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Comment by FussyZeus | Hacker News Reader

Very little of YouTube feels genuine at all anymore. For as much as I can't stand the middle schoolers vlogs, at least I know that's an actual person with something to actually say. If you go to YouTube's home page with no account, literally all you see is promoted content, usually by a mix of record labels, TV stations, some "company" that makes comedy sketches or whatever, and one of those channels that does the "worlds blankiest blank" video lists.

There's very little regular people on there anymore, and IMHO, that is their biggest problem. It's just become a slightly different version of television, with all the big money, shallow personalities, derivative content and problems that comparison implies.

Edit: self correcting, there are plenty of regular people on there, they just never get seen organically.

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Isn't that pretty much what happened to eBay? Used to be a community of people selling their old computer parts and Magic The Gathering cards, and now it's devolved into Yet Another Distribution Channel where faceless companies offer their lineup of products.

Add Etsy to that list.

I also feel like the same thing is happening to Snapchat.

As someone who is in the business, the one thing that has had this effect is YouTube's drive towards brand safety. Brand safety always has a material effect on an advertising company's bottom line, and YouTube being loss-making, they've been going full blast in the past two years to make the site as ad-friendly as possible. One thing about brand safety though: it's expensive to achieve. Brand safety = high production value, vanilla content. This means high costs coupled with slow growth. This heavily favours the established or well-funded media entity. The 'genuine' camcorder-weilding film student can only afford to try this YouTube thing out for a few months before going broke. With this constraint on time and money, the one-man shows resort to cheaply produced, edgy content to grow as fast as possible and now they're being slaughtered for this approach.

I've previously listed the various YouTube channels that I subscribe to [1]. All of them are "regular people", and nearly all of them I've found organically, by YT's suggested content. There are many others who I know of but don't follow because I have only a limited amount of time I'm willing to spend on watching videos.

I agree, though, that almost none of this ever appears on the front page. I posit that this is because they are relatively niche interests: what I see on the trending list is pop-culture content, which is so called because it appeals to a very wide demographic—and thus would be expected to appear on the default front page, precisely because there is no additional information to go by on more specific content that the viewer might be interested in.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14017518

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