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This feels symptomatic of Google getting more and more desperate to have Youtube generate net revenue. All of the changes pointed out (and all of the 'shorts' t

This feels symptomatic of Google getting more and more desperate to have Youtube generate net revenue. All of the changes pointed out (and all of the 'shorts' that litter the site) are explained as 'additional monetization.' If the author scrolls down another 5 videos and an ad will appear, etc. Shorts are designed so that they can feed more ads/hour to viewers. Both are strategies to increase monetization on the site at the cost of customer experience.

silisili 1y ago
Between shorts, search results, the ads, and the content...I treat youtube links like pinterest links these days. Basically, I'll only click it if I think I really, really need to see it. By 'content' I mean the fact that every video has a moron talking for 10 minutes at the beginning. You can search up something as simple as how to tie a shoe, find a promising video with a lot of likes, then click it. Gotta start with 2 ads first, naturally. Then the first 2 minutes will tell you they'll teach you to tie a shoe. The next 5 minutes will be a backstory on the history of the shoe and how it's impacted the creator's life and their own shoe stories. Then a 2 minute sponsored segment for some dropshipped wallet or sock nobody needs, then another youtube ad, then hurried 10 second clip of someone poorly tying a shoe. Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore. when you're not an old, and this is all you know, you just accept it without knowing that there was a better world back when the olds were young. not being able to accept this really shows how old man yells get off my lawn you are. YT is not trying to capture you, and probably doesn't care one bit about olds. it's the younger crowds that have been given YT as an absentee parent/babysitter that they have been able to set their hooks in from the beginning. that's the group that will be making them money for years to come
  - silisili 1y ago
    That tracks. It feels like as soon as you fall out of that 18-25, or 18-30 demo, the world leaves you behind. Now I understand why we always thought old people were so cranky!
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      I'm still using an 8 year old phone. Nobody has made a phone yet where the feature set would motivate me to but a new one. Stickers? Emojis? Camera filters and effects? Social media integration? None of this is even remotely interesting to elderly-me. The only reason I'm likely to get a new one any time soon is that the companies stopped supporting the old one with software updates, effectively forcing me to throw away a perfectly working phone to keep up with security patches. Same with computers. My daily driver is from 2017. I'm just not interested in anything new they're coming out with.
      - dylan604 1y ago
        I went from a 6S+ to a 15 because I was in the same boat where the end of support/updates made it impossible to use. Also, the battery is shot so it lives on a cable full time. Hoping I can get as many years out of the new one. I have very few apps because I don't trust any of you app builders to respect my privacy. If there was something in between a smart phone and a feature phone, I'd be interested.
      - Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
        My phone is 11 years old, from 2014, and I will probably have to buy a new one when they shutdown 3G since VoLTE is not “officially supported” with my device.
  - ChuckMcM 1y ago
    This response captures it perfectly. I started at Google in 2006 and the "mini kitchens" (essentially a convenience mart) were just getting "re-organized" The new CFO was out to "cut unnecessary costs."[1] While Google was banking billions of dollars in "Free Cash Flow" every QUARTER than were cutting the 'unnecessary' costs that were something like $12,000 per employee per YEAR. So with 20,000 employees, that is about 1/4 billion dollars a year, or roughly 3% of the free cash flow. I called Eric on it at a TGIF[2]. The gist was "We're going to lose all these great employees because you want to keep more of the free cash than you currently do?" And people quit, lots of people, and the flow moved out. And people who joined had no idea it had been "better" than what it was, this was just the standard which was admittedly still better than other companies. Eventually everyone for whom this affront was to high left leaving an employee base reasonably happy with the status quo. They continued to "downgrade" the 'lifestyle benefits' the entire time I was there and it continued to piss people off who left. As margin pressure grew the need to monetize grew and Marissa Meyer who had been the 'brick wall' between the user experience and monetization left the company. Others who felt as she did also left for a variety of reasons. Leaving only those for whom monetization was just the cost of doing business and hey, "We're Google!" right? This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore, they are 'search' users and if their OS pre-loads Bing they use that, sometimes they switch to DDG or Kagi. Once that takes hold in the bulk of the addressable market, Google will go the way of every other tech company before them. I used to point out to people that the "GooglePlex" was the dead hulk of SGI. Like wasps Google was living inside the corpse of a formerly big player. Everyone would tell me, "We're different, we're always going to be around." And like the Zen quotes from "Charlie's War" I would say, "We'll see." :-) [1] I believe that this statement is perhaps the single most destructive thing any CFO can do. In part because they don't define 'necessary.' [2] He was not amused :-)
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  There's a million videos uploaded to YouTube each second. If you're only seeing low quality videos it's because you're only looking in the wrong places.
  - silisili 1y ago
    I don't doubt good videos exist - I'm blaming YouTube for boosting the awful ones so it's all I see in my first page of search results, and the 'creators' who make them.
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      As for search results, I cannot help you. As for recommendation, the algorithm works perfectly if you make the effort to "Like and subscribe™" to quality channels and videos. It's amazing how good YouTube can be if you curate the algorithm with this – and with dislikes if you have to.
      - magicalhippo 1y ago
        Yeah I find generally YouTube to recommend me interesting stuff. I've gotten recommended videos by creators with <1k subs that I really enjoyed, and many with <10k subs. I've gotten recommended videos with topics I hadn't really thought about but which I ended up enjoying. Sure there's about 10% or so that I'm not interested in, but I just mark those as "don't recommend channel" and move on. And the times I just need to check out some stupid clickbait, I make sure to remove it from my history afterwards.

