The end result? I'm sticking to my current channels. I can't be alone and knowing that YouTube takes recommended content so seriously, I have to imagine this is going to panic plenty of product managers at YouTube.
They can do whatever they want and they won't lose a single user.
In fact, I wanted to cancel my Youtube Premium, but I know it's not gonna affect their decision in the slightest, while I will hurt my favourite content creators as they won't get that thousandth of a cent they get from my Premium view.
Over time this should put pressure on them to be open to a better platform and make the move as soon as such platform exists.
Over time means nothing until there's actually competition, and there's nothing on the horizon that can compete to the scale of YouTube. Your content creator is not moving anywhere any time soon.
That's why I choose to reward them through non YouTube platforms like Patreon. I've also noticed a huge trend in content creators making sponsorship deals that they embed in their own videos. I sense that canceling your YouTube premium won't hurt them as much as it used to in the past. Plus, you can give a portion of your subscription to them directly, should you so choose.
Monthly donations are cool but limited as they only distribute the money among few people because they're expensive and a commitment.
My dream, if I had the patience to build it, would be a platform that distributes some amount of budget among every content creator you have watched. Out of my $100, everybody gets $2. A bit like Brave Rewards, without the crypto stuff.
So no, they probably won't lose "users", but they may lose "engagement," however they're measuring that at the minute.
This is not a logical conclusion.
Twitter is different to blogging (also shorter) it has killed a lot of the blogging market.
In fact, a lot of Youtube is too long, as the content producers chase the ad revenue.
Logically things will continue and everything will go to smaller chunks.
As I grow older, I watch longer and more informational videos than I did 10 years ago.
I something learned from the MMO boom back in the days of WoW. After WoW came out, there were a glut of other MMOs. Game companies were like, "Look at WoW! Players love MMOs! If we make MMOs, we'll be rich!"
Almost all of them failed. The problem wasn't that the games were bad. Many were technically and artistically better. It definitely wasn't that gamers couldn't afford them. Cost was within the level of disposable income for most. The problem wasn't even network effects and userbase, though those do have an effect. Gamers move to new games all the time.
The problem was that there is one fundamentally scarce commodity: human time.
Thinking of competition in terms of physical goods is using an Industrial Age definition of competition when we're living in an Information Age. Consumers need a wide variety of unrelated physical things, so competition is only really meaningful between the products of the same kind. Also, producing goods has a significant per-unit cost.
With information—especially entertainment media—anything that takes user attention competes with every other product that does the same. It doesn't matter if the products are completely unrelated: they burn the same scarce resource, so users using one are less able to use the other. And this is the only scarce resource in the equation since the marginal cost of streaming the same movie to one viewer or a million is essentially the same.
YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, Fortnite, Instagram, Fox News, Minecraft, Reddit, Spotify, they're all competing against each other.
As Reed Hastings said once, "You get a show or a movie you’re really dying to watch, and you end up staying up late at night, so we actually compete with sleep. And we’re winning."
I don’t know how well Nebula is doing, but I don’t see it as impossible that there is going to be some fragmentation in the video space in the future.
I wish Peertube or something would take off. The kind of centralization YouTube has isn't healthy, and it's easier and cheaper to host video now than ever since HTML5 video became a thing. If you're running a business, depending on the goodwill of a third party company's free offering (which costs them a fortune to run) is nonsensical.
Not an uncommon state of affairs, for open sources va proprietary.
TikTok has a horrible conversion rate though.
A lot of them are cross-posting to Odysee, and some are also on Nebula.
Edit: Do any of these content creators posting to other non-YT sites mention the availability of these sites in their YT videos? If not, then they are not really convinced of their staying power themselves.
Yes. EEVblog mentions Odysee all the time, and many many channels mention Nebula when shilling Curiosity Stream. They tend to tread lightly on YT itself because of the reverse of the prisoner's dilemma.
Why so? Are these other platforms unable to payout as much as YT? Seems natural that ad revshare would not be the same on a site that nobody has heard of compared to the numbers available from YT. Doesn't seem too enticing for creators to go to other platforms where there is less revenue potential.
I'm just not seeing the prisoner's dilemma here. I just see people placating a noisy herd by offering content on other sites while still firmly attached to the teet of YT.
I assume this is less of a risk now than it used to be, because more creators are promoting alternative sites, and I'm even seeing ads for TikTok on YouTube itself.
About the software, I have a dream (tm): NNTP expanded so that it can be integrated with other services, include small binaries natively, or magnet links when above a certain size, the torrent being automatically created, seeded and linked by the originating user's client, employ enough security to become troll/vandal proof, etc. The infrastructure is already here, but the protocol is too tied to the limitations of the Internet in the 70s and 80s and takes for granted that everyone is a gentleman, which makes it hardly usable today.
YouTube is becoming the place you find content, not necessarily though where you spend money. They're going to start caring about this.
- Curiosity Stream/Nebula (Adam Neely, Mary Spender, Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank, Super Bunnyhop)
- LBRY/odysee (DistroTube)
- FloatPlane (Linus Tech Tips)
None of these has a nice recommender like YouTube, so you'll likely either have manual curation (Nebula, Floatplane) or drown in a sea of bad/uninteresting content (LBRY)
The main point of that list was: there are multiple platforms that try to be a "YouTube for people who don't like YouTube, for a point in time when YouTube gets horrible", with some people creating content there, and e.g. odysee lets creators sync their videos so you get exactly the same videos from them on YT and on Odysee. But for most creators this is still additional work for little benefit since their main audience is on YT.
