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Comment by MichaelApproved | Hacker News Reader

The article touches on the importance of YouTube’s discovery a bit but doesn’t do justice to just how strong it can be.

Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.

From the article:

> “If you do run a YouTube channel with any type of significant viewership, I highly recommend backing up your videos, in the event you may need to self-host your content in the future.”

Sure, backups are good but anyone with significant viewership should make sure they promote their other web assets to diversify.

Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority. Getting them subscribed to your email list or to follow you on another platform should be your #2 priority.

There are plenty of alternatives to YouTube for pure video hosting (Vimeo, Wistia, self hosting). There are no alternatives to YouTube for discovery.

View on HN

YouTube owns more than discovery too: they own relationship between viewers and producers.

Most of the YouTube channels I follow have no external means to notify me about new videos. If I were to stop using YouTube, they were banned, or YouTube subscriptions stopped working the same, they would have no way to actually contact me about new content, and they’d lose me.

Effectively YouTube owns the relationship between the creators and I. This can be changed, CGPGrey has been building a mailing list for this reason, but it takes a lot of painstaking deliberate action to achieve. Migrating to a new platform alone is insufficient.

That‘s why you plug your twitter and maybe other socials (mailing list as well I guess, though less usual) at every possible opportunity. It‘s incredibly important to cultivate the relationship with your audience.

In the event that you have to change platform for whatever reason, you still have a line of communication.

Twitter has the same problem as YouTube. Email is a federated open source protocol and far superior as way of securing your fan base. It's probably a great idea for content providers to self-host a website with their videos on it as well.

I agree generally, but most people I know barely ever check their personal emails, pretty much just enough to sign up for twitter/instagram/snapchat/whatever's popular now.

In what kind of bubble do you live? Most people I know check their personal e-mails quite regularly.

Mostly people aged 18-25.

Ok, then it makes sense. That age group is still considered very young adults, and most are still studying and not even exposed to full time jobs yet. As soon as you receive important emails from banks etc you start checking your personal e-mail regularly.

That works for very niche streamers/creators. Maybe with an older audience as well. If your a streamer on twitch or YouTube chances are your audience isn‘t older than 30. I personally don‘t really use email for actual communication. Twitter is pretty much perfect to communicate to an audience. Yes it isn‘t federated but at least you‘re using a bunch of different platforms to diversify risk.

Generally I would advise new content creators to be present on every possible platform.

I don't use Twitter but I tried it a few years back. It's hard to follow relevant content if half of what you see are people's re-tweets. With e-mail I can easily sift through and find what is relevant to me.

The first "big" band I ever saw go multi-channel to connect with fans was Dave Matthews Band [1] In March of 2009, the band went from a blog-looking thing [2] that collected email addresses to putting every social channel front and center. [3]

By November 2010, they had iTunes Ping, Twitter, an iPhone app, Facebook, Myspace, the bassist's twitter feed all being pushed in huge tiles.

At the time this was extraordinary, since many artists did not have a handle on social at all and definitely were not pushing people "away" from direct connection like this.

I believe the idea was to allow many platforms to get between you and your fans/followers, but to allow the fans to choose which platform that would be.

As the OP suggests, this can be a lot of work.

[1] Coran Capshaw, the band's manager created an early dial-up ISP company in Charlottesville that went on to become MusicToday. was responsible for major tech advances in live entertainment

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090219153059/http://www.davema...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20101105102023/http://www.davema...

> The first "big" band I ever saw go multi-channel to connect with fans was Dave Matthews Band

Judged.

However, on a more serious note, I new people who were -very- attached to bands/musicians based on interactions they had on MySpace and LiveJournal.

One problem with any online exposure in the modern web is that the bar from 'unknown' to 'trolls flooding your inbox' is pretty low. I do wonder however whether small time performers wind up trapped by this: When they are first growing they probably can't pick the ideal "Social Media" person, which may limit certain exposure and opportunities.

> Judged

You don’t know the half of it. I ran a DMB blog and large online community. It was where I did a lot of my first web programming. :|

Whatever you think of their music, DMB and their fans pioneered a bunch of areas.