silisili 1y ago

Between shorts, search results, the ads, and the content...I treat youtube links like pinterest links these days. Basically, I'll only click it if I think I really, really need to see it. By 'content' I mean the fact that every video has a moron talking for 10 minutes at the beginning. You can search up something as simple as how to tie a shoe, find a promising video with a lot of likes, then click it. Gotta start with 2 ads first, naturally. Then the first 2 minutes will tell you they'll teach you to tie a shoe. The next 5 minutes will be a backstory on the history of the shoe and how it's impacted the creator's life and their own shoe stories. Then a 2 minute sponsored segment for some dropshipped wallet or sock nobody needs, then another youtube ad, then hurried 10 second clip of someone poorly tying a shoe. Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore.

dylan604 1y ago
> Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't see how anyone can stand it anymore. when you're not an old, and this is all you know, you just accept it without knowing that there was a better world back when the olds were young. not being able to accept this really shows how old man yells get off my lawn you are. YT is not trying to capture you, and probably doesn't care one bit about olds. it's the younger crowds that have been given YT as an absentee parent/babysitter that they have been able to set their hooks in from the beginning. that's the group that will be making them money for years to come
- silisili 1y ago
  That tracks. It feels like as soon as you fall out of that 18-25, or 18-30 demo, the world leaves you behind. Now I understand why we always thought old people were so cranky!
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    I'm still using an 8 year old phone. Nobody has made a phone yet where the feature set would motivate me to but a new one. Stickers? Emojis? Camera filters and effects? Social media integration? None of this is even remotely interesting to elderly-me. The only reason I'm likely to get a new one any time soon is that the companies stopped supporting the old one with software updates, effectively forcing me to throw away a perfectly working phone to keep up with security patches. Same with computers. My daily driver is from 2017. I'm just not interested in anything new they're coming out with.
    - dylan604 1y ago
      I went from a 6S+ to a 15 because I was in the same boat where the end of support/updates made it impossible to use. Also, the battery is shot so it lives on a cable full time. Hoping I can get as many years out of the new one. I have very few apps because I don't trust any of you app builders to respect my privacy. If there was something in between a smart phone and a feature phone, I'd be interested.
    - Mr_Minderbinder 1y ago
      My phone is 11 years old, from 2014, and I will probably have to buy a new one when they shutdown 3G since VoLTE is not “officially supported” with my device.
- ChuckMcM 1y ago
  This response captures it perfectly. I started at Google in 2006 and the "mini kitchens" (essentially a convenience mart) were just getting "re-organized" The new CFO was out to "cut unnecessary costs."[1] While Google was banking billions of dollars in "Free Cash Flow" every QUARTER than were cutting the 'unnecessary' costs that were something like $12,000 per employee per YEAR. So with 20,000 employees, that is about 1/4 billion dollars a year, or roughly 3% of the free cash flow. I called Eric on it at a TGIF[2]. The gist was "We're going to lose all these great employees because you want to keep more of the free cash than you currently do?" And people quit, lots of people, and the flow moved out. And people who joined had no idea it had been "better" than what it was, this was just the standard which was admittedly still better than other companies. Eventually everyone for whom this affront was to high left leaving an employee base reasonably happy with the status quo. They continued to "downgrade" the 'lifestyle benefits' the entire time I was there and it continued to piss people off who left. As margin pressure grew the need to monetize grew and Marissa Meyer who had been the 'brick wall' between the user experience and monetization left the company. Others who felt as she did also left for a variety of reasons. Leaving only those for whom monetization was just the cost of doing business and hey, "We're Google!" right? This opens up the opportunity for disruption. There is a hysteresis effect though, everyone has a different tolerance for crap. More and more people I know are not "Google" users anymore, they are 'search' users and if their OS pre-loads Bing they use that, sometimes they switch to DDG or Kagi. Once that takes hold in the bulk of the addressable market, Google will go the way of every other tech company before them. I used to point out to people that the "GooglePlex" was the dead hulk of SGI. Like wasps Google was living inside the corpse of a formerly big player. Everyone would tell me, "We're different, we're always going to be around." And like the Zen quotes from "Charlie's War" I would say, "We'll see." :-) [1] I believe that this statement is perhaps the single most destructive thing any CFO can do. In part because they don't define 'necessary.' [2] He was not amused :-)
carlosjobim 1y ago
There's a million videos uploaded to YouTube each second. If you're only seeing low quality videos it's because you're only looking in the wrong places.
- silisili 1y ago
  I don't doubt good videos exist - I'm blaming YouTube for boosting the awful ones so it's all I see in my first page of search results, and the 'creators' who make them.
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    As for search results, I cannot help you. As for recommendation, the algorithm works perfectly if you make the effort to "Like and subscribe™" to quality channels and videos. It's amazing how good YouTube can be if you curate the algorithm with this – and with dislikes if you have to.
    - magicalhippo 1y ago
      Yeah I find generally YouTube to recommend me interesting stuff. I've gotten recommended videos by creators with <1k subs that I really enjoyed, and many with <10k subs. I've gotten recommended videos with topics I hadn't really thought about but which I ended up enjoying. Sure there's about 10% or so that I'm not interested in, but I just mark those as "don't recommend channel" and move on. And the times I just need to check out some stupid clickbait, I make sure to remove it from my history afterwards.