moritonal 5y ago
Bit hostile. I pay £30 a year for RoosterTeeth, who are a company that put their content on YouTube (with ads) and their own site without. YouTube is becoming the place you find content, not necessarily though where you spend money. They're going to start caring about this.
sqrt17 5y ago
Some of the more well-known YouTube creators are also on - Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop) - LBRY/odysee (DistroTube) - FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips) None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)
- SllX 5y ago
  Your list also doesn’t have a single YouTuber I actually watch. Well known or not, viewers have very fractured tastes.
  - sqrt17 5y ago
    Probably i don't watch any of the YouTubers you're watching either - the long tail is exactly why people watch YouTube (and maybe a handful of 10k-1M subscriber channels) rather than, or in addition to, TV programme and streamable shows that are modeled after it that are less niche. The main point of that list was: there are multiple platforms that try to be a "YouTube for people who don't like YouTube, for a point in time when YouTube gets horrible", with some people creating content there, and e.g. odysee lets creators sync their videos so you get exactly the same videos from them on YT and on Odysee. But for most creators this is still additional work for little benefit since their main audience is on YT.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Firstly, the entire point of YouTube for me is the long tail. I don't watch any of those channels you listed, and the only two I've heard of are Linus and Adam Neely. But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experience than YouTube, especially since there would almost certainly be huge variation in the features and quality of their various web, mobile, and TV apps.
  - slackson 5y ago
inChargeOfIT 5y ago
I cancelled my premium, unsubscribed from all my channels, and have stopped browsing YouTube (which I did daily for years). Basically, I've stopped using YouTube as a source for finding new content. If I get linked to a video from a trusted source (here, reddit, etc), then I'll watch the video, but they lost me as a member of the community.
- FjgdymdjttdjG 5y ago
  Gotta pay the Premium, or burn 1500 mAh / hour because you can't turn your screen off without Premium. You and about 4 billion others can't afford the Google toll, so pay for electricity instead. One way or another, you will pay. Gotta get that gold. If only I could calculate the total electricity burn planet wide because 4 billion people can't turn their screens off. I wonder how a 4 billion screenburn compares to 1 million Bitcoin miners, or whatever the total is. I listen 95% of the time, lectures, opera, podcasts, other stuff, and there are multitudes of data that don't need me to be staring at my screen.
  - noisem4ker 5y ago
    Check out NewPipe.
  - thedrbrian 5y ago
    You could always side load something. Better cercube for iOS?
NDizzle 5y ago
Where do I go to watch their videos? Rumble.
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>Where are you going to go watch your favorite content creators? Rumble and Rokfin, where more and more them are moving. History is littered with bankrupt companies who thought they were untouchable because people had nowhere else to go.
- narrator 5y ago
  Rumble is going public soon via a SPAC[1]. They have 30 million active users, up from 1 million a year ago. 50% of the voting public who voted for Trump is a pretty good demographic for starting a big new Internet company. It's as if Microsoft in the 90s said they wouldn't sell software to Republicans or something and everyone had to switch to Apple. I think it's unprecedented in the history of American business that a company would alienate such a large demographic purposefully. [1]https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-spac-partner-cf-acquisition-shares-spike-on-donald-trump-partnership-what-investors-should-know-1031023929 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-spac-...
kristopolous 5y ago
> In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest Long running project of mine. "Corporate change bounties". Customers leave some supplier and then state why and somehow demonstrate how much cash has exited with them as a customer. Here's an example. Let's say att lobbies hard against net neutrality and customers were fed up and left. They could go to this site and somehow select "att + net neutrality + i will return if they support it" and then through some black magic prove that they were a long time att customer that paid $X/month that just cancelled. There's a way to avoid the black magic by making it a "crowd funding" style site but in many conversations effectively zero people would want to give, say Nestle or Walmart, a gift in return for them not being an evil prick. So there's gotta be some kind of balance. A number representing potential money on the table that can be captured if a policy change happens. I made two versions of it a while back but new ideas are hard so oh well. But maybe a third time it will work, who knows
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  New ideas aren't a hard sell. Cumbersome ideas that cost more than the benefit are a hard sell.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    I believe it was one of Steve Blank's fairly complicated books that differentiated different kinds of new[1] Simplifying dramatically, there's new solutions to acknowledged problems and unacknowledged problems. What you say satisfies the first one. The unacknowledged problem requires you to first connect desperate ideas and consolidate them together in the prospect's mind. Then you need to convince them that it's a suboptimal state of affairs. Then you need to convince them that an amelioration is attainable. Then you need to convince them that you provide it. Contrast this to the first one. The prospect knows things are suboptimal, has a current insufficient remedy and is open to a better one. You need to convince them that you provide it. That's way way easier - like orders of magnitude, a "completely different problem domain" kind of easier (It's worth noting that elevator pitch templates address the easier type of new) Next task, solve the first one in under 5 or so seconds of exposure: connect ideas, show it's a problem, demonstrate the mechanism, and propose a plausible solution that's easy to participate in. Maybe that's trivial for you but I personally have very little aptitude for that and struggle immensely with it [1] all those startup books become a giant soup after you read a bunch so sorry if this was like Moore or Christensen, I think it's Blank. If anyone remembers exactly where this was I'd love to find it again.
ironmagma 5y ago
If they don’t care, why do anything?
tomrod 5y ago
Yes, that's a common attitude that is corrected with antitrust legislation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ItsMonkk 5y ago
The important aspect is less of where the video is hosted, but where people are looking for content discovery. With the removal of dislikes, YouTube is actively making their content discovery worse. On the margin people should be looking for new content discovery options. You might see people drift to Reddit, you might see people drift to DIY StackExchange. That's the message we should be pushing in these conversations as a result of this, you should be changing your behavior. Once you move the discovery off YouTube, it becomes trivial to move the content to another video host. The discovery is the lock-in.
Terry_Roll 5y ago
Peertube, Patreon, Netflix, Sky.... do I need to list more?
ronnier 5y ago
TikTok will be what takes down youtube. It'll happen.
nostromo 5y ago
Content creators are already moving to TikTok. YouTube has a weaker position now than they’ve ever had. You may be a HN TikTok skeptic (there are many) but TikTok is already expanding to things you’d find on YouTube historically, like tutorials, DIY, arts and crafts.
_jal 5y ago
I just don't subscribe. It isn't even about incentives or trying to punish or whatever. Paying for the privilege of interacting with some shitty thing I don't like to be entertained.... doesn't seem entertaining to me.
soheil 5y ago
I think if you feel like YT is in the wrong and still care about your favorite creators the right thing to do is to cancel your Premium membership. The greater good here is to team up against YT since in the long run removing dislikes is bad for majority of YT users including the creators.
Epitom3 5y ago
> youtube premium lmfao