One of the most forward decisions by the band was to allow online distribution of their live recordings.

Being mainstream at that point meant it pushed torrenting of the live shows into the workflows of many people who wouldn’t have otherwise have been exposed to the tech.

It also drew the hackers of sorts to their scene who would illicitly capture and record IEM streams, mix them with mic recordings then combine them with stealth monopod videos to release bootleg copies of entire shows.

Only the Radiohead fans came close to the amount of enthusiasm in the DMB scene back then.

That said—if I could go back I’d pick Radiohead to follow.

This is a natural extension of any platform geared for the general public as creators, because managing all that for someone in one place provides real benefit to the user. It's just as you note that benefit comes with loss of control.

It's really no different than anything else in life. People hire contractors to do larger home repairs, and the contractors contact and subcontract other specialty workers as needed (drywall, woodworking, plumbing, electrical) for things they can't cover themselves. As the homeowner, unless you make an effort to know who these people are, you won't know who they are and may not know what their company is. The benefit is that you don't need to know any of it and can just let the contractor coordinate it all for you.

Youtube is just like that contractor, except instead of a local guy that cares about your business it's a giant multinational which is hard to get to care if they screw something up for you because you're one of many millions of other customers.

The parallels of you can handle all this coordination youtube offers with more control are obvious. Either hire someone to do it all for you or handle it yourself if you want control, because no matter what platform you go to that handles it for you, chances are it will exhibit some or all of the problems that Youtube has, or even new ones.

I disagree somewhat - well, I think simply backing up content is insufficient but if you diversify your platform now and manage to snag a significant number of viewers then you should be good. Shared platforms like DLive (a la pewdiepie fame and others) or watchnebula.com is one way to do this and can be very strong for topically related subjects - independent platforms like Dropout.tv are also an option but you're either hoping to win the bandwidth vs. advertiser cost balance or going to need to charge for access - both of which can lower your subscriber rate.

I think it's hard to make a fully independent platform so I think topical ones are a better option - but YouTube is really in a position of power due to the network effect. As long as they don't shoot themselves in the foot with controversy and banning then they should be able to easily hold onto their position - everything challenging them has an uphill battle.

I would really like a recommendation engine that I own and control.

It would know what I read and watch. It would find new stuff for me, dedupe it, listen to my feedback,and learn from its mistakes. It would work with all kinds of media, not just youtube or HN.

And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.

+1 I'd also pay for something like this...

> And it would all be private. I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.

Some portions of a personalized, cross-service recommendation engine are a lot more viable if centralized (e.g. any scraping/indexing, and plausibly the personalization itself). Supposing such a service had no intention of you ever personally being the product, what would they have to do in order for you to still be comfortable handing that data over to them?

Host in my closet or basement with a one-way data flow. In only, not out.

How much of the general public is going to be capable to set up and maintain a server in their basement? To challenge YouTube, targetting just the programming crowd isn't going to be sufficient.

The general public seems to be capable of setting up and maintaining a Nest thermostat. The only difference would be that data only goes down, not up.

I guess if you sell a pre-constructed device, that could work. There would be other issues (you have to spend money on hardware, potentially have to get it shipped, may not be able to get access to the device at all based on your region, keeping it always on and accessible, etc).

As a computer program, this is probably not feasible. While in theory you are possibly capable of writing the algorithms for your own recommendation engine using whatever ML tools are popular today, the issue you'd have is data. YouTube's recommendation algorithm effectively only works because it's capable of aggregating millions of users behavior to feed into their own system. Getting that data personally would be very difficult both because YouTube doesn't want to enable competitors, and because consumers would be extra freaked out to find out about some random engineer outside of YT getting their watch history.

As a non-program, you can always depend on the means that humans have used for content discovery since time immemorial: word of mouth.

Well just for me I don't care what's trending so don't need the feed of other people's views. But absolutely needing a feed of new posts might be problem.

