They might try to make something look nice and be slick for the end user, but they won't usually hire people or use big studios.
This contributed to a culture where the very best people in the field are making things that any user could also go away and do themselves easily, which led to creativity.
Nowadays the best people get money, and lots of it, which leads to their production becoming better and better, which leads to a better product, but less innovation.
"Better" in the sense that they are more polished and edited, but unfortunately that means more filtered, targeted and biased. There is an intrinsic, authentic value in raw productions that gets lost or doesn't exist in the former.
Sheesh...
> unfortunately that means more filtered, targeted and biased
Usually, appealing to a mass-market means less targeted/biased, more generic. The hipsters always want their bands to stay weird.
In contrast, the channels that have large production crews and publish more regularly usually feel thin on content. There is either very little value to the information or the density of information is incredibly low. There are exceptions. Vox comes to mind because they clearly respect their audience, has many more people involved in production, and produces more polished videos.
Yet those exceptions feel rare. More often than not I find new channels through those small time producers, either directly from the creator or through YouTube's automated recommendation while watching an interesting channel.
Now Google is sanitizing educational hacking videos, which is disconcerting because a lot of those videos are either lectures or produced by small producers. Google is probably doing that to protect their reputation, and there are likely cases when I would agree that it is a good thing. On the other hand, hacking is filled with a lot of grey areas. I enjoy some of those educational videos because it offers a glimpse into how hardware and software works, or demonstrates some interesting uses of everyday software. (At least for a Unix user, The other day, I was watching a video on reverse engineering firmware where I have regularly used all but one of the Unix utilities in the demonstration.) If Google takes that option away one of the best avenues for discoverability disappears. That hurts audiences and producers.
Are you familiar with the youtube channel Kurzgesagt?
It's the other way around. When there is no compensation, people do stuff for fun, out of love, and not for optimisation, ROI, DAU/MAU, etc.
"Back in the days" - pre-dot-com - the website was part of the hobby. People wanted to put their knowledge out there, maybe for pride, maybe just "why not?". And the site was theirs, it looked the way they wanted, it was organised they way they were thinking[^1]. But when money comes in, one has to deal with making more visitors, making the site according to trends, with negative space material auto dark/light design, constantly and regularly put in updates, add JSON-LD microdata... it's endless. And the fun dies. On platforms, everything looks the same, it doesn't feel like a home any more, it's not yours. It's a job.
This is what kills quirky, niche little sites and communities.
[^1]: https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/
I also think (though don't have the numbers) that there are many more hobby sites now than there were in, say, 1995, because the whole web is so much bigger. They're just far smaller portion of what you're likely to encounter.
I severely doubt this. 1995-2004(?), essentially pre-myspace, was an era when many of us had a homepage as a hobby; some went into blogging as well, but still on their own site.
Compare it to the web today: everyone is posting content* on silos and a most don't event bother thinking of a website. Convenience, they say, but reality is that everyone thinks they might be able to make a living out of that hobby.
Let me quote a comment from this very site: "It's a shame to ruin a perfectly good hobby by making it a job." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728367
* "content" in the context of silos is a tricky thing to be honest. When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo? When I say modern, I mean Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; WordPress and Tumblr are different, being more like providers of websites.
I know lots of people with websites (ex: my own, https://jefftk.com) and a lot of this is it's so much easier and cheaper now. You don't have to be a sysadmin or be friends with one, domains cost 10x less than they used to, many more people have internet access, etc.
> When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo?
I think it depends a lot who your friends are, what subcultures you're in, and how you choose who to follow. My Facebook feed is mostly my friends talking about interesting things and I like it a lot.
Almost worse, it puts up a barrier to resistance to me even reading opposing views. When I see an anti-Christian comment on HN or Slashdot, I have no problem reading it and potentially responding to it. But if I see an anti-Christian article on Medium, I'm a bit reluctant to click on it, because 1) that person may get money as a result, and 2) it may promote that article to more people, potentially leading to even more articles on a similar vein being written. I assume the situation is the same for lots of ideological positions -- Conservatives avoiding reading Liberal think-pieces, etc.
I don't know, I feel like it's the opposite
When you look at the myriad X-Files or guitar pedal schematic or whatever site, they could be endlessly detailed because it's what people did for fun. Nobody maxes out on fun.
I do, however, max out my work hours...generally as quickly as possible. D In a behavioral psych class, we had the "Bart vs Lisa" analogy of working.
If we pay Bart to study, his grades will increase. If we pay Lisa to study, her grades will decrease. I've forgotten the original papers this was based on because it's not my area.