etchalon 5y ago

The chance this change was pushed without data, and tests, seems antithetical to what we know about the change and how it was rolled out. They did this with an understanding of its impact on engagement.

Metricon 5y ago

I've heard of a number of Youtube creators that are also placing their content on Odysee as a potential backup. I first heard of this site from Dave at EEVblog: https://www.youtube.com/c/EevblogDave/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/EevblogDave/videos https://odysee.com/@eevblog:7 https://odysee.com/@eevblog:7

jjcon 5y ago
Interesting - I first heard of odysee this week too from a VR channel I follow - it seems like a decent setup
aronpye 5y ago
“Welcome to odyssey: we have dislikes”, this made me smile
officeplant 5y ago
Doesn't give me a lot of hope with Dave being in the top list on odysee surrounded by alt-right creators who escaped there from other platforms. Plus his recent shilling of the crypto currency connected to odysee on twitter. I get that creators want to be paid and need a better home than youtube, but none of this bodes well to me yet.
- willis936 5y ago
  He's been dropping dogwhistles in his recent videos. It feels very mercenary, like he's saying controversial things because it makes his engagement numbers go up. It's fascinating to see the gears of the machine moving. Any gaps in the narrative "attention economy monopolists are profiting off divisive misinformation" are sewn shut in one picture.
matt123456789 5y ago
Maybe I live under a rock, but I’ve never heard of odysee. I’m definitely checking them out. I love that their tag line is “welcome, we have dislikes.”
- 5y ago

charcircuit 5y ago

As a heavy YouTube user the removal of the dislike count didn't effect me at all since the number was always useless to me. >because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch. That is YouTube's job. Their recommendation algorithm will try and suggest videos that are worthwhile for you to watch. The order that videos are recommend is how know which videos are likely more worthwhile for you to watch. After clicking on a video most people judge the video be just watching the first few seconds an opposed to looking at the likes. They will switch to a different video if they didn't find that one interesting. Another common behaviour is just skimming through a video.

dathinab 5y ago

I stopped using YT recommendations a while ago, not I only go back to the same channels and if any new channel gets added it's not from a YT source. Stupid "I don't want to think" content got replaced by twitch, even through many twitch streams contain hardly any interesting "content" they are sadly stile miles better then most/close to all "dump" YT content (because "dump" YT content has gotten pretty bad). And high quality YT content often gets demonetized and seldomly recommended, because its either not advertisement friendly enough or doesn't cover a wide enough audience spectrum.