That's really missing the point. Recommendation engines are a lot more dumb than you are thinking. They don't understand the content at all. They only know that thousands of users that watched the same videos as you in the past also watched this other new video, so you might like it as well.

A recommendation engine that works solely based on your own watch history would require a totally different approach using algorithms that are years/decades/forever away from existing.

Good points.

It does make sense that the job is simpler with everyone's history and inputs, if you can keep PII out of it. Are there any good references on recommendation aggregation algorithms?

Here's a simple proposal that keeps everyone's stuff anonymous and allows a rec service to pay bills.

Distribute the pool of everyone's watch histories/prefs/etc using IPFS, which is a DHT with static names and some storage. User clients put the share data into IPFS and register into a public pool. The client remembers their own hash. Rec services (there can be multiple) pull everyone's sets periodically and aggregate/indexe them. Users can then retrieve a batch of new recs by sending a small fee to the service of their choice along with their hash and the server will place some new recs into their bucket. If the recs are not suitable, they can try another service.

If I send you links to 2-3 rare videos and you view them, I can probably uniquely identify you (or restrict the list of potential users to ~5 users then recognize you based on other videos you would have watched). I then have access to your full video watching history.

Even without this, I could just check videos you shared on Twitter, follow the same process, and have a decent chance of identifying you.

Anonymization is very very hard. Maybe federated learning is more promising here, keeping all your data privately stored on your own devices.

> That's really missing the point. Recommendation engines are a lot more dumb than you are thinking. They don't understand the content at all.

I think you're the one underestimating modern recommender systems, especially the ones built by advanced teams in big tech companies.

They absolutely use content features. Among other advantages, this counters the cold start problem (how will you learn about a new video if it doesn't get recommended to anyone).

Have you ever seen the torrent of garbage that is new posts on e.g. Reddit or Imgur? You only see decent posts on the ‘front page’ because some people sift through that and filter out teenagers' low-effort attempts.

YouTube has hours of video uploaded every minute. A non-centralized, context-less recommendation system would mean that you are offered those crap videos together with ones that are the standard for ‘good’ now. Just get into the long tail on any search results and see if you want those.

A non-monopolized video discovery would be splendid, only who knows how to achieve that. Perhaps it would be more realistic to do the recommendations based on the numbers of ‘retweets’ in federated networks—in a more ‘social’ style instead of views (dunno if PeerTube already offers that). Also, an open system will be incessantly gamed.

Open Data is a thing, I can imagine some PeerTube instances would publicly share their data (anonymously etc), in order to build open recommendation systems.

Personally, I would gladly donate my (anonymous etc) data for this noble goal.

Open data + federated learning (somewhat ironically a Google invention) could help with this, but it has a long way to go, and a lot of opportunities for incumbents to fight back.

The problem is (as with all open/federated systems) spam.

How do you figure out which data has been faked to drive views to particular content?

Data offers diminishing returns, and at sufficient quantity introduces vetting and validity problems --- see Amazon's reviews crisis or fake Yelp reviews, as examples.

Data quality and relevance matter far more.

Except that youtube’s recommendation engine It terrible and getting worse. I am on youtube all the time and all it ever recommends is things I already subscribe to. And it seems to be steering further into things I have already watched.

This is maybe a tangent, but do these ML-powered recommendation algorithms actually, like, work well for people?

I use both YouTube and Netflix pretty extensively. These companies are both held up as ML success stories. But, at least in my personal experience, they suck! My front-page feeds consist of (1) content that the platform knows I have already seen because IT IS IN MY WATCH HISTORY, (2) content that is trivially related, like by having the the same channel/director/actors, and (3) random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on.

It's not that the content isn't out there -- I'm able to find stuff I like through "big spreadsheet of all the Netflix movies" websites, online recommendations from humans, and YouTube channel crossovers/cameos. But I've never had that magical "the algorithm knows you better than you know yourself" experience that every ML engineer I've ever spoken to seems to be convinced their systems achieve.

Are all ML engineers mindless drones with exactly average movie preferences, or am I some kind of incomprehensible weirdo?