Anyway. I'm sure Bart's work for pay is equivalent or better than Lisa's free work.
If asked, any rational human would work an hour for $5 versus $0, right? Nobody can spend time making anything complex or useful and then give it away freely.
I know this is true for myself. I will happily contribute to a project if I need it for work and my employer compensates me for it. I only work on a project if it is personally rewarding outside of work
What has happened is that, whereas 10 years ago we would individually spend the time to track down these communities and niche sites, nowadays we can't be bothered and just go to Youtube or Facebook. That's on us though.
Fortunately, in my experience niche sites and communities are still thriving through social transmission, and the fact that so many more people are active online nowadays.
Today, everything is hyper-optimized SEO for maximum ad views run by a huge faceless corporation. How do you discover anything good in that noise?
My only hope at this point is Neocities.
Those who wonder how these niche sites looked like, and example: http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography/ This site has an immense amount of data in a reading-friendly format about old, obscure, beautiful photography equipment, in a way I've not seen for decades. Why? Because it hasn't been updated since 2005. And it just works.
You go and find an appropriate subreddit.
Seriously. Subreddits are mini-Internets. Yes, centrally controlled and restricted to newsboard format (the latter is arguably a benefit), but they link out to interesting sites on the "main" Internet, and mostly haven't been poisoned by marketers just yet.
Not an elegant solution, and not a permanent solution - but it works for now.
The "authentic" people are on Youtube and Reddit and Medium and publishing on Twitter and closed Facebook groups. And yet, some of those people sometimes want to make a living on their passion. I would be willing to bet most people on the web in the 90s would have as well, if they could have.
There is more hobby and enthusiast content on the web now than there ever has been, with more depth, greater quality and dimensionality than the 90's web could ever have hoped to offer, as well as far more opportunities for interaction between people. I think that's a fair trade for nostalgia and "quirk."
(Edited for less snark and more clarity since it seems this comment is getting sniped.)
Discovery on YouTube is now comically difficult, getting out of your filter bubble means making bizarre searches and filter edge cases, otherwise you see the same 15 videos weekly.
They've failed to filter the hate content they intended to eliminate, they've failed to improve their curated content volume, and discovery remains bound and gagged in the back of Ad monetization's sedan.
If you were here in 2010 it's worse now. Privacy / safety / predictability, I guess, but the magic is all gone.
YouTube could use an [adult swim] concept. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. YouTube.
And that sucks.
Thanks for the pointer to Neocities.
It’s a good model for other craft sites.
I'd like people to stop harping on "individual responsibility". It's not "on us". We are social monkeys, we are not perfectly rational autonomous individuals. Monopolies are emerging from collective behaviour that can't be subsumed into the simple aggregation of random personal choices.
Ook!
But also because I was bored and googled for the old StumbleUpon and was surprised to discover it no longer seems to exist.
Basically my goal here is to find a bunch of weird, random, and unique sites and give people a way to randomly explore or adventure through them.
Thanks for taking the time and putting together your site.
Initially all businesses are trying to figure out how to make money by quickly exploring possible business ideas. That's when the most fun but also most start-up tragedies happen. Once some revenue stream is found, the company can start growing, getting into collaborative phase, where it is viewed as a super cool place and most people inside can change things. At some point business opportunities get exhausted, other measures need to be put in place, company grows too big for everybody to have a voice; bureaucracy and formalism sets in, company starts to be perceived as losing its edge and being stale, optimizing for its core profit, exploiting as much as it can and stopping most of the exploration. Innovative people move on to other spaces allowing exploration, reliable business types move in.
Online downloadable audio was barely tractable in 1999 or earlier, let alone streaming video. What was this golden age, what were the sites, and what was the usage?
Streaming video is almost wholly 2004 and later, generally years later.
But the assertion I'm addressing was a golden age of online video specifically.
(I also typically prefer text to video, though good, well-produced, audience-respecting video and audio can be of value.)
Looking back further before video, we had web-rings which allowed for finding some of the best and worst sites on a subject :) I can't be the only card carrying member of the HTML Writers Guild here, can I?
Join the HN "OP Delivers!" webring now!
The Internet audience as of 1999 was about 250 millions of users, with penetration of <50% even in many advanced nations.
As of nearly eight years ago, it was 2.5 billions, and is probably on the order of 5 billion now.
https://bus206.pressbooks.com/app/uploads/sites/10536/2013/0...
And that's neglecting to address the amount of content and traffic available.
I'm not making a "more is better" argument, rather, I believe that "more is different", often in hard-to-appreciate ways.
