3 ms·

> I just want to watch shows/films/content that I heard people recommend to me (not algorithms - people). How do you even start doing that on youtube? I don’t

> I just want to watch shows/films/content that I heard people recommend to me (not algorithms - people). How do you even start doing that on youtube? I don’t understand your question. You talk with people you care about, they tell you what they recommend and then you use the search bar to locate the content and watch it. This is so obviously the answer to your question that I am worried I am misunderstanding you in some way.

Barrin92 3y ago
I think their point is that discovery for authentic content is really awful which is true. The homepage never shows me subscriptions, there's a gigantic amount of shorts. The subscription page itself has no way to group or find anything and it also shoves shorts in your face. The Youtube UI is actually so bad and Tiktok-ified that I just use Feedly to follow individual channels and avoid the website. Even creators talk about this quite often. "ProZD" most recently encouraged people to support him on Patreon because his long form content essentially is algorithm-punished. Apparently only 10% of his views ever come from the subscription page. I think it's quite telling that the people who make the kind of content that I think the OP is after so heavily encourage people to support them outside of the actual platform.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  Not only that: also long-form curated content at all. If I watch TV (Here "TV" means I'm in a couch, there is a big screen I'm often surrounded by other people) then I don't want 3 minute bits of content or extremely niche personal content. I want the general sports/news/entertainment stuff that a group of people can enjoy. Everyone already sits with their phones and watches video content. But that's not TV. That's my personal video content consumption. What I'm talking about is something for passive consumption on a big screen. That's TV. Linear broadcast TV does this well. Netflix does it too. But I struggle to use YouTube for this.
alkonaut 3y ago
If someone mentions a TV show and I search for it, there will be 100 reviews of the show, 1000 short clips of the show. Try yourself: think of a TV show that was big in the last 10 years, then search for it on YouTube. Whether or not the actual content is ON youtube (which is the question my search is trying to answer) you'll get thousands of search results. In the off chance that the actual content of the show is actually on YouTube, the odds that you'll get the episodes of the show in your search result in any sensible order seems like zero. Another example: a huge use of TV is news. Every big news outlet has a presence on YouTube. But if you pick one (say CNN) and go to their page on YouTube, you can see a list of clips. But the clips seem randomly selected and unordered a a week old. So there is no way I can play their "news"? At least not at first sight.
- lupusreal 3y ago
  On the page for a channel, click the Videos 'tab' to see list of the channels videos ordered by most recent.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    Doesn’t look like the big broadcasters/news sites want me to use YouTube “as TV” judging by what I see. It’s just clips not programs. BBC for example has some news stories but no news broadcasts. The curation is what I want. A big important story should take more time of the broadcast. I don’t want to choose what story I’m interested in I want someone to do it for me. That’s the difference between a news program and a set of N 3 minute news stories. It’s like the difference between an rss feed and a newspaper. A big point of the newspaper is they decide what space to give everything and what to put on the front page. You can’t meaningfully understand the world by reading an rss even with the same articles, because a key insight is knowing what the big story is in the sense of what other people have seen.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      Old media corporations have never used Youtube well. But people aren't "replacing TV with youtube" by watching that old media content on Youtube; rather they're not watching that old sort of content at all and now watch the new style of media, mostly done by individual "creators" or a few new-media saavy corps. The remaining audience for old media corps, NBC/etc, are nursing home residents or soon to be.

Barrin92 3y ago

I think their point is that discovery for authentic content is really awful which is true. The homepage never shows me subscriptions, there's a gigantic amount of shorts. The subscription page itself has no way to group or find anything and it also shoves shorts in your face. The Youtube UI is actually so bad and Tiktok-ified that I just use Feedly to follow individual channels and avoid the website. Even creators talk about this quite often. "ProZD" most recently encouraged people to support him on Patreon because his long form content essentially is algorithm-punished. Apparently only 10% of his views ever come from the subscription page. I think it's quite telling that the people who make the kind of content that I think the OP is after so heavily encourage people to support them outside of the actual platform.

alkonaut 3y ago
Not only that: also long-form curated content at all. If I watch TV (Here "TV" means I'm in a couch, there is a big screen I'm often surrounded by other people) then I don't want 3 minute bits of content or extremely niche personal content. I want the general sports/news/entertainment stuff that a group of people can enjoy. Everyone already sits with their phones and watches video content. But that's not TV. That's my personal video content consumption. What I'm talking about is something for passive consumption on a big screen. That's TV. Linear broadcast TV does this well. Netflix does it too. But I struggle to use YouTube for this.

alkonaut 3y ago

If someone mentions a TV show and I search for it, there will be 100 reviews of the show, 1000 short clips of the show. Try yourself: think of a TV show that was big in the last 10 years, then search for it on YouTube. Whether or not the actual content is ON youtube (which is the question my search is trying to answer) you'll get thousands of search results. In the off chance that the actual content of the show is actually on YouTube, the odds that you'll get the episodes of the show in your search result in any sensible order seems like zero. Another example: a huge use of TV is news. Every big news outlet has a presence on YouTube. But if you pick one (say CNN) and go to their page on YouTube, you can see a list of clips. But the clips seem randomly selected and unordered a a week old. So there is no way I can play their "news"? At least not at first sight.

lupusreal 3y ago
On the page for a channel, click the Videos 'tab' to see list of the channels videos ordered by most recent.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  Doesn’t look like the big broadcasters/news sites want me to use YouTube “as TV” judging by what I see. It’s just clips not programs. BBC for example has some news stories but no news broadcasts. The curation is what I want. A big important story should take more time of the broadcast. I don’t want to choose what story I’m interested in I want someone to do it for me. That’s the difference between a news program and a set of N 3 minute news stories. It’s like the difference between an rss feed and a newspaper. A big point of the newspaper is they decide what space to give everything and what to put on the front page. You can’t meaningfully understand the world by reading an rss even with the same articles, because a key insight is knowing what the big story is in the sense of what other people have seen.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    Old media corporations have never used Youtube well. But people aren't "replacing TV with youtube" by watching that old media content on Youtube; rather they're not watching that old sort of content at all and now watch the new style of media, mostly done by individual "creators" or a few new-media saavy corps. The remaining audience for old media corps, NBC/etc, are nursing home residents or soon to be.