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Social media sites actually want search engines to index them. It's just much more computationally intensive and thus hard to cheaply to index a photo on Instag
by alightsoul 2mo ago
Social media sites actually want search engines to index them. It's just much more computationally intensive and thus hard to cheaply to index a photo on Instagram or a video on TikTok or a podcast on Spotify than plain text. So search engines decide not to do it. Only google indexes YouTube transcriptions
This shift to hard to cheaply index content is maybe why search engines died. People don't use hyperlinks anymore
There's also a psychological aspect to relating faces to information. It's much more engaging and attractive. Content creation is still alive and more popular than ever but text based content creation brings no clicks and creates no interest. There's something about video that makes it very appealing like feeling you are outside and thus needing to be alert
- mike_hearn 2mo agoYeah that's the core of it. I've seen people say their finely crafted essays get 1% of the engagement of a video. And in video there is no natural equivalent of the hyperlink, so ranking and discovery are now fully neural and centralized around Youtube.
- inigyou 2mo agoActually YouTube videos do hyperlink to each other.
- alightsoul 2mo agoAt the end or in a corner that disappears, it's not as central to the experience as hyperlinks were. I really miss YouTube annotations. The thing I believe comes close is danmaku comments on bilibili and Nico Nico
- alightsoul 2mo agoAll social media sites including sites like YouTube and reddit rely heavily on ai powered recommendation algorithms for ranking and discovery. They have done so since the introduction of the first TPU around 2016, when Instagram also decided to get rid of the chronological feed. Outside the US TikTok has largely replaced YouTube