The 1999 audience, and contributors, wanted to be on the Internet, for the most part. They didn't have to be there, and more importantly, most use was not directly remunerative, though some may have been self-interested (expression, proselytising, shingle-hanging, tech advocacy, targeted sales, and yes, a nascent advertising niche).
Creators could rarely hope for direct benefits, with rare exceptions ("Million Dollar Homepage", etc.)
Use now is vastly broader, it's all but essential, being widely recognised as a basic human right. Devices are easier to use, but far less generative. Even traditionally creative platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows) increasingly get in the way of, rather than facilitate, creation (the time I spend nursing rather than using systems is ... depressing).
And whilst many of the newcomers are welcomed, a large share really aren't. Their use is not aimed at general benefit, but at private and personal appropriation, often through deception and fraud.
More is different.
To some degree yes, but the feeling of belonging to niche forum in the 90's and 00's, really had a different feeling today's sub-reddit, discord, slack communities.
> The internet was a lot smaller place in the past and by every measure there is orders of magnitude
This is very good point, and maybe what I'm mostly uncomfortable with. I'm uncomfortable using large web sites (like YouTube or Reddit) for community building. This could be tied to certain personality types, or lacking from something emotionally for me, but that may be what causes the feeling of missing those sites.
True Honest Question.
What were these sights? I was a teenage in the 1990s. I seriously and literally do not know and now I want to.
Video was all through real player and was grainy, postage stamp affairs that constantly suffered from buffer underruns. It sucked. There was no independent dudes exploring abondoned buildings with high quality production (the proper people). No dudes picking locks in under 30 seconds (lock picking lawyer). No people taking apart power tools (ave).
None of that existed before YouTube. YouTube has dramatically changed the content landscape for the better—both for the producer and consumer. We’ve never lived in a greater time of independent content than now.
And it really seems like whatever site I tell you I miss is going to be met with reasons why YouTube is better for said content, which is completely orthogonal to my original point.
For some reason my comment got a lot of replies and comments. Take some time to think about why that is? Everyone is just on here full of it? Making up feelings of missing web sites? Maybe you don't miss any web sites–that is okay. Maybe it seems silly that someone would have strong-positive memories and emotions tied to certain web-sites that were actual communities to many of us–that is okay. But you shouldn't shame others. Not for this, not for anything.
Of course I didn't yet understand the idea of operating at a huge loss to generate hockeystick growth and attract VC and/or acquisition, so I wasn't wrong and the math didn't make any damn sense, I just didn't know that it didn't matter.
It also seemed wild that their player actually kinda mostly worked. In the browser! Before YouTube it was all awful RealPlayer videos at ultra-low res and smeary, high compression rates, or maybe a short .mov or something of similar quality, and if it was streaming rather than a download it woul... [BUFFERING] ...d freeze constantly. Napster and friends were still mostly for music at the time. Some video sharing was going on but it was, like, really low-quality DiVX rips of DVDs for burning to CDs.
Why do you hear the words "hey guys" or "you guys" in virtually every YouTube video today? Because it's an approved (and extremely boring, meaningless, and effortless) way to address your audience in a non-specific manner.
Internet videos had a lot more character before they were a source of income.
Of course that same income potential produces a lot of garbage 20 minute videos about the latest Nintendo Switch rumor, for example, and they also allow truly passionate people to make money creating the videos they would not have time to create without that income, so it's a mixed bag.
The internet in general 20 years ago had a lot more character overall before people figured out how to make it profitable.
In the early 2000s before YouTube, IME it was a lot more about P2P than web-based publishing or streaming (as mentioned, streaming video was mostly horrible RealPlayer).
A lot of videos were shared and downloaded through DirectConnect and the FastTrack (Kazaa/Grokster/iMesh/Morpheus) and Gnutella (Limewire) family protocols. Some was discovered via search and some (especially at LAN parties) via browsing others' archives. People seem to forget that early day P2P was far from only piracy - this is how homemade content was spread as well.
More sophisticated people would have web sites linking to FTP archives of their own content. I also gather that file-sharing (mostly piracy?) via IRC was big, but it's not something I personally used.
The web was less conflated with the internet back then.
US "broadband" (apparently: any connection speed >56.6kbps, mostly early T1 lines at 1.5 Mbps) crossed the 50% threshold in October, 2004.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0506/
Video quality and bitrates are tightly related. 240p video (320x240) requires 300-700 kbps for live streaming, well beyond the capabilities of modems. 360p is in the 700kbps - 1.5 Mbps range, now considered low-end DSL. 720p, a reasonable HD resolution (1280×720) runs at 2-4Mbps, and 4K is 15-25Mbps.
https://teradek.com/blogs/articles/what-is-the-optimal-bitra...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/12/10/you...
