YouTube’s TikTok competitor YouTube Shorts is rolling out globally | Hacker News Reader

YouTube’s TikTok competitor YouTube Shorts is rolling out globally

theverge.com

16 pointselorant8 comments

YouTube has some of the worst algorithmic censorship of any social media platform and very little creator support for recourse. People seem to regularly lose channels they spent years building, along with all the revenue and subscriptions. It’s pretty much required to plan for the worst and have backup channels for your backup channels and be ready to start a viral campaign on Reddit just to have any chance to get your channel reopened.

I’d be surprised if anyone trusts them enough to stake their future on another one of their products. Not that TikTok doesn’t have their own serious problems but they have less of a track record and the topics are much more explicit, seems to be less collateral damage, which is easier for a creator to navigate.

Shorts cemented me extending my block on youtube another 3 months.

I already have a block most the time, due to being a sucker for youtubes junk food algorithm (even with history off and not signed in amazingly..), but I find shorts to be the most non-informational yet addictive form of media content, which it sucked to see were taking over youtube.

Putting aside the question of whether any company can disrupt the position of TikTok in this space, it's been interesting to watch this new short-media consumption spread across the platforms. They don't need to be "the" platform to use it effectively. I don't purposefully consume it -- i.e., I don't have TikTok or whatever -- but the medium itself can keep me on a platform longer. I'll mindlessly watch the shorts on YouTube, even in-between watching other content, without really noticing I'm doing it.

Is it really ok for youtube, a product with monopoly position on online video, to bundle a product that competes with other companies ? Seems similar to what Microsoft did with bundling IE with Windows

I agree. This is a tech monopoly using its position of near-absolute power to try and oust a lesser competitor by co-opting their business model. Naïve "invisible hand" types will just see this as healthy competition, not realizing how hard Google can leverage other parts of their company to make this succeed and potentially destroy all competition. Anti-competitive behavior like this doesn't always result in destroying competition, e.g. Instagram Stories being a complete rip-off of Snapchat's entire app after Zuckerberg tried and failed to acquire Snapchat. It did hurt Snap Inc. [2], but they're still around.

Luckily Google has a huge history of adopting and then abandoning their projects[1]. So, maybe we'll get lucky and this will flop as hard as Twitter's Fleets.

[1] https://killedbygoogle.com/ [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/12/how-mark-zuckerberg-has-used...

No longer joining social networks like tiktok as I personally feel most social networks are toxic. YouTube Shorts are enjoyable to watch but short videos are like social media crack you can never get enough.

For what it's worth, I find that tiktok leaves me much more fulfilled than something like twitter or HN or reddit, which can all be quite toxic. To be sure, you can go overboard, but there are a lot of interesting perspectives. It's easy to find people with really interesting hobbies or cool projects

Youtube is well managed. They might have a real shot with this. I sense Instagram stories potential to disrupt an up and coming platform.

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