26 ms·

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki is stepping down

441 points by mikece 4y ago

radiojasper 4y ago
Hopefully the new CEO will give a push for more / better live contents on the platform and for a better navigation structure on the website.
k8sToGo 4y ago
> Wojcicki, who joined Alphabet nearly 25 years ago… I’m not a journalist, but that doesn’t sound right.
- thetinguy 4y ago
  >Google was founded on September 4, 1998 Maybe she was an early employee?
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  - mikece 4y ago
    Google is that old, Alphabet isn't.
    - Arrath 4y ago
      Splitting hairs. "Joined the entity that would later become <a part of> Alphabet", big deal.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
  - flebron 4y ago
    I think k8sToGo's point is that she never "joined Alphabet", Alphabet did not exist when she joined Larry and Sergey. She joined concurrent with Google's founding as a company, she probably joined when the search engine was named Backrub. Alphabet would be created decades later.
    - k8sToGo 4y ago
      Exactly. But I guess people don’t care about accuracy anymore.
  - tinyhouse 4y ago
    If I'm not mistaken she was Sergei's girl friend back then or maybe it was her sister. Not sure but I remember his first wife had this last name.
    - ggambetta 4y ago
      Anne, sister, founded 23andme.
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- nickelpro 4y ago
  ? Google's first office was in her parents' garage
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    No, her garage. > With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki https://about.google/intl/en_us/our-story/ https://about.google/intl/en_us/our-story/
- ejvincent 4y ago
  Read the article: Wojcicki has been involved with Google practically since the beginning. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set up office in her parents' garage soon after they incorporated Google in 1998. Wojcicki became Google's first marketing manager the following year and played a role in the earliest Google Doodles. In 2006, she encouraged Google to buy YouTube, which launched a year earlier.
- joewhatkins 4y ago
  It’s accurate. Google was started out of her parent’s garage, and she became involved around then.
- yurylifshits 4y ago
  Google started as a research project in 1995 and incorporated in 1998. Susan was an employee number 16. 25 years sounds about right.
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- michaelt 4y ago
  > In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up office in Wojcicki's parents' garage in Menlo Park, California. [1] 2023-1998=25 Sounds right to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki#Career
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- layer8 4y ago
  Yes, Alphabet was created less than 8 years ago. She probably joined Google.
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cft 4y ago
Does this mean even more censorship or less?
- uSoldering 4y ago
  Considering the lead of the Trust and Safety team is taking over, less is unlikely.
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5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
- increasingly ignores your search keywords, instead shoving unrelated stuff at you - removed ability to sort videos by date - removed dislikes what else.....youtube UX has being getting worse for a few years.
- voisin 4y ago
  Fear not! Just serve more ads before and between every video! Sacrifice your user at the altar of advertisers and all will be fine in the world.
  - sammalloy 4y ago
    YouTube is almost unwatchable. The show I’m viewing now has an ad every minute or so. I don’t see how they will survive another few years. They’ve literally angered their user base to the point of abandoning the platform.
    - bagacrap 4y ago
      You can't afford $9 a month or whatever it is to remove the ads? What other service are you planning to use instead that has no ads and no subscription fee?
    - voisin 4y ago
      There’s no alternative (though Tik Tok certainly is doing a decent job of taking all the short content). I think it would be a gangbuster opportunity for Apple to integrate user created content into Apple TV. They don’t need to rely on ad revenue, and similar to Microsoft kneecapping Google with ChatGPT, it would be a great opportunity for Apple to further hurt Google by winning longer form video content and driving advertisers away from YouTube. But I am not sure Apple has the stomach for the controversy that often surrounds user generated content. Maybe Facebook would be the better competitor, though they are as beholden to advertisers as Google. All I know is that it will take a massively well financed group that can sustain the server costs of video streaming with most of it generating zero revenue.
posharma 4y ago
Curious why this is important enough to be on the front page. Even as a techie I don't find this news interesting, at least not HN front-page worthy. (Instead of down voting it would be nice to hear what others think as valid reasons). How does this affect our day-day lives?
- sokoloff 4y ago
  A change in leadership of what is almost surely a top 10 online property and something that >98% of HN readers use? That seems like something that would be of enough interest to make the top-30 stories for a period of time.
- mkaic 4y ago
  YouTube is one of the largest and most influential tech companies in the world, and wields huge social power. Some of the greatest content on the internet is hosted there, so it makes sense to me that HN readers would find a major change like this of interest. Wojcicki has been in charge of YouTube for a long time now, so hearing that she is stepping down and will be replaced opens up tons of space for speculation about where YouTube could be heading in the near future. Personally, as someone who spends many hours a week using YouTube, I find this article to be absolutely HN-front-page-worthy!
  - posharma 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - mkaic 4y ago
      If it's in the company of curious, smart people like the kind I routinely encounter here on HN, then yes! Absolutely! I greatly enjoy a good round of civil speculation and discussion with my fellow hackers :P
      - posharma 4y ago
        * There's absolutely nothing we could do to influence YouTube's leadership changes. * There's very little you can do to influence changes in the product YouTube as well. * There's very little we know about the internals of upper C-level leadership changes. Speculating is an utter waste of time. I don't see a point. For me this news was just another passable piece of information. Meh! Definitely not HN front-page worthy.
robmusial 4y ago
Hopefully this brings back the dislike button. Intellectually I know a change of CEO shouldn't/wouldn't impact a feature like this, but I am still annoyed at its absence and find it makes YouTube substantially less useful. Edit: I understand the dislike button is still there, I misspoke. But for my purposes of seeing like/dislike ratio, it might as well not be there.
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  Completely disagree. Getting rid of that button has significantly cleaned up the associated comments sections. I’ve also noticed a general improvement in my recommendations. Great move imo.
  - rolobio 4y ago
    How can you tell when a video contains something misleading? For example, I struggle to find quality DIY videos without the dislikes warning me away. Dislikes are a great way for the community to clean house.
    - robmusial 4y ago
      DIY videos are my primary concern on this as well. It is also why browser extensions don't help me too much because my use case is usually in the garage, half way through a project having issues, on my phone furiously trying to get a solution to the problem I'm having. I had this exact scenario yesterday trying to remove rounded/stripped lug nuts off my wheels. It would've been very helpful to be able to see if the video I was watching had 1000 likes but 6000 dislikes to know if what I was about to do was advisable or not. Yes, I read the comments and it ended up being a simple fix with the right tools, but the like/dislike ratio is a great way to filter dangerous/dumb/unhelpful videos.
      - khazhoux 4y ago
        Isn't YouTube already pushing down the bad-ratio videos, though? I know it's not the same as you being able to filter the counts yourself... but the data is being used to try to hide crap.
MKGoogle 4y ago
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dtx1 4y ago
We can all hate Youtube here for sure but when you listen to for example Linus from LTT he is very adamant that while youtube does have it's fair share of problems, when it comes to compensating creators fairly on their platform, they are much better than almost all others. And I personally enjoy Youtube very much. So much great content for free. If I need to learn about something i find myself looking into youtube first quite often.
- mkaic 4y ago
  Agreed. I would not be where I am in life today without the skills and knowledge I learned from YouTube. I am a huge fan of the way they compensate creators and align their incentives with creators' incentives, and generally just very pleased with the product they provide. I pay for Premium and it's the best monthly subscription I have imo — the sheer quantity of expertly-produced content on YT is unparalleled, and I've discovered so many new hobbies, interests, and people through it.
  - bredren 4y ago
    I’m not familiar w the compensation mechanism but am part of a YouTube premium family subscription and agree on the overall value. The content is unparalleled. Home repair is one of my most valued content types on the site. There are many, many different types of house problems and solutions covered by videos. Even when you get to something that seemingly has no person describing the problem and fix, you can often get close enough to improvise based on other people’s ideas. YouTube is a skill building platform. You can save money by becoming more self-reliant. Despite other comments here, I think the search is quite good. It sometimes ignores keywords but returns the video I _intended_ to seek. I don’t care for shorts, though and would hide them completely if able. It would also be good to have relatively anonymous ways to upload video. Sometimes I’ll establish a novel solution and would post the information but wouldn’t want it associated with my identity—or even to monetize it.
- joenathanone 4y ago
  If you have a large channel sure, but they cut off smaller creators a while back with their new monetization requirements.
anonreeeeplor 4y ago
I believe it is related to this movement to subpoena big tech about “collusion with government” https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/15/jim-jordan-subpoenas-alphabet-amazon-apple-meta-and-microsoft-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/15/jim-jordan-subpoenas-alphabe... Either she is being blamed, or she is deeply guilty and wants to try to avoid the publicity, or they anticipate this will become extremely ugly. Or sundar is blaming her for lining him up for a firing squad. Or she is a liability due to her past work. Regardless, it seems like she is leaving because what she had to do to make the government happy previously is now going to be used against Google. Someone else mentioned the theory that she might be the best Sundar replacement. Maybe she found out it’s not her or Sundar is eliminating competition here.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
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- fullshark 4y ago
  Maybe, but I also think a lot of these people that hit the jackpot from the maturation of the internet the last 25 years are just going to quit cause the job is going to suck going forward. Being an internet tech executive when the industry is no longer growing ridiculously and is just another sector of the economy like durable good manufacturing, or real estate development or whatever might not be very fun anymore. The founders themselves of these companies have already gotten a headstart.
- minimaxir 4y ago
  YouTube has been under far more dangerous regulatory scrutiny than that.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Nobody is falling on the sword for that circus. The "Twitter Files" were not very meaningful. After 25 years and being worst case a hundred-millionaire, what's the point?
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gpt5 4y ago
I always saw her as one of the best candidates to become the Twitter CEO. She has the industry credence, and the experience of leading and making both google ads and YouTube successful (the two parts that Twitter needs help with). I wonder if Elon Musk would notice.
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  It would be ironic if Twitter turned into a graveyard for former Googlers, considering how many of them have been shut out from ever working at Google again/being rehired by the company end of their respective non-compete periods.
  - nebula8804 4y ago
    >considering how many of them have been shut out from ever working at Google again/being rehired by the company end of their respective non-compete periods. Is this because of layoffs or something else happening? I would think that mass layoffs would still allow eligibility for rehire down the road?
- verteu 4y ago