> random junk I have no interest in watching and always regret clicking on

if you regret clicking on it, that means you did click on it and the recommendation did it's job; remember that the job of the recommendation engine is not (directly) to suggest content you'll like, it's to suggest content that will get you to click. Ideally those goals would be aligned, but not necessarily. YouTube is simply incentivised (via ad revenue) to get you to click on as many videos as possible.

At least in my case, it's not that I'm constantly clicking on things that it turns out I dislike. Rather, it's that the few times I have clicked on a recommendation (because hey, maybe they know something I don't, maybe Sonic the Hedgehog actually is a good suggestion for people who liked Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), I've regretted it.

Right, but my point is that from YouTube's perspective it doesn't "matter" if you like or dislike the video, if they can get you to click. And clearly this strategy works on some people, or they wouldn't be doing it.

So while it may not be overly successful on you (i.e. you only click occasionally), if it works on a significant portion of people it could still be a successful strategy overall.

Sometimes you click even when you don't want to. For example on youtube on ipad it's very difficult to click on the vertical three-dot hamburger icon on a video (that you need to use to tell them you're not interested in a video) without clicking on the video by mistake. The hitbox on that icon is all wrong.

So true. The thing I find bizarre about youtube is how bad not only their recommendations but their search is. This is a Google company but somehow if I search for a specific episode in a specific series (eg one episode in a game walkthrough or whatever) it can't get the ranking right?

I also still don't understand why yt recommendations are as poor as they are. I've tried taking the time to try removing certain things from the "recommendation history" (or whatever they call it), flag recommendations I'm not interested in etc and it does improve things a bit but still it recommends things I would never watch in a million years (eg right now I have 4 Joe Rogan recommendations on my homepage even though I've literally never watched any of his things and have zero interest in ever doing so, and click on every one and say not interested etc, for a while it was obsessed with trying to get me to watch MMA content even though I can't bear watching other people hurt each other).

And the whole issue of recommending videos where it knows I've watched the whole thing, I just don't even know where to start.

On search, I wonder if this is deliberate; if they gave you exactly what you want as the top result, you'd click that one and not look any further. But by having to scroll past a few other videos, maybe you'll see another one or two that you also decide to click on, resulting in more overall views.

This is a different strategy to Google web search, where the monetisation occurs on the search results page (via ads there) rather than on click-throughs, so there isn't an incentive to try and get you to click several tangentially related links.

What do you think of https://findka.com/

No affiliation, but it seems to be trying to do what you want

I know what you mean, if this is what you mean. YouTube has become so laser-focused that it's become ridiculous. I watch videos and get suggested similar videos. Eventually I'm only watching one type of video.

>I don't mind paying for my content but I do mind being the product.

This is another thing that bothers me. Being guilt-tripped for not watching an ad, or being a Patreon subscriber, or YouTube Red subscriber. Even if I don't watch ads or pay a fee I am, me, this individual is valuable just for who I am. My data, my habits are valuable to Google just as much as it is for me to pay a fee or to watch ads.

Google is not the person who created the content you are consuming. That person or group of people gets nothing from viewers who "don't watch ads or pay a fee."

Remember when people browsed pages to find new content by creators instead of being spoonfed by an algorithm?

I do, but the memory is well-faded, and growing dimmer...

Yeah I remember when no one but nerds like us used the web

Yes, unless you crosspost to Instagram or Facebook and tell people in your videos about all three. Or is that frowned upon at YouTube and/or monitored if you have a high viewership channel?

YouTube doesn't care about that.

> Multimillion dollar businesses are built based on just the discovery feature.

Arguably, entire political movements; the far right and conspiracy vlogosphere relies on constantly being advertised for free to new suckers through youtube recommendations.

We've seen a massive movement for companies to post warnings or alerts stating facts might not back up certain content on social media in the last year or so. Fact Checkers they're called.

Can we at least get youtube to put up a banner saying "no it's impossible to defy the laws of physics and build a unlimited energy machine with a few magnets a microwave and a multimeter?"