rpowers 5y ago

From my experience the ones pushing for these ideas are the fresh grad PMs trying to do something big for "perf". The whole platform feels like Waymo, driverless.

alisonkisk 5y ago
This is ridiculously. Major changes like this are decided at the top.

mitchdoogle 5y ago

I'm really puzzled why anyone cares about this so passionately. I'm not a YouTube diehard but I use it pretty regularly to watch a handful of channels I like, maybe 2-3 hours per week watching videos on the site. Occasionally I'll search for how to video and click on whatever is in the top few results on Google. I've seen several posts now across different sites lamenting this change, but I've yet to see anything remotely persuasive that this is a bad thing. Sometimes I think it's just people being grumpy about any change at all, the way some people will grumble about a logo change despite it having no real consequence of how things work. In my personal experience, I rarely even noticed the dislike count. Sometimes I'd wonder who the few unfortunate people were who disliked a video with about 1000x as many likes. It reminded me of the 1 star reviews you see on Amazon complaining about the postman for a product that otherwise has a stellar record. I just assume something is wrong with those peoples computers which made their video glitch out or something. I don't really trust negative feedback that much when it is paired with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for the same thing. And I don't think I ever encountered a video with anywhere near the number of dislikes as likes, let alone more dislikes. I personally have never disliked a video. If I'm watching something new, I'll just watch part of the video myself, and decide if I want to watch the rest or click away to something else. When I heard the announcement of removing the count as an effort to combat brigading, it made a lot of sense to me. I've seen the growth of negativity across the internet in the last few years. People are actually addicted to outrage these days, so anything that can help eliminate that seems like a good idea to me. The fact they kept the button there and still show the count to the uploader seems like they've at least tried to appease the diehards who appreciate having that dislike button - pretty fair if you ask me. You may challenge the assumption that only diehards care about this, but I've just looked at a few videos in my feed to see the number of likes and it's abysmal. 40k likes for a video with 4M views. 18k likes for a video with 800k views. They're all like that. The like/dislike metric just doesn't have much engagement. While you predict dire consequences for YouTubes future and panic among their employees, I am thinking that casual users probably have not even noticed at all.

ford_o 5y ago
No idea what HOW TO videos you watch, but in my domain, 80% are garbage, where the dislike ratio saves me minutes of watch time on each.

emodendroket 5y ago

I think hanging out in places like this is drastically altering your perception of how much anybody noticed or cared about this change.

ddingus 5y ago
I agree and do take time to ask others about this stuff. Right now, I enjoy having a broad mix of people, young, old, men, women... to talk to. One thing I love is when they bring me stuff to discuss. The trick is to express an interest and make those conversations fun, real gives and takes. The numbers on people seeking news outside the established media are pretty high. YT and the White House did that public beta and that was noticed! Brought to me by others who probably would not otherwise. "Why hide dislikes for POTUS?" Why indeed! The people saying few care about the details like the HN crowd usually does are not wrong. But there is more to this than that. Discussing whether dislikes is useful to understand potential video quality is a mixed bag like proponents of that idea say. And in some instances, say for how to videos, it is a great metric, like those proponents say too. A higher order look at this is more like what normies are into. They ask how come this became an issue after POTUS, CNN and Fauci got ratioed non stop? They ask, "who decides what is misinformation? Is it the same people getting RussiaGate wrong for years, and who always seem excited about endless wars?" I can make a case for how hanging out here alters perceptions in like kind. Maybe more people talking outside their comfort zone, with a more diverse set of people and contexts is a good thing. Having done it for a while, I sure think so. People do not care too much about the details. They care a lot about being managed, essentially told they need to be guided in this way.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  It sounds a lot like the people you're talking to are Republican partisans who view most events through that lens.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    Not at all. I have a solid mix, and have cultivated that over a considerable time too. Started a decade ago. Indies, Dems, GOP, you name it. I enjoy politics and culture. No judgement, just frank talk. More people than you know find that to be high value and it is not easy. Those questions are not partisan. They do speak to class though.

lhorie 5y ago

> The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels Isn't that good for them though? Generally speaking, it's a lot easier for youtube to do a few red carpet partnership shenanigans with the ssniperwolfs and mrbeasts in the top ranks and screw the long tail. That story has played again and again all over the entertainment media industry. If everyone does what you're doing, they can potentially even get away with having to do less content moderation, or quietly "disappearing" channel categories, etc. You're already getting sort of played by relying on recommendation systems in the first place. People seem to think recommendations scour the deep web to cater to them personally, but the Occam's Razor take is that you get shown whatever the algorithm determines is clickbaity enough for your general flavor of hivemind.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

soheil 5y ago

I'm so confused why would hiding the dislike count impact the internal recommendation engine that has access to the dislike count?