  Would you really want Twitter run by Sergei Brin's sister-in-law?
  - gpt5 4y ago
    Are you suggesting that she is less qualified because of her sister's past relationships?
    - verteu 4y ago
      No. I'm worried competition/antitrust will suffer when a small number of dominant media companies are run by close relatives.
- vnchr 4y ago
  I think there's some conflict in their philosophies on free speech.
ramraj07 4y ago
So much hate for her on all fronts, yet she made the most rewarding media platform today on the internet. Any creator or consumer who has half a brain should realize the magnitude of the feat and how unobvious it is that YouTube exists as it does today.
- pzduniak 4y ago
  Rewarding to who? And _she_ made it? To me YT continued its successful streak despite of the poor changes with not much to attribute to people actually making the calls.
  - ncann 4y ago
    Exactly, she was only CEO since 2014. Saying she made YT is laughable, if anything most of the annoying things at YT happened under her reign, from bogus DMCAs to dislike button removal to the force fed YT shorts and so on.
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    - causi 4y ago
      Don't forget having to have a fucking Google+ account. I'm proudly one of the few who spent half a decade being unable to comment or send direct messages because I refused to assent to the Google+ account creation pop-up.
      - nostrademons 4y ago
        That wasn't under her. Google+ launched in 2011; Salar Kamangar was CEO of YouTube at the time.
      - zo1 4y ago
        Google plus is still "around", it's just not a social media network. A conspiracy theorist would argue it succeeded in its purpose: to unify all accounts under a single Google account banner. Google music, android, YouTube, maps, Gmail, search, drive, etc. We didn't even notice it happening, like frogs being boiled. E.g. try being anonymous on a fresh Android device now. You can't even access the play store without logging in.
joegahona 4y ago
I'm nervous about this. YouTube Premium is my favorite and most-used product. As long as ads stay gone and my grandfathered price doesn't change, I'm a very happy user.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  > grandfathered price doesn't change ... and you get cost of living salary increases at the same time, right? Sadly a market oriented economy just doesn't work this way.
- bredren 4y ago
  I am part of a “YouTube family” that shares the premium family plan. We collect payment every six months. Makes the price low enough to beat the hassle of various ad blocking methods across many platforms and devices.
- mkaic 4y ago
  Agreed. I am a massive fan of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. While I am a bit nervous because major change like this could lead to those products getting worse, I'm also hopeful that it could lead to them getting better! So in general I'm just eager to see what happens next, come what may.
  - jossclimb 4y ago
    can you sell it to a current spotify user?
    - buggy6257 4y ago
      When I first compared Spotify/YT Premium (Google Music at the time): - Relatively similar offerings of music, at least when it came to my tastes. I have a wide variety and some weird stuff in there, but both worked for me to find whatever I thought of. - Relatively similar price ($10 Spotify vs $12 YT), so I knew I needed at least some extra value from YT to justify - YT Premium not only gives me YT Music, but also HASSLE FREE ad-free YT. What I mean is -- I don't have to manage extensions for web youtube and apps for Android or iOS or using NextDNS or a pihole or something just to get "ad free" from YT. It just works. Not having ads, and not having to CARE is a big value add for me. This alone is well worth $2 a month just in the time it saves me dealing with it. - YT Premium USED to be Google Music, which I loved the UI of way more than Spotify. I am still VERY upset at YT Music since it's objectively worse than Google Music in every way, but it's still the same goddamn company - AT THE TIME, I was having serious issues getting Spotify to play music from cache. Even if I cached, it would still default to streaming it as long as I had data. This resulted in huge data usage each month. I am SURE this is fixed by now. But this went into the calculus for me at the time. Would I move over to Spotify? I think the things that would push me back would be an increase in YT price, a further degradation in YT Music UX, some new killer feature Spotify has/gets (podcasts aren't my thing) This was a VERY long answer which can TLDR to "Having ad-free YouTube + Music all at once for $2 more was well worth not having to give a crap about all the infrastructure needed to block ads across all my devices forever."
msikora 4y ago
Hopefully Sundar's turn next!
- slt2021 4y ago
  Agree. Google desperately needs to clean house on the executive/management/VP side
- muttantt 4y ago
  He's busy working on ChaatGPT
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falcolas 4y ago
Speculation: I wonder if any of this relates to the Supreme Court Gonzalez v. Google case? (basically, the SC is reviewing YouTube's Section 230 protections due to the use of recommendation engines)
- justinzollars 4y ago
  Thats awesome! was not aware of this https://www.brookings.edu/events/gonzalez-v-google-and-the-fate-of-section-230/ https://www.brookings.edu/events/gonzalez-v-google-and-the-f...
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bioemerl 4y ago
Being replaced by someone with years of working on ads, who was brought into the company as a result of the purchase of DoubleClick. I would broadly expect YouTube to get worse as a result of this.
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- sagarm 4y ago
  Susan also came from ads.
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mrkramer 4y ago
>She's 'starting a new chapter' to focus on her family, health and passion projects. So YouTube wasn't her passion project?! C'mon.
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ez_mmk 4y ago
W
thanatropism 4y ago
> focus on family Maybe just wants kids?
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
  I'm sorry, what?
  - Strom 4y ago
    Maybe not new ones, but more time with existing ones. Could also just be a firing.
tasubotadas 4y ago
That crazy push for 10min and longer videos was a sole reason why tiktok happened. I still remember that there used to be short and super informative videos before but now everything is so stretched out with low info density
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- tempnow987 4y ago
  God, I wondered why these youtubers can't stop with the super long introductions, walkarounds to tell us something basic that could be explained in 2-3 minutes TOPS.
  - margorczynski 4y ago
    Yeah, lot of noise added. Reminds of those content mill articles that dance around the subject/question for 80% of the length of the article just to keep you for longer and increase the chance of clicking an ad.
  - rullelito 4y ago
    It has to be long for you to get any ad revenue, I thought?
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  There is quite some value in longer videos. However there seems to be a thing that you need 10 minutes for monetisation, so people stretch content not needing much time to those 10 minutes ...
- robotnikman 4y ago
  I remember some of the best youtube content I've seen was less than 10 minutes in length, like short animations and other content which took a lot of time to produce in small amounts.
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gsatic 4y ago
She got us to 100 miilion 'how to boil egg' videos. Hopefully the next corporate robot in charge or Bard (if the rumors are true) can take us to 1 billion.
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neosat 4y ago
YouTube has been riding it's content momentum for too long. It really needs a change of leadership to continue to innovate. For some searches, it's baffling that the top results are clearly intuitively wrong (e.g. showing videos where dislike to like ratio is very high, compared to clearly better alternatives that you can find if you wade through the results)
- ignoramous 4y ago
  I thought YouTube did really well under Wojcicki's leadership.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    Well.... not really. - Why does seemingly every channel I follow, whether it be JCS Criminal Psychology or The 8-bit Guy, have to mention the YouTube Algorithm, Content ID, Copyright Strikes, or Community Guidelines? If almost every creator is struggling and not just the fringe and edgy, you've screwed up big time. - Removal of the dislike count. Extremely unpopular decision. Also YouTube's API is still answering dislike counts making extensions to bring it back still function, despite over a year later, almost implying it was about keeping up appearances. Now... who could be so worried about keeping up appearances... - Completely blowing up YouTube Rewind into an increasingly corporate affair that quickly started heading downhill until the absolute train wreck of 2018, where it became the most disliked video in YouTube history at that point. This was, in part, because YouTube basically sanitized it of the presence of the popular YouTubers at the time because they might not be advertiser-friendly. Rewind never recovered and YouTube has now given up trying to engage with the community in such a way. - Taking a 5-second ad at the beginning of her tenure, and leaving it with multiple, constant, unskippable, rampant advertising; and a subscription plan that started at $10/mo. turning into $23/mo. for equivalent service (5 users). - Launched YouTube Kids to provide a curated experience for younger individuals, then decided to make it run on automation. Which then screwed up big time and started serving kids extremely inappropriate content causing a brief congressional inquiry. Then YouTube settled as guilty to violating COPAA, and decided to shift all the responsibility on the creators by disabling comments and other features on any video that may possibly be seen by kids. Some "success"...
paulpauper 4y ago
my suggestions: 1. make dislikes visible 2. no more covid warnings/disclaimers on content. Public health is important, but this beyond the scope or role of youtube. If the CDC, WHO etc. want to buy YouTube ads warning of covid misinformation, they can do so, and can afford to. 3. do more about accounts being hacked and repurposed for elon musk livestream scams 4. fewer ads, or no more 15 second ads. The max length should be 10 seconds, and no more than a single ad at a time, instead of having two ads back-to-back.
- jfoster 4y ago
  Regarding warnings/disclaimers on content, I find genuinely helpful ones are far more palatable than censorship. I think Twitter's Community Notes is a great example of this. From what I've seen, YouTubers are concerned about their videos getting censored or demonetized to a degree that indicates YouTube are being far too heavy handed.
bitL 4y ago
Bring back the original founders from UIUC instead?
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.
robbiet480 4y ago
Discussion of her actual announcement at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34821472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34821472
lvl102 4y ago
She quite literally got this far because of family. Geez I wonder why Youtube remains one of the most underperforming media assets. Edit: SV is full of nepotism.
- moffkalast 4y ago
  Well given that Youtube gets its money from making the user experience terrible via ad bombardment... that sounds like a good thing? They'd get more revenue by breaking things like uBlock origin being able to completely remove all ads. Not something we really want them to do I think.
- robk 4y ago
  Not true. Her sister met Sergey because they were in her garage. She got the job fair and square.
  - lvl102 4y ago
    This is like saying Ron Wayne should run the freaking Mac division because he was there first. She’s just not that smart. She only got around on her dad’s legacy prior to Google. She added zero value to Youtube.
- sosodev 4y ago
  How do you figure? She worked for Google for nearly 15 years before becoming the CEO of YT. If anything it sounds like she was peter principled.
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labrador 4y ago
YouTube for the things I enjoy has improved dramatically because the comment section is vastly improved. Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of a comment section dumpster fire, but they fixed it. I've seen the recommendations get better then worse then better again as they tweaked the algorithms. Right now it's better than it's ever been. Again, for me. One complaint: I like to upload interesting clips from this or that. I got my first copy right strike on a clip of Russel Brand talking to Terry Gross of NPR about life on heroin because I thought it was helpful for people. YouTube told me I could only get 3 strikes before they disabled my account, which I assume they mean they will disable my GMail. I can't have that so I don't upload interesting clips anymore. In fact, I don't upload anything since I don't want to lose my GMail. So the complaint is why didn't YouTube tell me when I uploaded it that I couldn't? I'd be ok with that. So I give Ms Wojcicki a people choice grade of B+ overall