My own recollections are that live streaming video wasn't a commonly-encountered thing until the mid-2000s, that Netflix was still mailing (rather than streaming) video as of 2007, and adoption of that service took considerable time.
https://qz.com/887010/netflix-nflx-launched-streaming-video-...
As of the late 1990s, online audio was a relative rarity, and much of that RealAudio based, witness early archives of programming from NPR and other sources locked in inaccessible, and very low-quality, audio codecs.
Assertions of a pre-2004, let alone pre-1999, golden age of Internet Video are implausible.
Answering this is hard, though. The best way to think about it is think of all those super random, niche subreddits. I'm sure all of those had cool, interesting web sites made by people really into that thing. So really they existed for everything. Find someone who was online a bunch during this time people and ask them if them were members of any interesting online forums.
https://www.vulture.com/2012/04/the-complete-dan-harmon-chan...
Give me a break...
Sidenote: If we were having this conversation over beers at a meetup would you have said "Give me a break..." to me? Is this your conversational tone in person as well?
Again. Give me a break. YouTube has absolutely transformed content distribution for then independent producer. We’ve never had a better age for independent content.
1.) there used to be a lot of niche video sites 2.) many of those sites are gone 3.) The standardization of YouTube is one of the reasons many of those sites are gone.
The first two are facts and the second is my opinion, but which of those things do you not agree with?
I can miss something and understand that what we have now is better overall.
And actually T&C which can change on a whim and aren't even always transparently visible.
Or of your attention?
I find a lot of similar content as text & video not hosted on YT via DDG search
The content is still out there. Google chose not to host it on their servers.
I really don't see how YouTube could be seen as anything but anticompetitive in many of its practices. Primarily, the fact that they have used and continue to use revenue driven by search from Google to maintain the tremendous infrastructure necessary to run YouTube. This means that anyone who wishes to compete with YouTube needs to be able to find investors (or pay themselves, but the number of people or organizations that could do that can be counted on one hand) willing to foot the bill to build billion-dollar infrastructure and then expect to run it at a profound loss, burning hundreds of millions of dollars a year for potentially a decade or more. Google is probably making some money on YouTube now, but they ran it at a mountainous loss for years and years for no reason other than suppressing the possibility of competition being developed. There also other smaller things, like the US government deciding to host all of their video content on YouTube without even considering following the legally-required bidding process - because there was no realistic competitor. That's pretty telling.
But can't folks still create their own websites and upload their own content for cheap?
domain name, virtual server, upload?
(don't know about monetization)
because of the network effect. Users end up flocking to the bigger platform and thus never even find out about the mon&pop store webpage with interesting content (not to mention the monetization is non-existent there).
But it may be not completely prudent to use YouTube as the only place your videos are available. Through the same videos, it is possible to constantly advertise the other sources of one's videos.
The problem, of course, is monetization, or lack thereof outside YouTube.
If you become successful, this will lose you money. If you become successful on Youtube, you can gain money. That's all there is to it.
The real problem is getting traffic, YouTube is the monopolist in that area.
On a slightly unrelated note: When these to-be monopolies are just starting and raising dollars, their service and everything is on point. Once their too big to have competitors, there is absolutely no way of even contacting them (even if you're in the clear and they're wrong). Customer service from these tech monopolies really makes me feel like we're all cattle.
I'm sure if they don't take customer support seriously, they will pay a price for it in the long run.
Would just like to clarify, that I don't think expecting personal support for non-paid services is reasonable. But as a paid customer (for e.g. of Uber), one should at least be able to call an IVR. But these cos. deliberately make it harder for you to get their numbers.
[1]for e.g. how youtube was free speech and niche artists, how google would get you to the result the quickest
10% of 1B is 100M.
100M tickets in how much time? Let's say a year. And it takes on average 5 minutes to respond to 1. That is 500M minutes. So you need a team of ~1500 people to respond to 100M tickets in a year. Not that bad eh.
Separately, your time estimates are much too low.
True that 5 mins per ticket is too less. But I don't think any paid tech service has 1B customers. (users yes, customers, I don't think so).
You could say it's one of the negative side effects of globalization - instead of small market entities serving their local populations, you have large market entities that try to handle everyone themselves.
They have a billion customers and still have a simple phone number, a mobile app and physical counters for customer service.
Inevitable TBH.