I'm with you, except I kind of love those videos. The plywood fabri-cobbled infinite energy pendulum that will be generating boundless power "just as soon as I get the friction down" always looks so cool! The enviable commitment to craftsmanship of the backyard free energy crank ends up producing beautiful, relatable work.

You found anyone who actually believed in it and weren't just trying to scam someone?

I always though these were prank/scam videos?

some really seem like true believers. I'm trying to find the one I'm thinking of because you're right: the search results are overwhelmingly people trying to get you off the site. The casual enthusiast having fun tinkering in the garage is fine by me; it's keeping them out of trouble and a better hobby than, say, boating. But like you I abhor the ruthless exploiter selling you a dream because having to work for a living is garbage. Whether that's the drop shipping get rich quick person, or the "buy my zero point generator" guy.

> and a better hobby than, say, boating.

LOL, as a boat owner that hasn't been out on my boat in quite a few hears, I wholeheartedly agree. On a side note, the payment's due again...

It might be inadvertent scam but a lot of these people passionately believe in their ideas. A lot of the time they’re not selling anything and it couldnt be categorized as scam. It’s wishful thinking for all I care

A coworker of mine, and otherwise an incredibly smart and skilled developer, bought one of these believing it was real :(

There's something to be said for the average person being ideologically incoherent from my perspective, for the same reason I probably seem likewise ideologically incoherent to them!

Sorry, I have to disappoint. I know at least one person IRL who believes a number of pretty weird things. Know him since school. Almost freaked me out when he told me he builds a cloudbuster for his backyard to protect against chemtrails.

There's a tonne of people that genuinely buy in to this stuff.

All you need is some vague sense that all the "experts" are either dumber than you, or part of some big conspiracy.

Then because of that you don't even try to understand the work of those that came before you and hey presto! You're on your way to slowly rediscovering the laws of thermodynamics on your own - and until you do (if you ever do) you'll believe all sorts of wacky shit might be possible.

"As soon as I get the friction down" is such a funny excuse because it's almost correct. They're so tantalizingly close to getting it.

That sounds like a lot of work. Can scanning software really do that effectively and fairly without a lot of false positives? Suppose for example you post a video debunking wacky anti-gravity claims, and the AI flags it because of keywords. You'll need to appeal, waste a lot of time, and maybe eventually it'll get straightened out, but the friction will be a disincentive to even produce your content at all.

The problem is that, in my experience, the most nefarious of these disinformation videos are those who are the most plausible and skirt reality enough to be complicated to debunk in a simple sentence.

If you seriously believe that the Earth is flat or that lizard people control the world, then frankly a Youtube disclaimer won't really change anything.

But take this random video I found earlier on PeerTube: https://peer.tube/videos/watch/7b5faff9-1752-4eba-be37-beeb0...

It's in French but basically it's one of these videos against the banking system that simplify and caricature the situation to the point of meaninglessness. Coming up with a proper fact-check for something like that would be incredibly difficult, and I'm sure extremely controversial.

It would also take a lot of time and money to get economists and physicists to weigh in on these videos. That's how these conspiracy theories manage to remain relevant in the first place: overwhelm the opposition with thousands upon thousands of hours of content, and claim that they take things out of context or that they don't get it if they don't bother to sink months of their lives watching all that garbage.

That's something I have noticed as well and it's concerning - the vast amount of fringe/conspiracy/right wing content that's showing up on things like Peertube. it's like the unhinged days of Usenet again in many ways.

Edit: And I've noticed the downvotes, yet what I have said is still accurate. It is true that Gab moved to mastodon, for example, and there is evidence of their mindset spreading to other properties in the Fediverse.

If you have something that's "just like youtube, but we don't delete your stuff" it shouldn't be surprising that the vast amount of content is stuff that was deleted from youtube

I think this effect becomes a strategic defensive moat for established social media websites. Anybody who tries to compete with established players will find that their earliest adopters are the most unsavory sort, banned by other sites looking for a new home. This is the more insidious side of 'network effects.'