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  It got so bad that I have essentially stopped reading the comments. Ever.
- bitcharmer 4y ago
  Are you a real person? Because everyone in my circles have the exact opposite impression. Are you also of the opinion that Google search improved?
- aeyes 4y ago
  Nowadays the comment section on several channels I watch is full of spam, oftentimes 50+ fake accounts responding to each other in threads.
  - labrador 4y ago
    I don't see that on the videos I watch. For example, this section from a song I recently listened to. Very nice comments. The Beatles - Within You Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck Do you see a bunch of spam comments? Maybe my ad blocker is blocking them?
gjsman-1000 4y ago
To be honest... good riddance. Her tenure will probably be remembered for YouTube's slowly increasing decline into irrelevancy among the young enamored with TikTok and Instagram, increasing and significant censorship misfires (the moment almost every creator has to mention Content ID and the YouTube algorithm or the community guidelines, you've screwed up), the removal of the dislike button despite overwhelming negative feedback to the change in what appears to have been a method of placating advertisers, and the total butchering of YouTube Rewind into a corporate affair before finally giving up.
- DeltaCoast 4y ago
  Youtube is the top platform for teens, according to pew research. "YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67%), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six-in-ten teens. After those platforms come Facebook with 32% and smaller shares who use Twitter, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit and Tumblr." https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...
droptablemain 4y ago
YouTube has become such an unfree, restricted platform in recent years. Hopefully that changes, although I doubt it.
- dmonitor 4y ago
  You can thank the concerted media effort to paint Youtube as a host for terrorist propaganda for that. The adpocalypse changed the site permanently for the worse, and a lot of people seem to overlook that. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/ads-shown-isis-videos-youtube-catch-companies-guard-n320946 https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/ads-shown-isis... this was a huge story overnight with tons of advertisers pulling out of youtube. the site became a lot more locked down after this and a few more advertiser threats in the following years.
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v3ss0n 4y ago
What most annoying is yt now showing vids that are already watched just a day afoy. Including shorts. They can't even do a proper sorting now
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game_the0ry 4y ago
I was big time addicted to youtube for a while starting around 2010, mostly bc the recommended videos were so good and content that was uploaded was more raw and silly then now. But at some point the recommendations got really bad, so much so that it made it a lot less enjoyable. I miss those days.
- xnx 4y ago
  10 minute minimum length for monetization killed short good content. There's still good content, but it doesnt respect your time.
  - jedberg 4y ago
    Seriously. I've seen videos with two minutes of very interesting content and 8 minutes of fluff. It's so frustrating.
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    Now they're pushing shorts, which are (in my opinion) too short to convey all the relevant info. Not sure how monetization works with shorts, since I use an adblock, but 50%+ of my subscription feed is shorts on some days and it suck (for me personally)
    - mackrevinack 4y ago
      if the adblock you're using is ublock origin then you can add this to your filters to block shorts on the homepage www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-rich-shelf-renderer.style-scope there's probably more filters to block shorts in other places like the suggestions sidebar if you look for them, but i have the sidebar disabled completely so the above filter was enough for me
  - johnnyanmac 4y ago
    ironically enough Patreon brought it back a bit. At least for the biggest animators and short form creators. YT is a great advertising platform for certain channels and kinds of content. YT shorts I guess is their solution to that... Still not a big fan and I hear the rates paid to yourubers is horrible.
skilled 4y ago
YouTube is an absolute trash platform and has been long before Susan became a CEO. Which goes to show just how incapable she was for the role. The same algorithm that YouTube was using for recommendations 10 years ago is still the same algorithm being used today. An absolute disgrace and a spat in the face for the platforms users.
breck 4y ago
YouTube started out as a site that gave the middle finger to (c)opywrong laws, and it still has that spirit alive, while growing into an incredible resource to learn and grow. It's also damn fast and easy to publish to. Thank you Susan!
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  > YouTube started out as a site that gave the middle finger to (c)opywrong laws, and it still has that spirit alive, no it doesn't has that spirit anymore, channels who get too many copyright strikes get banned. Why do you even credit "Susan" for any of that? She isn't a Youtube founder, but a pure product of Google culture.
daltont 4y ago
Hopefully, the "stop showing me this ad" feature gets fixed. I'm tired of always being presented with an ad for the "Dixie Store". No, I don't want to shop for Confederate flags and other garbage.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  I'm tired of the ads asking "Are you gay? Take this 10-minute quiz!"
  - galleywest200 4y ago
    Or alcohol ads when you have given up the juice.
    - stemlord 4y ago
      Amazing reason to use an adblocker
    - oehpr 4y ago
      Oooof. You may be able to disable that in googles ad choices setting. Assuming you have a google account. To get there, when you see a youtube add, there should be some text in the bottom right, "Ad 1 of 2" and then an information icon, click that. and scroll down the popup and you should see "ad settings" If you don't have an account then I'd really recommend an ad blocker in this circumstance.
- britch 4y ago
  One of the best Twitter features was the "ad dislike" It can be done
  - tincholio 4y ago
    I kept getting promoted posts for crypto bullshit stuff, even though I consistently disliked them. I'm not sure there was a proper implementation of that feature in Twitter at all...
rejectfinite 4y ago
Ok. I don't pay for YT Premium. I mostly watch streamers and documentaries on Youtube. I find the recommends are perfect. You do have to "train" it, though.
pradn 4y ago
Positives: * Presided over a vast increase in revenue, from $4 to $29 billion * Steered the ship through a number of content controversies * Anecdotally, the brand value of YouTube remains good * YouTube Premium seems to have good uptake * Presided over enormous cost savings with custom encoder hardware * Few major technical outages, good streaming performance generally * Relationships with advertisers and content creators generally remain good Negatives: * Missed the Twitch/streaming wave * Missed the TikTok, short video wave * YouTube Originals flopped (partly bc they didn't commit hard enough, not like Netflix or Amazon) * Overall low user experience - slow/complex website and apps * Issues for content creators - overly aggressive ContentID, not rewarding short but valuable videos enough (indie animation), opaque demonetization rules * No shrinking of the algorithmic filter bubble
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  > * Relationships with advertisers and content creators generally remain good I'd say this is due to lack of competition and network effects than a good relationship. CuriosityStream, Nebula, and even channels as benign as Linus Tech Tips trying to get Floatplane off the ground show this relationship is far from strong. Your non-edgy creators wouldn't be trying to replace you if they thought you were doing a good job.
  - pradn 4y ago
    It's not perfect, but it's not terrible either. Millions of creators and billions of users generally have a good experience on YouTube. There's been no "let's try Mastodon" moment.
- ris58h 4y ago
  > Overall low user experience I literally have to wait for 5 seconds for 3 dot menus under videos to load on the main page. It's ridiculous.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Just discovered something very interesting: She is resigning one day after Google received a subpoena from the U.S. House of Representatives demanding answers to questions on censorship of conservative voices, and specifically on content moderation decisions. Yes, just yesterday. Subpoena to resignation. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-republicans-subpoena-big-tech-ceos-over-censorship-claims/ar-AA17xziB https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-republicans-subpoena... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/15/house-republican-subpoena-big-tech/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/15/house-r... https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3859762-house-gop-subpoenas-big-tech-companies-over-content-moderation-decisions/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3859762-house-gop-subp... That's actually a really bad look (pro PR tip: Don't resign immediately after bad press - delay your resignation to avoid association if possible - or, if you know a certain political group doesn't like you and you're planning to retire, maybe resign before they get into power). Particularly important because Twitter is all over that "connection" right now that was pretty unnecessary. It appears that the subpoena was directed at Google, but her resignation means she may not have to personally have to personally testify, as Google could send the new CEO in.
CSDude 4y ago
Can I get my dislike button back now? Youtube has been a significantly worse place since that.
- Whatarethese 4y ago
  Have you downloaded the extension that brings that back?
  - r3vo 4y ago
    Only works against the database the extension manages. Biased in comparison to the native dislike button.
    - oehpr 4y ago
      I used to think that was a negative until I realized I had more in common with the people who had that extension installed than I did with youtube at large.
- ac29 4y ago
  Mine never disappeared, only the dislike count.
  - junon 4y ago
    That's what they meant. The count is gone.
- spurgu 4y ago
  I've been using the Return YouTube Dislike extension[0] for a couple of weeks now and it seems to be working surprisingly well (due to the relatively large user base probably, surprised it hasn't been mentioned here). It uses a combination of dislike data of other users of the extension combined with data from older videos which still have dislike count accessible through the API. And yeah, hiding the dislike count was an extremely weird/annoying move, given that it was a good quality indicator which is now completely gone. It doesn't matter if a video has 1M likes if it has 3M dislikes, in which case it probably sucks. Nor are you misled to believe a video with only 3k likes is bad if it doesn't have more than 22 dislikes. As with everything you should keep context in mind. For example if you're watching a video on a political topic (or by a controversial character) then the ratio will be more even, even for high quality videos. But the point is: Give the user the information, don't assume they are dumb. [0] Links for Chrome/Firefox/etc: https://returnyoutubedislike.com/install https://returnyoutubedislike.com/install
kentosi 4y ago
Dear Youtube: Please please please have an option to filter out "shorts" on the web version. None of the normal controls exist: playback speed, jump to position, etc. The desktop web interface is a terrible place for these.
- stewartbutler 4y ago
  As a stopgap, you can use a URL redirector: Redirect: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/* to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1
- MzHN 4y ago
  Behind the scenes the shorts are just normal YouTube videos. You can change the /shorts/ to /watch?v= in the URL and they work fine. There are addons to do this redirect automatically, but I haven't bothered. Why they force the terrible UI on desktop is beyond me though.
- kentlyons 4y ago
  I use an extension to remove them - no affiliation but it seems to work. Chrome: "No YouTube Shorts". Between that, a plugin to remove already watched videos and my ad blocker, youtube is a way better experience!
  - teddyh 4y ago
    I use Remove YouTube Suggestions: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/ https://lawrencehook.com/rys/> It has settings for a lot of customizations, including removing shorts. (You can keep suggestions if you want to.)
- mustacheemperor 4y ago
  I'd like the option to filter out cable tv news designed to emotionally outrage from my recommendations. I'm well aware there is a land war in Europe right now, when I turn on the TV at 6pm on a Thursday to watch cooking videos I don't need reminders pushed in my face. Out of all the issues with youtube, this is probably the one that has the most real negative cognitive impact for me.
nperez 4y ago
