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Comment by josephjrobison | Hacker News Reader

As a 29 year old, I’ve just found YouTube much more interesting and actionable recently. Almost every topic is covered and the best content rises to the top.

The recommendation engine is really good now. I’ve added more to my watch later list in the last 6 months than I have in the last 6 years combined.

As an SEO I’m surprised to admit, but I find it better to search directly in YouTube than actual Google search for certain searches.

Google was playing the loooong game on YouTube and it seems to be paying off.

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Yup. I’m 33 and stopped using Facebook a year ago. YouTube is what I’m all about. I use it to listen to ML lectures mostly, and I share videos of my robots. Facebook seems like it’s for old people now or something, and I’m disgusted with how creepy that site became.

> Yup. I’m 33 .... > Facebook seems like it’s for old people now...

In the world the article is talking about, you do realise that YOU are one of these 'old people' right?

I'm 34 and recently got into YouTube in a really big way - as a consumer, not a content creator. I still have a Facebook account (for event invitations and Messenger, go figure) but don't look at the newsfeed at all and my hours spent on there are dwindling as the content becomes more and more useless.

My few younger relatives who use FB have very basic "token accounts" that they don't actually seem to use.

Off-topic slightly, but is there a way to change my YT username? In other words, changing https://www.youtube.com/user/[mycurrentusername] to [newusername] ?

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2657968?hl=es

You need +100 subs

What a bizarre requirement. Why should someone need 100 subscribers to do a simple action like changing their account name?

Why not limit how often you can change it, or make some other kind of limitation?

It's weird to me as a (former?) voracious reader how much I get through audiobooks and YouTube now, because it's easier to multitask with them. I listen to a lot of fiction on audiobooks while commuting or working on my house, because I don't have time to laze about reading. I get technical information through conference talks on YouTube, because I can watch it on a treadmill (it doesn't tell you everything you need to know, but you usually get a good idea if eg Kubernetes does a thing you want to do by watching the "Intro to X using Y" talks).

Same here. Since I started listening to audio books a few years ago my commute became so much more enjoyable - I even look forward to longer business trips now-a-day, especially with the new genres coming out, like LitRPG. Sometimes I even look forward to gardening or cooking if I can have the headphones on. A also frequent YouTube, but more as a replacement for TV (try watching John Oliver in Europe over regular TV on demand..).

> I’ve added more to my watch later list in the last 6 months than I have in the last 6 years combined.

Me too, in fact the wife and I save videos over the course of the week to cast to the TV on a Friday night over a few glasses of wine. We've even started to get into a few vlogs, which up until very recently we assumed were talentless narcissistic rubbish. Turns out there are at least a few good ones (mainly travel related in our case).

Have you found Geography Now yet? I find his presentation style and energy really pleasant.

> I’ve added more to my watch later list in the last 6 months than I have in the last 6 years combined.

Are you actually watching it though?

It's a fair question, but mostly irrelevant in this context. As long as users feel engaged with the site and are using it (and thus watching ads), it doesn't matter how long a users's 'watch later' list grows.

I say "mostly" because there's likely some small effect from users who get overwhelmed by the length of their watch list and bounce from the site, but it's hard to avoid links to YouTube if you spend any time on the Internet.

The YouTube links thing is an interesting point. I wonder if that’s how Facebook’s decision to be a walled garden will come back to them. They prevented other sites from indexing and linking to content, but as a result there’s not as much organic traffic into Facebook to reactivate lapsed users. They planned for growth which will hurt their decline.

The walled garden will continue being lucrative though. Especially if they win VR.

Yea a portion of the watch later. The main signal there is that the recommendation engine is so much better than I see tons of recommended stuff that I automatically add to the watch later. In the past it was always - watch one video and bounce because there was a lot of low quality, irrelevant videos recommended.

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