This was exactly my point and I am disappointed to see that I was downvoted for saying so. I am still surprised at just how swiftly Gab, for example, spread into the Fediverse.

Some of the early adopters are definitely unsavory, yet that content is what new users are going to see. Peertube/etc are still too small to protect against it, I fear.

Founding cohorts matter.

Early online worlds were (often, not always), academics and techies. Even that was often hard going to generate larger appeal. Facebook was Literally Harvard.

Random malcontents have an even higher social hill to climb.

An elite founding cohort tends to regress to the mean. An unsavory cohort ... tends to further radicalise or collapse entirely.

Fandom/hobby groups are more sustainable and often avoid pathological evolution, but rarely seem to develop mass appeal.

And all this before adding financial or business pressures.

These services benefit from offering the viewer what they want.

I'm very cynical about any attempts to curb this. I suspect these services will go for stuff that they know, through A/B testing and whatnot, won't affect their bottom line.

Let's say they show particularly harmful and scientifically 'banana-shit' videos, but with a disclaimer in a sidebar that the content in question is 'disputed'.

I imagine viewers are much more drawn to the content and will filter out the sidebar because 1) they don't notice, 2) they don't care because it's just a sidebar, or at worst 3) the libs are trying to make us be okay with homos/feminist/etc.

A provider of said content could defend their 'wokeness', a consumer could just ignore the sidebar or use it to point out how 'the libs' control things.

Meanwhile the rest of us, if we get past the partisanship, are left wondering how such few actors got to decide on so many societally-relevant topics. Surely we've progressed beyond having to deal with feudal lords?

Seeing how inaccurate other aspects of youtube moderation are, I puzzled why anybody would want youtube to attempt this. It would inevitably end up flagging videos of kittens when their shitty autocaption system thinks "purr" means "zero point energy".

I’ve seen couple anecdotes that Japanese artists and amateur musicians get better view counts on Nico Nico Douga(Japanese clone of 2010s YouTube - also inspiration for Chinese Bilibili), despite obviously having far less active users, so I think it’s possible that trying to gain audiences within YouTube could be not as important as perceived, especially the purpose of doing so isn’t to gain more affiliate fees.

A good example to show how much discoverability is important.

Check Blender's Peertube [1] and compare to their Youtube Channel [2]. At the time of writing the latest video is a week old and has 27K views on YouTube while a measly 28 views on PeerTube.

Those figures alone show that it's not even worth to keep an instance up and running for this. I doubt it even counts as an insurance policy against Google shenanigans, you are likely to lose all viewership if your channel goes kaput anyway.

The only way this can possibly be successful for anyone is if they make huge investments in marketing and that carries a risk that even then it may never pay back. YouTube just provides immense value through discovery. You may not like it but there's no denying.

[1] https://video.blender.org/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/BlenderFoundation/videos

"None of my videos have ever gotten a large number of views, and none are monetized, so I might as well copy them to a PeerTube instance I control."

As we know, there is a growing history of unexpected changes or even phase-outs of services/features that were once considered fixtures provided by Google.

There is nothing I am aware of that says a user could/should not simultaneously 1. keeps backups of her work on physcial media in her possession (as well "in the cloud"), 2. host her work on YouTube or some similarly commercial service, and 3. self-host her work on PeerTube. The decision to diversify should not matter whether the videos have significant views or not.

If both services are free, do you have to "move" from service X to service Y, or can you can just "copy" (mirror).

As a video creator, who in the world would go to all of the effort to create a video, upload it to youtube, and then delete every single piece of the original content in their possession leaving the final in YT as the only surviving copy? WHO? IDIOTS.

People who have limited storage resources? One of the wonderful things about making content for YouTube is its low barrier to entry, and that probably includes a lot of people using their mom's hand-me-down MacBook Air. Maybe people who haven't been bitten by significant data loss before? Sure, it usually only takes once, but maybe that would be their first time? Lots of young people on that platform that are probably really used to everything just kind of automatically being backed up in a cloud somewhere.