There is so much untapped potential in Youtube right now. Hopefully new leadership means improvements in YT Live and YT Music, both of which feel like afterthoughts even though they have large competitors.
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  They have Sunday ticket now which could be a game changer.
grapesurgeon 4y ago
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rurp 4y ago
After winning the Free Expression award[0] there just wasn't much left for her to accomplish there. https://www.theblaze.com/news/youtube-ceo-receives-free-expression-award https://www.theblaze.com/news/youtube-ceo-receives-free-expr...
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1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
Five days out from the Gonzalez v Google hearing. If the decision goes against Google, perhaps some will question YouTube's decision-making around recommendations.
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haolez 4y ago
Thank you, Susan, for (maybe?) being responsible for the only case in Big Tech where you can actually pay to not be the product yourself. YouTube Premium is awesome.
- deleted 4y ago
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- wslh 4y ago
  Well, you continue to be a product delivering a lot of metrics to the platform beyond the ads you don't see, surely you are optimizing others ads. Not saying YouTube Premium is awesome, though.
  - haolez 4y ago
    Yes, but if they eventually get more revenue from this than ads, the incentives will align more with the user. It's not likely to happen, but it's not too far fetched either.
mbrameld 4y ago
Right now YouTube has a big scammer problem. People impersonate channel owners and reply to comments on their videos with phishing links. Several creators I follow are now putting a warning at the beginning of their videos to help educate people, but it seems like this is something YouTube could and should fix. Another probable issue is the upcoming Supreme Court decision about Section 230 protections. Maybe Wojcicki sees that writing on the wall.
- deleted 4y ago
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- _gabe_ 4y ago
  > People impersonate channel owners and reply to comments on their videos with phishing links Not only this, YouTube literally allows scammers to run ads and you can't report it. I saw an ad with Mr. Beast pop up offering $1,000 to the first X people to click on it. I clicked, because it sounds like something he would do and I was curious and figured YouTube wouldn't let a scammer advertise. Once I landed on the page it was immediately clear from the domain that it was a scam, but the page looked legit. It's astounding that YouTube is alright with openly running scammers ads for them.
option 4y ago
I really hate youtube shorts. Can I completely turn them off? And whose idea was that??
- mr90210 4y ago
  +1 I pay a premium subscription to not see ads, and I wish were able to disable shorts as well.
- deleted 4y ago
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- bagels 4y ago
  It was the idea of all the people that gave TikTok so much watch time.
- suby 4y ago
  There are extensions which will convert shorts into the regular UI, you should be able to find one through Google.
- kevincox 4y ago
  I don't really mind that they added a new interface for viewing short videos. Buy what I don't like is that when I get linked to the new player it is lacking tons of features for no apparent upside (you can work around this by manually fixing the URL) and your can't play then via Chromecast (but old vertical videos not tagged #shorts work perfectly fine). Sure, add a browser for short vertical videos. But don't ruin the existing experience for no reason.
jokoon 4y ago
I wonder if demonetization practices caused youtube to bleed creators. There was so much drama around youtubers and how youtube treated them. I guess Youtube must always obey its advertisers.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Due to demonitization some types of videos (especially political, "current affairs", medical, anything (even comedy) using curse words, etc.) almost always get demonetized and many people have stopped such content since it's not worth it. During covid times it was so bad, that even mentioning "covid" in a video got some of them demonetized (even in non-medical context, eg. "shippments from china got delayed due to covid").
  - mablopoule 4y ago
    Yes, I wonder how we went from "9/11 never forget" to "Don't even mention the subject if you want to keep earning money for your effort in creating content" [1]. YouTube is weird when it comes to completely arbitrary demonetization (and the absolutely braindead idea of removing the downvote counter) because it's one of the rare plateform that get so much negative goodwill from content creator who depends on it to make some money. [1] One famous french Youtubeur, "Joueur du Grenier" has to playfully bypass the subject by joking that "Nothing whatsoever happened between the 10th and the 12th September" while showing 2 plastic bottles being hit by paper airplane and then crumbling. He originally put real images of 9/11 while describing the early 00's zeitgeist, but had to do that instead since it caused the video to not be sent to subscribers (or demonetized to oblivion, I forgot which)
  - robswc 4y ago
    I honestly think YouTube could have stood up to the advertisers... I also think it was way overblown. Too many people got caught in the crosshairs.
    - qball 4y ago
      >I honestly think YouTube could have stood up to the advertisers. No, YouTube was looking for an excuse to clean house. Advertisers have had the tools to stop their ads from appearing per video type for a long time now, so the claim that "it's the advertisers" was obvious misinformation. >Too many people got caught in the crosshairs. And yet, YouTube has yet to be dethroned; seems to be working fine for them.
web3-is-a-scam 4y ago
Maybe they can do something about the endless crypto scams about "elon musk projects" that use (really lousy) deep fakes and the same script across dozens of different advertising accounts. Doubt they will though.
throw7 4y ago
youtube has run its course. it's basically a medium for corporate (read: tv). everything can be disabled and, most importantly, dislikes are globally disabled. It says Mohan launched 'youtube music' and 'shorts' et al. well, youtube music killed google play music, so not a fan; and shorts are the most recent annoying unfilterable addition to youtube. ah well.
tootie 4y ago
It seems to me that YT as a product has vastly improved during her tenure and become an incredibly valuable brand that probably has more value than "Google" at this point. It's facing an existential threat in TikTok and still hanging on. It more or less shoved Vimeo aside. It's definitely moved on a bit from the early days of purely "home video" amateur content to be a real marketplace for professional and aspiring professional content.
dzonga 4y ago
this should've the person to get the reigns at google and run google. however, they got a chrome pm as ceo. and now the company is floundering. if the youtube CEO made a billion in remuneration, it will be well deserved compared to say some CEO / CPO's eg the recent Coinbase CPO or Mozilla CEO.
esel2k 4y ago
Reading through the comments the audience seems very split between lovers and haters. At the end Susan managed to have a product on the market that was number 1 in its category, created revenue and has survived for so long. I think she deserve a fair amount of respect and acknowledgement, ad I have not seen any other platform with that track record (yep no time for envy, just hard facts).
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  Maybe I need to read more, but I have yet to hear a positive comment, just neutral "nothing will really change" sorts of comments. I subscribe to that thought. One CEO isn't doing as much damage to a product this big as people thought. The dislike feature isn't coming back nor any other engineering feature that affected users.
est 4y ago
google might have a chance to win the LLM battle, to train multi-modal LLM based on youtube videos, which is a huge advantage over Microsoft. OpenAI's Codex model got the reasoning ability through github. LLM could learn so much more with real-life videos in an embodied way.
- bagacrap 4y ago
  That would require better speech recognition. Judging by automated subtitles, it's not there yet. And I don't think YouTube videos tend to have better veracity than the web at large. Maybe YouTube videos can be used to train models on how to verbally present information in a compelling way, but I don't see how it would make an AI better at generating written text.
  - est 4y ago
    > That would require better speech recognition No, I mean ML can recognize real-world objects like human eyes do. They have a raw, direct understanding of the visual "world", an alternative to parse the world facts only by texts.
spike021 4y ago
YouTube recommendations have always sucked for me. But ever since Shorts was released, I constantly get amazing science channel shorts that are usually bite sized chemistry or physics experiments. I'm really enjoying them. Not sure how they even came to be recommended to me because I was never one to search for them before. Kids have it so good these days.
- dmix 4y ago
  Maybe they learned from TikTok? What matters most is what people watch from beginning to end, not what people "like and subscribe" to. Short videos are an easier signal for this than 1-20min+ videos.
  - spike021 4y ago
    That is definitely the case. I guess I was thinking more in terms of how the recommendations just one day populated with cool science content for no obvious reason in a format (shorts) that works so well.
kderbyma 4y ago
Using YouTube is physically painful. I am pretty sure if I was at risk of heart problems, I would be advised to avoid YouTube. it's UX is fatal. it raise blood pressure almost instantly and it has the feature set of a vaporware product demonstration as far as sort and search is concerned. it's like YouTube decided to make a point of removing all useful search and sort functionality and make sure it was nothing but a glorified vending machine arm serving up 'chances' to find what you are looking for while being bombarded worst than minesweeper on extreme difficulty.
- ivanjermakov 4y ago
  Oh yes, search is the worse. They inserted a few widets with unrelated videos ("People also watched", "Previously watched", etc.) after the first 5 results and you have to scroll through multiple pages to get to the next search results.
grej 4y ago
With Wojcicki stepping down, what YouTube executive will be the next one to win the YouTube sponsored Freedom Of Expression Award?
m3kw9 4y ago
Discovery sucks on it, I feel like walking into an echo chamber everytime I go in
- bagacrap 4y ago
  what platform is not an echo chamber? For example, if you don't want to read tangentially related pet peeves every time bigtechco is in the news, you stop coming to HN. You stop coming to HN, and only complainers are left.
  - m3kw9 4y ago
    HN is different, it seem separate from the rest of Reddit. The comments are almost always informative without karma farmers popping crowd pleasing jokes
jameyk 4y ago
Head Censor stepping down.
didip 4y ago
She is the last exec I expected to step down. YouTube vastly improved in the recent years. If there's anyone who should step down, it's Sundar. What an uninspiring leader.
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- xaldir 4y ago
  > YouTube vastly improved in the recent years. Can you explain how? From my perspective, the platform is still struggling to get the basics right : lots of spam in the comments, recommendation is meh at best, some videos are hard to find even when typing the exact title in the search bar and I can go on and on.
nxten 4y ago
Hopefully crypto/webniar scam ads stop now
thomassmith65 4y ago
When people have an emotional fondness for a 'brand', that fondness can blind them to its faults. Cognitive dissonance makes it difficult for people to hold views such as "Roman Polanski is both a gross person and a brilliant director" or "Eminem's lyrics were witty, but their cultural influence was unhealthy" and so on. People love Youtube because Youtube had the financial resources to store more video than any other service, and people love videos. Youtube itself is a shitshow, famous for hosting the largest collection of low-quality comments on the planet – and Wojcicki has been okay with that. A better calibre of human being would have fixed Youtube – or resigned trying – years ago (eg: 2015, when Youtube became world's largest and most effective extremist recruitment service). Wojcicki's best asset was perhaps an ability to keep her name out of the tech news cycle, and that's probably because 'Wojcicki' is difficult to spell more than any personal talent. Youtube is great inasmuch as videos are great, but almost any other tech company would have been a better steward of humanity's video archive. So my view is: Fantastic! I will not miss her – in fact I'll ride a wave of endorphins from this news all week.
rldjbpin 4y ago
the only positive thing i can say about the changes during the era under her is that now makers of the videos get to keep a chunk of money if they use a "copyrighted" song. it used to be slurped entirely by the "copyright holder" till recently. but i also empathize with someone trying to break even from a very expensive-to-run platform.

441 points by mikece 4y ago

Hopefully the new CEO will give a push for more / better live contents on the platform and for a better navigation structure on the website.

k8sToGo 4y ago

> Wojcicki, who joined Alphabet nearly 25 years ago… I’m not a journalist, but that doesn’t sound right.

thetinguy 4y ago
>Google was founded on September 4, 1998 Maybe she was an early employee?
- deleted 4y ago
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- mikece 4y ago
  Google is that old, Alphabet isn't.
  - Arrath 4y ago
    Splitting hairs. "Joined the entity that would later become <a part of> Alphabet", big deal.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
- flebron 4y ago
  I think k8sToGo's point is that she never "joined Alphabet", Alphabet did not exist when she joined Larry and Sergey. She joined concurrent with Google's founding as a company, she probably joined when the search engine was named Backrub. Alphabet would be created decades later.
  - k8sToGo 4y ago
    Exactly. But I guess people don’t care about accuracy anymore.
- tinyhouse 4y ago
  If I'm not mistaken she was Sergei's girl friend back then or maybe it was her sister. Not sure but I remember his first wife had this last name.
  - ggambetta 4y ago
    Anne, sister, founded 23andme.
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nickelpro 4y ago
? Google's first office was in her parents' garage
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  No, her garage. > With this investment, the newly incorporated team made the upgrade from the dorms to their first office: a garage in suburban Menlo Park, California, owned by Susan Wojcicki https://about.google/intl/en_us/our-story/ https://about.google/intl/en_us/our-story/
ejvincent 4y ago
Read the article: Wojcicki has been involved with Google practically since the beginning. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, set up office in her parents' garage soon after they incorporated Google in 1998. Wojcicki became Google's first marketing manager the following year and played a role in the earliest Google Doodles. In 2006, she encouraged Google to buy YouTube, which launched a year earlier.
joewhatkins 4y ago
It’s accurate. Google was started out of her parent’s garage, and she became involved around then.
yurylifshits 4y ago
Google started as a research project in 1995 and incorporated in 1998. Susan was an employee number 16. 25 years sounds about right.
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michaelt 4y ago
> In September 1998, the same month that Google was incorporated, its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin set up office in Wojcicki's parents' garage in Menlo Park, California. [1] 2023-1998=25 Sounds right to me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki#Career
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layer8 4y ago
Yes, Alphabet was created less than 8 years ago. She probably joined Google.

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cft 4y ago

Does this mean even more censorship or less?

uSoldering 4y ago
Considering the lead of the Trust and Safety team is taking over, less is unlikely.

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5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

- increasingly ignores your search keywords, instead shoving unrelated stuff at you - removed ability to sort videos by date - removed dislikes what else.....youtube UX has being getting worse for a few years.

voisin 4y ago
Fear not! Just serve more ads before and between every video! Sacrifice your user at the altar of advertisers and all will be fine in the world.
- sammalloy 4y ago
  YouTube is almost unwatchable. The show I’m viewing now has an ad every minute or so. I don’t see how they will survive another few years. They’ve literally angered their user base to the point of abandoning the platform.
  - bagacrap 4y ago
    You can't afford $9 a month or whatever it is to remove the ads? What other service are you planning to use instead that has no ads and no subscription fee?
  - voisin 4y ago
    There’s no alternative (though Tik Tok certainly is doing a decent job of taking all the short content). I think it would be a gangbuster opportunity for Apple to integrate user created content into Apple TV. They don’t need to rely on ad revenue, and similar to Microsoft kneecapping Google with ChatGPT, it would be a great opportunity for Apple to further hurt Google by winning longer form video content and driving advertisers away from YouTube. But I am not sure Apple has the stomach for the controversy that often surrounds user generated content. Maybe Facebook would be the better competitor, though they are as beholden to advertisers as Google. All I know is that it will take a massively well financed group that can sustain the server costs of video streaming with most of it generating zero revenue.

posharma 4y ago

Curious why this is important enough to be on the front page. Even as a techie I don't find this news interesting, at least not HN front-page worthy. (Instead of down voting it would be nice to hear what others think as valid reasons). How does this affect our day-day lives?

sokoloff 4y ago
A change in leadership of what is almost surely a top 10 online property and something that >98% of HN readers use? That seems like something that would be of enough interest to make the top-30 stories for a period of time.
mkaic 4y ago
YouTube is one of the largest and most influential tech companies in the world, and wields huge social power. Some of the greatest content on the internet is hosted there, so it makes sense to me that HN readers would find a major change like this of interest. Wojcicki has been in charge of YouTube for a long time now, so hearing that she is stepping down and will be replaced opens up tons of space for speculation about where YouTube could be heading in the near future. Personally, as someone who spends many hours a week using YouTube, I find this article to be absolutely HN-front-page-worthy!
- posharma 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - mkaic 4y ago
    If it's in the company of curious, smart people like the kind I routinely encounter here on HN, then yes! Absolutely! I greatly enjoy a good round of civil speculation and discussion with my fellow hackers :P
    - posharma 4y ago
      * There's absolutely nothing we could do to influence YouTube's leadership changes. * There's very little you can do to influence changes in the product YouTube as well. * There's very little we know about the internals of upper C-level leadership changes. Speculating is an utter waste of time. I don't see a point. For me this news was just another passable piece of information. Meh! Definitely not HN front-page worthy.

robmusial 4y ago

Hopefully this brings back the dislike button. Intellectually I know a change of CEO shouldn't/wouldn't impact a feature like this, but I am still annoyed at its absence and find it makes YouTube substantially less useful. Edit: I understand the dislike button is still there, I misspoke. But for my purposes of seeing like/dislike ratio, it might as well not be there.

kerpotgh 4y ago
Completely disagree. Getting rid of that button has significantly cleaned up the associated comments sections. I’ve also noticed a general improvement in my recommendations. Great move imo.
- rolobio 4y ago
  How can you tell when a video contains something misleading? For example, I struggle to find quality DIY videos without the dislikes warning me away. Dislikes are a great way for the community to clean house.
  - robmusial 4y ago
    DIY videos are my primary concern on this as well. It is also why browser extensions don't help me too much because my use case is usually in the garage, half way through a project having issues, on my phone furiously trying to get a solution to the problem I'm having. I had this exact scenario yesterday trying to remove rounded/stripped lug nuts off my wheels. It would've been very helpful to be able to see if the video I was watching had 1000 likes but 6000 dislikes to know if what I was about to do was advisable or not. Yes, I read the comments and it ended up being a simple fix with the right tools, but the like/dislike ratio is a great way to filter dangerous/dumb/unhelpful videos.
    - khazhoux 4y ago
      Isn't YouTube already pushing down the bad-ratio videos, though? I know it's not the same as you being able to filter the counts yourself... but the data is being used to try to hide crap.

MKGoogle 4y ago

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dtx1 4y ago

We can all hate Youtube here for sure but when you listen to for example Linus from LTT he is very adamant that while youtube does have it's fair share of problems, when it comes to compensating creators fairly on their platform, they are much better than almost all others. And I personally enjoy Youtube very much. So much great content for free. If I need to learn about something i find myself looking into youtube first quite often.

mkaic 4y ago
Agreed. I would not be where I am in life today without the skills and knowledge I learned from YouTube. I am a huge fan of the way they compensate creators and align their incentives with creators' incentives, and generally just very pleased with the product they provide. I pay for Premium and it's the best monthly subscription I have imo — the sheer quantity of expertly-produced content on YT is unparalleled, and I've discovered so many new hobbies, interests, and people through it.
- bredren 4y ago
  I’m not familiar w the compensation mechanism but am part of a YouTube premium family subscription and agree on the overall value. The content is unparalleled. Home repair is one of my most valued content types on the site. There are many, many different types of house problems and solutions covered by videos. Even when you get to something that seemingly has no person describing the problem and fix, you can often get close enough to improvise based on other people’s ideas. YouTube is a skill building platform. You can save money by becoming more self-reliant. Despite other comments here, I think the search is quite good. It sometimes ignores keywords but returns the video I _intended_ to seek. I don’t care for shorts, though and would hide them completely if able. It would also be good to have relatively anonymous ways to upload video. Sometimes I’ll establish a novel solution and would post the information but wouldn’t want it associated with my identity—or even to monetize it.
joenathanone 4y ago
If you have a large channel sure, but they cut off smaller creators a while back with their new monetization requirements.

anonreeeeplor 4y ago

I believe it is related to this movement to subpoena big tech about “collusion with government” https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/15/jim-jordan-subpoenas-alphabet-amazon-apple-meta-and-microsoft-.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/15/jim-jordan-subpoenas-alphabe... Either she is being blamed, or she is deeply guilty and wants to try to avoid the publicity, or they anticipate this will become extremely ugly. Or sundar is blaming her for lining him up for a firing squad. Or she is a liability due to her past work. Regardless, it seems like she is leaving because what she had to do to make the government happy previously is now going to be used against Google. Someone else mentioned the theory that she might be the best Sundar replacement. Maybe she found out it’s not her or Sundar is eliminating competition here.

mikeyouse 4y ago
[flagged]
fullshark 4y ago
Maybe, but I also think a lot of these people that hit the jackpot from the maturation of the internet the last 25 years are just going to quit cause the job is going to suck going forward. Being an internet tech executive when the industry is no longer growing ridiculously and is just another sector of the economy like durable good manufacturing, or real estate development or whatever might not be very fun anymore. The founders themselves of these companies have already gotten a headstart.
minimaxir 4y ago
YouTube has been under far more dangerous regulatory scrutiny than that.
Spooky23 4y ago
Nobody is falling on the sword for that circus. The "Twitter Files" were not very meaningful. After 25 years and being worst case a hundred-millionaire, what's the point?
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gpt5 4y ago

I always saw her as one of the best candidates to become the Twitter CEO. She has the industry credence, and the experience of leading and making both google ads and YouTube successful (the two parts that Twitter needs help with). I wonder if Elon Musk would notice.

hummus_bae 4y ago
It would be ironic if Twitter turned into a graveyard for former Googlers, considering how many of them have been shut out from ever working at Google again/being rehired by the company end of their respective non-compete periods.
- nebula8804 4y ago
  >considering how many of them have been shut out from ever working at Google again/being rehired by the company end of their respective non-compete periods. Is this because of layoffs or something else happening? I would think that mass layoffs would still allow eligibility for rehire down the road?
verteu 4y ago
Would you really want Twitter run by Sergei Brin's sister-in-law?
- gpt5 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that she is less qualified because of her sister's past relationships?
  - verteu 4y ago
    No. I'm worried competition/antitrust will suffer when a small number of dominant media companies are run by close relatives.
vnchr 4y ago
I think there's some conflict in their philosophies on free speech.