Someone not having your level of prudence and understanding in their MO doesn't mean they're idiots. Did you learn everything you know by reading the docs and best practices recommendations and acting accordingly, or did it take a couple of stinging mistakes to bring you to where you are? Your attitude is the stuff that nightmare bosses/parents/teachers/mentors are made of. Mellow out.

Video files are large, so you usually have to store them on some kind of external disk. And it's very possible to lose an external disk. If videos are your livelihood then I imagine you're going to be a lot more disciplined than that but there are plenty of hobbyist vloggers out there.

I manage petabytes of storage of media content. While this content is not mine, I'm just saying I'm fully aware of the size of video content. My personal video archive is in the hundreds of TBs. I have put forth the effort to save my content in multiple formats aw well as locally, offsite, and in the cloud. I'm saving RAW content. Most "YouTubers" are producing MP4 video content which is tiny compared to RAW. If I can do it, they can too. I guarantee YouTubers making money are making way more money than I am.

I'm gonna go ahead and assume that to someone who manages petabytes of video content, the importance of backing up video content is more obvious than it is to, say, a non-technical person with a hobby toy unboxing channel. If it was indeed knowledge that is as common and obvious as your attitude suggests, then you probably wouldn't be making any money at all.

Perhaps it's a matter of tone not coming across well through text, but you seem to be bizarrely angry at people on YouTube in general, even more so if they don't back up their video files.

> I guarantee YouTubers making money are making way more money than I am.

You would be incorrect. The overwhelming majority of video uploaders on YouTube have never made a single cent.

You misread that. My guarantee is if a YouTuber is making any money, they are making more than I do. That implies that I am not making any money on my video that I am storing, yet I still back it up properly.

It's more common than you think.

Dustin, from Smarter Every Day, has millions of subscribes and keeps his backup copies on old hard drives loosely placed into plastic containers. He also causally tosses them around.

He's hardly and idiot but...

Here's the video where Linus sets him up a 160tb server to replace his old "backup solution". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcWSrIiR1tY

*Destin

I think it's not that someone intentionally does that, it's that daily creators or those that make large quantities of videos simply run out of space or get overwhelmed by how much storage is needed over time.

There are many videos by creators chronicling the solutions they've had to contrive to preserve their records and the cost/time tradeoffs they've made to continue creating while saving their archives.

Some people do it intentionally to "move on".

I have over 160k+ subscribers. What you say is correct and something I've known for years. Build your own platform and hope others will follow you wherever you go. YouTube is a temporary marketing platform at the moment but there are still huge amounts of potential. I have no faith in it's long term stability though.

Definitely agree on priority #2.

My flow for watching youtube has been to subscribe and sign up for email alerts (the bell). When I had some time to watch, I'd scan my youtube alerts email folder for items of interest. It was efficient and would quickly leave me with a queue of videos.

That workflow went away for me this month: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/63269933?hl=en

I don't even know what the alert bell is for now. If I look at notifications its full of "recommendations". If I go to my subscriptions its random items from all my subscriptions regardless of "the bell".

> Getting people subscribed to your YouTube channel is #1 priority

Is it though?

I don’t make videos, but if I did it wouldn’t be as “my job”, it would be because I had information to share.

My favorite YouTube videos and channels aren’t “personalities” being “influencers”.

I guess I just don’t measure success in “popularity”. I don’t think my number one goal would be to get to people, it would be to contribute something useful to a couple people that could use that info.

I would value a good and reliable search feature over the highest possible user base, but this is all just me. I am aware there are people that need the attention / viewership more than I do.

If you count on ad revenue in any way, getting subscriptions matters. This is true even for channels that wouldn’t be categorized as (scare quotes) “influencers”. Your subscriber count directly affects your ability to turn each new video into more views and therefore more ad revenue.

> If you count on ad revenue in any way,

Maybe relying on Google to share -or- arbitrarily decide not to share money that they get in from their massive advertising machine with you... isn’t a good business model?

Being censorship-proof is INFINITELY more important than "Multimillion dollar businesses" done on censorable platforms which invariably will become evil (not if but when).

Do you have a philosophical justification for that argument?

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