ramraj07 4y ago

So much hate for her on all fronts, yet she made the most rewarding media platform today on the internet. Any creator or consumer who has half a brain should realize the magnitude of the feat and how unobvious it is that YouTube exists as it does today.

pzduniak 4y ago
Rewarding to who? And _she_ made it? To me YT continued its successful streak despite of the poor changes with not much to attribute to people actually making the calls.
- ncann 4y ago
  Exactly, she was only CEO since 2014. Saying she made YT is laughable, if anything most of the annoying things at YT happened under her reign, from bogus DMCAs to dislike button removal to the force fed YT shorts and so on.
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  - causi 4y ago
    Don't forget having to have a fucking Google+ account. I'm proudly one of the few who spent half a decade being unable to comment or send direct messages because I refused to assent to the Google+ account creation pop-up.
    - nostrademons 4y ago
      That wasn't under her. Google+ launched in 2011; Salar Kamangar was CEO of YouTube at the time.
    - zo1 4y ago
      Google plus is still "around", it's just not a social media network. A conspiracy theorist would argue it succeeded in its purpose: to unify all accounts under a single Google account banner. Google music, android, YouTube, maps, Gmail, search, drive, etc. We didn't even notice it happening, like frogs being boiled. E.g. try being anonymous on a fresh Android device now. You can't even access the play store without logging in.

joegahona 4y ago

I'm nervous about this. YouTube Premium is my favorite and most-used product. As long as ads stay gone and my grandfathered price doesn't change, I'm a very happy user.

michaelcampbell 4y ago
> grandfathered price doesn't change ... and you get cost of living salary increases at the same time, right? Sadly a market oriented economy just doesn't work this way.
bredren 4y ago
I am part of a “YouTube family” that shares the premium family plan. We collect payment every six months. Makes the price low enough to beat the hassle of various ad blocking methods across many platforms and devices.
mkaic 4y ago
Agreed. I am a massive fan of YouTube Premium and YouTube Music. While I am a bit nervous because major change like this could lead to those products getting worse, I'm also hopeful that it could lead to them getting better! So in general I'm just eager to see what happens next, come what may.
- jossclimb 4y ago
  can you sell it to a current spotify user?
  - buggy6257 4y ago
    When I first compared Spotify/YT Premium (Google Music at the time): - Relatively similar offerings of music, at least when it came to my tastes. I have a wide variety and some weird stuff in there, but both worked for me to find whatever I thought of. - Relatively similar price ($10 Spotify vs $12 YT), so I knew I needed at least some extra value from YT to justify - YT Premium not only gives me YT Music, but also HASSLE FREE ad-free YT. What I mean is -- I don't have to manage extensions for web youtube and apps for Android or iOS or using NextDNS or a pihole or something just to get "ad free" from YT. It just works. Not having ads, and not having to CARE is a big value add for me. This alone is well worth $2 a month just in the time it saves me dealing with it. - YT Premium USED to be Google Music, which I loved the UI of way more than Spotify. I am still VERY upset at YT Music since it's objectively worse than Google Music in every way, but it's still the same goddamn company - AT THE TIME, I was having serious issues getting Spotify to play music from cache. Even if I cached, it would still default to streaming it as long as I had data. This resulted in huge data usage each month. I am SURE this is fixed by now. But this went into the calculus for me at the time. Would I move over to Spotify? I think the things that would push me back would be an increase in YT price, a further degradation in YT Music UX, some new killer feature Spotify has/gets (podcasts aren't my thing) This was a VERY long answer which can TLDR to "Having ad-free YouTube + Music all at once for $2 more was well worth not having to give a crap about all the infrastructure needed to block ads across all my devices forever."

msikora 4y ago

Hopefully Sundar's turn next!

slt2021 4y ago
Agree. Google desperately needs to clean house on the executive/management/VP side
muttantt 4y ago
He's busy working on ChaatGPT
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falcolas 4y ago

Speculation: I wonder if any of this relates to the Supreme Court Gonzalez v. Google case? (basically, the SC is reviewing YouTube's Section 230 protections due to the use of recommendation engines)

justinzollars 4y ago
Thats awesome! was not aware of this https://www.brookings.edu/events/gonzalez-v-google-and-the-fate-of-section-230/ https://www.brookings.edu/events/gonzalez-v-google-and-the-f...
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bioemerl 4y ago

Being replaced by someone with years of working on ads, who was brought into the company as a result of the purchase of DoubleClick. I would broadly expect YouTube to get worse as a result of this.

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sagarm 4y ago
Susan also came from ads.
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mrkramer 4y ago

>She's 'starting a new chapter' to focus on her family, health and passion projects. So YouTube wasn't her passion project?! C'mon.

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ez_mmk 4y ago

thanatropism 4y ago

> focus on family Maybe just wants kids?

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 4y ago
I'm sorry, what?
- Strom 4y ago
  Maybe not new ones, but more time with existing ones. Could also just be a firing.

tasubotadas 4y ago

That crazy push for 10min and longer videos was a sole reason why tiktok happened. I still remember that there used to be short and super informative videos before but now everything is so stretched out with low info density

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tempnow987 4y ago
God, I wondered why these youtubers can't stop with the super long introductions, walkarounds to tell us something basic that could be explained in 2-3 minutes TOPS.
- margorczynski 4y ago
  Yeah, lot of noise added. Reminds of those content mill articles that dance around the subject/question for 80% of the length of the article just to keep you for longer and increase the chance of clicking an ad.
- rullelito 4y ago
  It has to be long for you to get any ad revenue, I thought?
johannes1234321 4y ago
There is quite some value in longer videos. However there seems to be a thing that you need 10 minutes for monetisation, so people stretch content not needing much time to those 10 minutes ...
robotnikman 4y ago
I remember some of the best youtube content I've seen was less than 10 minutes in length, like short animations and other content which took a lot of time to produce in small amounts.
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gsatic 4y ago

She got us to 100 miilion 'how to boil egg' videos. Hopefully the next corporate robot in charge or Bard (if the rumors are true) can take us to 1 billion.

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neosat 4y ago

YouTube has been riding it's content momentum for too long. It really needs a change of leadership to continue to innovate. For some searches, it's baffling that the top results are clearly intuitively wrong (e.g. showing videos where dislike to like ratio is very high, compared to clearly better alternatives that you can find if you wade through the results)

ignoramous 4y ago
I thought YouTube did really well under Wojcicki's leadership.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  Well.... not really. - Why does seemingly every channel I follow, whether it be JCS Criminal Psychology or The 8-bit Guy, have to mention the YouTube Algorithm, Content ID, Copyright Strikes, or Community Guidelines? If almost every creator is struggling and not just the fringe and edgy, you've screwed up big time. - Removal of the dislike count. Extremely unpopular decision. Also YouTube's API is still answering dislike counts making extensions to bring it back still function, despite over a year later, almost implying it was about keeping up appearances. Now... who could be so worried about keeping up appearances... - Completely blowing up YouTube Rewind into an increasingly corporate affair that quickly started heading downhill until the absolute train wreck of 2018, where it became the most disliked video in YouTube history at that point. This was, in part, because YouTube basically sanitized it of the presence of the popular YouTubers at the time because they might not be advertiser-friendly. Rewind never recovered and YouTube has now given up trying to engage with the community in such a way. - Taking a 5-second ad at the beginning of her tenure, and leaving it with multiple, constant, unskippable, rampant advertising; and a subscription plan that started at $10/mo. turning into $23/mo. for equivalent service (5 users). - Launched YouTube Kids to provide a curated experience for younger individuals, then decided to make it run on automation. Which then screwed up big time and started serving kids extremely inappropriate content causing a brief congressional inquiry. Then YouTube settled as guilty to violating COPAA, and decided to shift all the responsibility on the creators by disabling comments and other features on any video that may possibly be seen by kids. Some "success"...

paulpauper 4y ago

my suggestions: 1. make dislikes visible 2. no more covid warnings/disclaimers on content. Public health is important, but this beyond the scope or role of youtube. If the CDC, WHO etc. want to buy YouTube ads warning of covid misinformation, they can do so, and can afford to. 3. do more about accounts being hacked and repurposed for elon musk livestream scams 4. fewer ads, or no more 15 second ads. The max length should be 10 seconds, and no more than a single ad at a time, instead of having two ads back-to-back.

jfoster 4y ago
Regarding warnings/disclaimers on content, I find genuinely helpful ones are far more palatable than censorship. I think Twitter's Community Notes is a great example of this. From what I've seen, YouTubers are concerned about their videos getting censored or demonetized to a degree that indicates YouTube are being far too heavy handed.

bitL 4y ago

Bring back the original founders from UIUC instead?

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.

robbiet480 4y ago

Discussion of her actual announcement at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34821472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34821472

lvl102 4y ago

She quite literally got this far because of family. Geez I wonder why Youtube remains one of the most underperforming media assets. Edit: SV is full of nepotism.

moffkalast 4y ago
Well given that Youtube gets its money from making the user experience terrible via ad bombardment... that sounds like a good thing? They'd get more revenue by breaking things like uBlock origin being able to completely remove all ads. Not something we really want them to do I think.
robk 4y ago
Not true. Her sister met Sergey because they were in her garage. She got the job fair and square.
- lvl102 4y ago
  This is like saying Ron Wayne should run the freaking Mac division because he was there first. She’s just not that smart. She only got around on her dad’s legacy prior to Google. She added zero value to Youtube.
sosodev 4y ago
How do you figure? She worked for Google for nearly 15 years before becoming the CEO of YT. If anything it sounds like she was peter principled.
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labrador 4y ago

YouTube for the things I enjoy has improved dramatically because the comment section is vastly improved. Everyone used to use YouTube comments as an example of a comment section dumpster fire, but they fixed it. I've seen the recommendations get better then worse then better again as they tweaked the algorithms. Right now it's better than it's ever been. Again, for me. One complaint: I like to upload interesting clips from this or that. I got my first copy right strike on a clip of Russel Brand talking to Terry Gross of NPR about life on heroin because I thought it was helpful for people. YouTube told me I could only get 3 strikes before they disabled my account, which I assume they mean they will disable my GMail. I can't have that so I don't upload interesting clips anymore. In fact, I don't upload anything since I don't want to lose my GMail. So the complaint is why didn't YouTube tell me when I uploaded it that I couldn't? I'd be ok with that. So I give Ms Wojcicki a people choice grade of B+ overall

michaelcampbell 4y ago
It got so bad that I have essentially stopped reading the comments. Ever.
bitcharmer 4y ago
Are you a real person? Because everyone in my circles have the exact opposite impression. Are you also of the opinion that Google search improved?
aeyes 4y ago
Nowadays the comment section on several channels I watch is full of spam, oftentimes 50+ fake accounts responding to each other in threads.
- labrador 4y ago
  I don't see that on the videos I watch. For example, this section from a song I recently listened to. Very nice comments. The Beatles - Within You Without You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsffxGyY4ck Do you see a bunch of spam comments? Maybe my ad blocker is blocking them?

gjsman-1000 4y ago

To be honest... good riddance. Her tenure will probably be remembered for YouTube's slowly increasing decline into irrelevancy among the young enamored with TikTok and Instagram, increasing and significant censorship misfires (the moment almost every creator has to mention Content ID and the YouTube algorithm or the community guidelines, you've screwed up), the removal of the dislike button despite overwhelming negative feedback to the change in what appears to have been a method of placating advertisers, and the total butchering of YouTube Rewind into a corporate affair before finally giving up.

DeltaCoast 4y ago
Youtube is the top platform for teens, according to pew research. "YouTube tops the 2022 teen online landscape among the platforms covered in the Center’s new survey, as it is used by 95% of teens. TikTok is next on the list of platforms that were asked about in this survey (67%), followed by Instagram and Snapchat, which are both used by about six-in-ten teens. After those platforms come Facebook with 32% and smaller shares who use Twitter, Twitch, WhatsApp, Reddit and Tumblr." https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social-media-and-technology-2022/ https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/08/10/teens-social...

droptablemain 4y ago

YouTube has become such an unfree, restricted platform in recent years. Hopefully that changes, although I doubt it.

dmonitor 4y ago
You can thank the concerted media effort to paint Youtube as a host for terrorist propaganda for that. The adpocalypse changed the site permanently for the worse, and a lot of people seem to overlook that. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/ads-shown-isis-videos-youtube-catch-companies-guard-n320946 https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/ads-shown-isis... this was a huge story overnight with tons of advertisers pulling out of youtube. the site became a lot more locked down after this and a few more advertiser threats in the following years.
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v3ss0n 4y ago

What most annoying is yt now showing vids that are already watched just a day afoy. Including shorts. They can't even do a proper sorting now

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game_the0ry 4y ago

I was big time addicted to youtube for a while starting around 2010, mostly bc the recommended videos were so good and content that was uploaded was more raw and silly then now. But at some point the recommendations got really bad, so much so that it made it a lot less enjoyable. I miss those days.

xnx 4y ago
10 minute minimum length for monetization killed short good content. There's still good content, but it doesnt respect your time.
- jedberg 4y ago
  Seriously. I've seen videos with two minutes of very interesting content and 8 minutes of fluff. It's so frustrating.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Now they're pushing shorts, which are (in my opinion) too short to convey all the relevant info. Not sure how monetization works with shorts, since I use an adblock, but 50%+ of my subscription feed is shorts on some days and it suck (for me personally)
  - mackrevinack 4y ago
    if the adblock you're using is ublock origin then you can add this to your filters to block shorts on the homepage www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope > .ytd-rich-shelf-renderer.style-scope there's probably more filters to block shorts in other places like the suggestions sidebar if you look for them, but i have the sidebar disabled completely so the above filter was enough for me
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  ironically enough Patreon brought it back a bit. At least for the biggest animators and short form creators. YT is a great advertising platform for certain channels and kinds of content. YT shorts I guess is their solution to that... Still not a big fan and I hear the rates paid to yourubers is horrible.

skilled 4y ago

YouTube is an absolute trash platform and has been long before Susan became a CEO. Which goes to show just how incapable she was for the role. The same algorithm that YouTube was using for recommendations 10 years ago is still the same algorithm being used today. An absolute disgrace and a spat in the face for the platforms users.

breck 4y ago

YouTube started out as a site that gave the middle finger to (c)opywrong laws, and it still has that spirit alive, while growing into an incredible resource to learn and grow. It's also damn fast and easy to publish to. Thank you Susan!

throw_m239339 4y ago
> YouTube started out as a site that gave the middle finger to (c)opywrong laws, and it still has that spirit alive, no it doesn't has that spirit anymore, channels who get too many copyright strikes get banned. Why do you even credit "Susan" for any of that? She isn't a Youtube founder, but a pure product of Google culture.

daltont 4y ago

Hopefully, the "stop showing me this ad" feature gets fixed. I'm tired of always being presented with an ad for the "Dixie Store". No, I don't want to shop for Confederate flags and other garbage.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
I'm tired of the ads asking "Are you gay? Take this 10-minute quiz!"
- galleywest200 4y ago
  Or alcohol ads when you have given up the juice.
  - stemlord 4y ago
    Amazing reason to use an adblocker
  - oehpr 4y ago
    Oooof. You may be able to disable that in googles ad choices setting. Assuming you have a google account. To get there, when you see a youtube add, there should be some text in the bottom right, "Ad 1 of 2" and then an information icon, click that. and scroll down the popup and you should see "ad settings" If you don't have an account then I'd really recommend an ad blocker in this circumstance.
britch 4y ago
One of the best Twitter features was the "ad dislike" It can be done
- tincholio 4y ago
  I kept getting promoted posts for crypto bullshit stuff, even though I consistently disliked them. I'm not sure there was a proper implementation of that feature in Twitter at all...

rejectfinite 4y ago

Ok. I don't pay for YT Premium. I mostly watch streamers and documentaries on Youtube. I find the recommends are perfect. You do have to "train" it, though.

pradn 4y ago

Positives: * Presided over a vast increase in revenue, from $4 to $29 billion * Steered the ship through a number of content controversies * Anecdotally, the brand value of YouTube remains good * YouTube Premium seems to have good uptake * Presided over enormous cost savings with custom encoder hardware * Few major technical outages, good streaming performance generally * Relationships with advertisers and content creators generally remain good Negatives: * Missed the Twitch/streaming wave * Missed the TikTok, short video wave * YouTube Originals flopped (partly bc they didn't commit hard enough, not like Netflix or Amazon) * Overall low user experience - slow/complex website and apps * Issues for content creators - overly aggressive ContentID, not rewarding short but valuable videos enough (indie animation), opaque demonetization rules * No shrinking of the algorithmic filter bubble

gjsman-1000 4y ago
> * Relationships with advertisers and content creators generally remain good I'd say this is due to lack of competition and network effects than a good relationship. CuriosityStream, Nebula, and even channels as benign as Linus Tech Tips trying to get Floatplane off the ground show this relationship is far from strong. Your non-edgy creators wouldn't be trying to replace you if they thought you were doing a good job.
- pradn 4y ago
  It's not perfect, but it's not terrible either. Millions of creators and billions of users generally have a good experience on YouTube. There's been no "let's try Mastodon" moment.
ris58h 4y ago
> Overall low user experience I literally have to wait for 5 seconds for 3 dot menus under videos to load on the main page. It's ridiculous.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
Just discovered something very interesting: She is resigning one day after Google received a subpoena from the U.S. House of Representatives demanding answers to questions on censorship of conservative voices, and specifically on content moderation decisions. Yes, just yesterday. Subpoena to resignation. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-republicans-subpoena-big-tech-ceos-over-censorship-claims/ar-AA17xziB https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/us-republicans-subpoena... https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/15/house-republican-subpoena-big-tech/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/15/house-r... https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3859762-house-gop-subpoenas-big-tech-companies-over-content-moderation-decisions/ https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3859762-house-gop-subp... That's actually a really bad look (pro PR tip: Don't resign immediately after bad press - delay your resignation to avoid association if possible - or, if you know a certain political group doesn't like you and you're planning to retire, maybe resign before they get into power). Particularly important because Twitter is all over that "connection" right now that was pretty unnecessary. It appears that the subpoena was directed at Google, but her resignation means she may not have to personally have to personally testify, as Google could send the new CEO in.

CSDude 4y ago

Can I get my dislike button back now? Youtube has been a significantly worse place since that.

Whatarethese 4y ago
Have you downloaded the extension that brings that back?
- r3vo 4y ago
  Only works against the database the extension manages. Biased in comparison to the native dislike button.
  - oehpr 4y ago
    I used to think that was a negative until I realized I had more in common with the people who had that extension installed than I did with youtube at large.
ac29 4y ago
Mine never disappeared, only the dislike count.
- junon 4y ago
  That's what they meant. The count is gone.
spurgu 4y ago
I've been using the Return YouTube Dislike extension[0] for a couple of weeks now and it seems to be working surprisingly well (due to the relatively large user base probably, surprised it hasn't been mentioned here). It uses a combination of dislike data of other users of the extension combined with data from older videos which still have dislike count accessible through the API. And yeah, hiding the dislike count was an extremely weird/annoying move, given that it was a good quality indicator which is now completely gone. It doesn't matter if a video has 1M likes if it has 3M dislikes, in which case it probably sucks. Nor are you misled to believe a video with only 3k likes is bad if it doesn't have more than 22 dislikes. As with everything you should keep context in mind. For example if you're watching a video on a political topic (or by a controversial character) then the ratio will be more even, even for high quality videos. But the point is: Give the user the information, don't assume they are dumb. [0] Links for Chrome/Firefox/etc: https://returnyoutubedislike.com/install https://returnyoutubedislike.com/install

kentosi 4y ago

Dear Youtube: Please please please have an option to filter out "shorts" on the web version. None of the normal controls exist: playback speed, jump to position, etc. The desktop web interface is a terrible place for these.

stewartbutler 4y ago
As a stopgap, you can use a URL redirector: Redirect: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/* to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$1
MzHN 4y ago
Behind the scenes the shorts are just normal YouTube videos. You can change the /shorts/ to /watch?v= in the URL and they work fine. There are addons to do this redirect automatically, but I haven't bothered. Why they force the terrible UI on desktop is beyond me though.
kentlyons 4y ago
I use an extension to remove them - no affiliation but it seems to work. Chrome: "No YouTube Shorts". Between that, a plugin to remove already watched videos and my ad blocker, youtube is a way better experience!
- teddyh 4y ago
  I use Remove YouTube Suggestions: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/ https://lawrencehook.com/rys/> It has settings for a lot of customizations, including removing shorts. (You can keep suggestions if you want to.)
mustacheemperor 4y ago
I'd like the option to filter out cable tv news designed to emotionally outrage from my recommendations. I'm well aware there is a land war in Europe right now, when I turn on the TV at 6pm on a Thursday to watch cooking videos I don't need reminders pushed in my face. Out of all the issues with youtube, this is probably the one that has the most real negative cognitive impact for me.

nperez 4y ago

There is so much untapped potential in Youtube right now. Hopefully new leadership means improvements in YT Live and YT Music, both of which feel like afterthoughts even though they have large competitors.

theGnuMe 4y ago
They have Sunday ticket now which could be a game changer.

grapesurgeon 4y ago

[dead]

rurp 4y ago

After winning the Free Expression award[0] there just wasn't much left for her to accomplish there. https://www.theblaze.com/news/youtube-ceo-receives-free-expression-award https://www.theblaze.com/news/youtube-ceo-receives-free-expr...

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1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

Five days out from the Gonzalez v Google hearing. If the decision goes against Google, perhaps some will question YouTube's decision-making around recommendations.

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haolez 4y ago

Thank you, Susan, for (maybe?) being responsible for the only case in Big Tech where you can actually pay to not be the product yourself. YouTube Premium is awesome.

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wslh 4y ago
Well, you continue to be a product delivering a lot of metrics to the platform beyond the ads you don't see, surely you are optimizing others ads. Not saying YouTube Premium is awesome, though.
- haolez 4y ago
  Yes, but if they eventually get more revenue from this than ads, the incentives will align more with the user. It's not likely to happen, but it's not too far fetched either.

mbrameld 4y ago

Right now YouTube has a big scammer problem. People impersonate channel owners and reply to comments on their videos with phishing links. Several creators I follow are now putting a warning at the beginning of their videos to help educate people, but it seems like this is something YouTube could and should fix. Another probable issue is the upcoming Supreme Court decision about Section 230 protections. Maybe Wojcicki sees that writing on the wall.

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_gabe_ 4y ago
> People impersonate channel owners and reply to comments on their videos with phishing links Not only this, YouTube literally allows scammers to run ads and you can't report it. I saw an ad with Mr. Beast pop up offering $1,000 to the first X people to click on it. I clicked, because it sounds like something he would do and I was curious and figured YouTube wouldn't let a scammer advertise. Once I landed on the page it was immediately clear from the domain that it was a scam, but the page looked legit. It's astounding that YouTube is alright with openly running scammers ads for them.

option 4y ago

I really hate youtube shorts. Can I completely turn them off? And whose idea was that??

mr90210 4y ago
+1 I pay a premium subscription to not see ads, and I wish were able to disable shorts as well.
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bagels 4y ago
It was the idea of all the people that gave TikTok so much watch time.
suby 4y ago
There are extensions which will convert shorts into the regular UI, you should be able to find one through Google.
kevincox 4y ago
I don't really mind that they added a new interface for viewing short videos. Buy what I don't like is that when I get linked to the new player it is lacking tons of features for no apparent upside (you can work around this by manually fixing the URL) and your can't play then via Chromecast (but old vertical videos not tagged #shorts work perfectly fine). Sure, add a browser for short vertical videos. But don't ruin the existing experience for no reason.

jokoon 4y ago

I wonder if demonetization practices caused youtube to bleed creators. There was so much drama around youtubers and how youtube treated them. I guess Youtube must always obey its advertisers.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Due to demonitization some types of videos (especially political, "current affairs", medical, anything (even comedy) using curse words, etc.) almost always get demonetized and many people have stopped such content since it's not worth it. During covid times it was so bad, that even mentioning "covid" in a video got some of them demonetized (even in non-medical context, eg. "shippments from china got delayed due to covid").
- mablopoule 4y ago
  Yes, I wonder how we went from "9/11 never forget" to "Don't even mention the subject if you want to keep earning money for your effort in creating content" [1]. YouTube is weird when it comes to completely arbitrary demonetization (and the absolutely braindead idea of removing the downvote counter) because it's one of the rare plateform that get so much negative goodwill from content creator who depends on it to make some money. [1] One famous french Youtubeur, "Joueur du Grenier" has to playfully bypass the subject by joking that "Nothing whatsoever happened between the 10th and the 12th September" while showing 2 plastic bottles being hit by paper airplane and then crumbling. He originally put real images of 9/11 while describing the early 00's zeitgeist, but had to do that instead since it caused the video to not be sent to subscribers (or demonetized to oblivion, I forgot which)
- robswc 4y ago
  I honestly think YouTube could have stood up to the advertisers... I also think it was way overblown. Too many people got caught in the crosshairs.
  - qball 4y ago
    >I honestly think YouTube could have stood up to the advertisers. No, YouTube was looking for an excuse to clean house. Advertisers have had the tools to stop their ads from appearing per video type for a long time now, so the claim that "it's the advertisers" was obvious misinformation. >Too many people got caught in the crosshairs. And yet, YouTube has yet to be dethroned; seems to be working fine for them.

web3-is-a-scam 4y ago

Maybe they can do something about the endless crypto scams about "elon musk projects" that use (really lousy) deep fakes and the same script across dozens of different advertising accounts. Doubt they will though.

throw7 4y ago

youtube has run its course. it's basically a medium for corporate (read: tv). everything can be disabled and, most importantly, dislikes are globally disabled. It says Mohan launched 'youtube music' and 'shorts' et al. well, youtube music killed google play music, so not a fan; and shorts are the most recent annoying unfilterable addition to youtube. ah well.

tootie 4y ago

It seems to me that YT as a product has vastly improved during her tenure and become an incredibly valuable brand that probably has more value than "Google" at this point. It's facing an existential threat in TikTok and still hanging on. It more or less shoved Vimeo aside. It's definitely moved on a bit from the early days of purely "home video" amateur content to be a real marketplace for professional and aspiring professional content.

dzonga 4y ago

this should've the person to get the reigns at google and run google. however, they got a chrome pm as ceo. and now the company is floundering. if the youtube CEO made a billion in remuneration, it will be well deserved compared to say some CEO / CPO's eg the recent Coinbase CPO or Mozilla CEO.

esel2k 4y ago

Reading through the comments the audience seems very split between lovers and haters. At the end Susan managed to have a product on the market that was number 1 in its category, created revenue and has survived for so long. I think she deserve a fair amount of respect and acknowledgement, ad I have not seen any other platform with that track record (yep no time for envy, just hard facts).

johnnyanmac 4y ago
Maybe I need to read more, but I have yet to hear a positive comment, just neutral "nothing will really change" sorts of comments. I subscribe to that thought. One CEO isn't doing as much damage to a product this big as people thought. The dislike feature isn't coming back nor any other engineering feature that affected users.

est 4y ago

google might have a chance to win the LLM battle, to train multi-modal LLM based on youtube videos, which is a huge advantage over Microsoft. OpenAI's Codex model got the reasoning ability through github. LLM could learn so much more with real-life videos in an embodied way.

bagacrap 4y ago
That would require better speech recognition. Judging by automated subtitles, it's not there yet. And I don't think YouTube videos tend to have better veracity than the web at large. Maybe YouTube videos can be used to train models on how to verbally present information in a compelling way, but I don't see how it would make an AI better at generating written text.
- est 4y ago
  > That would require better speech recognition No, I mean ML can recognize real-world objects like human eyes do. They have a raw, direct understanding of the visual "world", an alternative to parse the world facts only by texts.

spike021 4y ago

YouTube recommendations have always sucked for me. But ever since Shorts was released, I constantly get amazing science channel shorts that are usually bite sized chemistry or physics experiments. I'm really enjoying them. Not sure how they even came to be recommended to me because I was never one to search for them before. Kids have it so good these days.

dmix 4y ago
Maybe they learned from TikTok? What matters most is what people watch from beginning to end, not what people "like and subscribe" to. Short videos are an easier signal for this than 1-20min+ videos.
- spike021 4y ago
  That is definitely the case. I guess I was thinking more in terms of how the recommendations just one day populated with cool science content for no obvious reason in a format (shorts) that works so well.

kderbyma 4y ago

Using YouTube is physically painful. I am pretty sure if I was at risk of heart problems, I would be advised to avoid YouTube. it's UX is fatal. it raise blood pressure almost instantly and it has the feature set of a vaporware product demonstration as far as sort and search is concerned. it's like YouTube decided to make a point of removing all useful search and sort functionality and make sure it was nothing but a glorified vending machine arm serving up 'chances' to find what you are looking for while being bombarded worst than minesweeper on extreme difficulty.

ivanjermakov 4y ago
Oh yes, search is the worse. They inserted a few widets with unrelated videos ("People also watched", "Previously watched", etc.) after the first 5 results and you have to scroll through multiple pages to get to the next search results.

grej 4y ago

With Wojcicki stepping down, what YouTube executive will be the next one to win the YouTube sponsored Freedom Of Expression Award?

m3kw9 4y ago

Discovery sucks on it, I feel like walking into an echo chamber everytime I go in

bagacrap 4y ago
what platform is not an echo chamber? For example, if you don't want to read tangentially related pet peeves every time bigtechco is in the news, you stop coming to HN. You stop coming to HN, and only complainers are left.
- m3kw9 4y ago
  HN is different, it seem separate from the rest of Reddit. The comments are almost always informative without karma farmers popping crowd pleasing jokes

jameyk 4y ago

Head Censor stepping down.

didip 4y ago

She is the last exec I expected to step down. YouTube vastly improved in the recent years. If there's anyone who should step down, it's Sundar. What an uninspiring leader.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xaldir 4y ago
> YouTube vastly improved in the recent years. Can you explain how? From my perspective, the platform is still struggling to get the basics right : lots of spam in the comments, recommendation is meh at best, some videos are hard to find even when typing the exact title in the search bar and I can go on and on.

nxten 4y ago

Hopefully crypto/webniar scam ads stop now

thomassmith65 4y ago

When people have an emotional fondness for a 'brand', that fondness can blind them to its faults. Cognitive dissonance makes it difficult for people to hold views such as "Roman Polanski is both a gross person and a brilliant director" or "Eminem's lyrics were witty, but their cultural influence was unhealthy" and so on. People love Youtube because Youtube had the financial resources to store more video than any other service, and people love videos. Youtube itself is a shitshow, famous for hosting the largest collection of low-quality comments on the planet – and Wojcicki has been okay with that. A better calibre of human being would have fixed Youtube – or resigned trying – years ago (eg: 2015, when Youtube became world's largest and most effective extremist recruitment service). Wojcicki's best asset was perhaps an ability to keep her name out of the tech news cycle, and that's probably because 'Wojcicki' is difficult to spell more than any personal talent. Youtube is great inasmuch as videos are great, but almost any other tech company would have been a better steward of humanity's video archive. So my view is: Fantastic! I will not miss her – in fact I'll ride a wave of endorphins from this news all week.

rldjbpin 4y ago

the only positive thing i can say about the changes during the era under her is that now makers of the videos get to keep a chunk of money if they use a "copyrighted" song. it used to be slurped entirely by the "copyright holder" till recently. but i also empathize with someone trying to break even from a very expensive-to-run platform.