But the more important point is that even if all the many dozens of mostly small channels I subscribe to were on some other paid video service, I wouldn't want to track down and check in on all those services. Even just 3 would be a vastly worse experience than YouTube, especially since there would almost certainly be huge variation in the features and quality of their various web, mobile, and TV apps.
The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
Absolutely, as long as there was widespread agreement in both the distribution mechanism and important video features like closed captions.
> The relatively closed nature of YouTube isn't necessarily something you'd want to replicate.
No, but the consistency and ability to get everything in one place is pretty vital, and is something you pretty much get for free from single centralized sources. The closed nature is obviously one of the huge downsides.
> The bigger issue would be search and discovery, especially since I can't think of any obvious way to prevent services from spoofing engagement data to influence rankings.
Yep. Another big one is the cost of serving videos.
It would take over a hundred years for a person to watch a single day's worth of YouTube uploads. At this point it would take the literal apocalypse to stop them.
Basically, I've stopped using YouTube as a source for finding new content. If I get linked to a video from a trusted source (here, reddit, etc), then I'll watch the video, but they lost me as a member of the community.
Gotta get that gold.
If only I could calculate the total electricity burn planet wide because 4 billion people can't turn their screens off. I wonder how a 4 billion screenburn compares to 1 million Bitcoin miners, or whatever the total is.
I listen 95% of the time, lectures, opera, podcasts, other stuff, and there are multitudes of data that don't need me to be staring at my screen.
Rumble and Rokfin, where more and more them are moving. History is littered with bankrupt companies who thought they were untouchable because people had nowhere else to go.
[1]https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-spac-...
Long running project of mine. "Corporate change bounties". Customers leave some supplier and then state why and somehow demonstrate how much cash has exited with them as a customer.
Here's an example. Let's say att lobbies hard against net neutrality and customers were fed up and left. They could go to this site and somehow select "att + net neutrality + i will return if they support it" and then through some black magic prove that they were a long time att customer that paid $X/month that just cancelled.
There's a way to avoid the black magic by making it a "crowd funding" style site but in many conversations effectively zero people would want to give, say Nestle or Walmart, a gift in return for them not being an evil prick.
So there's gotta be some kind of balance. A number representing potential money on the table that can be captured if a policy change happens.
I made two versions of it a while back but new ideas are hard so oh well. But maybe a third time it will work, who knows
Simplifying dramatically, there's new solutions to acknowledged problems and unacknowledged problems.
What you say satisfies the first one.
The unacknowledged problem requires you to first connect desperate ideas and consolidate them together in the prospect's mind. Then you need to convince them that it's a suboptimal state of affairs. Then you need to convince them that an amelioration is attainable. Then you need to convince them that you provide it.
Contrast this to the first one. The prospect knows things are suboptimal, has a current insufficient remedy and is open to a better one. You need to convince them that you provide it.
That's way way easier - like orders of magnitude, a "completely different problem domain" kind of easier (It's worth noting that elevator pitch templates address the easier type of new)
Next task, solve the first one in under 5 or so seconds of exposure: connect ideas, show it's a problem, demonstrate the mechanism, and propose a plausible solution that's easy to participate in.
Maybe that's trivial for you but I personally have very little aptitude for that and struggle immensely with it
[1] all those startup books become a giant soup after you read a bunch so sorry if this was like Moore or Christensen, I think it's Blank. If anyone remembers exactly where this was I'd love to find it again.
"Your app predicts when my lightbulbs will go out and it costs $1? Wait, why wouldn't I just do what I do now which is have some spares and wait till one actually goes out?"
If the target customers have already found each other, it's an easier sell. If they haven't then you have a "customer diaspora"
For instance, if I have a new game, there's plenty of organizations, institutions, and forums I can introduce my game on.
If instead, I have productivity software that helps disorganized people manage time better, there's no "disorganized users group" or "decluttering news" website to find the people ... it's a slog. Where would those people concentrate? A bar on a weekday night maybe? The most inconvenient parking spaces of an office park? I don't know.
At least to me this is a harder problem
Once you move the discovery off YouTube, it becomes trivial to move the content to another video host. The discovery is the lock-in.
You may be a HN TikTok skeptic (there are many) but TikTok is already expanding to things you’d find on YouTube historically, like tutorials, DIY, arts and crafts.
Paying for the privilege of interacting with some shitty thing I don't like to be entertained.... doesn't seem entertaining to me.
lmfao
In my personal experience, I rarely even noticed the dislike count. Sometimes I'd wonder who the few unfortunate people were who disliked a video with about 1000x as many likes. It reminded me of the 1 star reviews you see on Amazon complaining about the postman for a product that otherwise has a stellar record. I just assume something is wrong with those peoples computers which made their video glitch out or something. I don't really trust negative feedback that much when it is paired with an overwhelming amount of positive feedback for the same thing. And I don't think I ever encountered a video with anywhere near the number of dislikes as likes, let alone more dislikes. I personally have never disliked a video. If I'm watching something new, I'll just watch part of the video myself, and decide if I want to watch the rest or click away to something else.
When I heard the announcement of removing the count as an effort to combat brigading, it made a lot of sense to me. I've seen the growth of negativity across the internet in the last few years. People are actually addicted to outrage these days, so anything that can help eliminate that seems like a good idea to me. The fact they kept the button there and still show the count to the uploader seems like they've at least tried to appease the diehards who appreciate having that dislike button - pretty fair if you ask me.
You may challenge the assumption that only diehards care about this, but I've just looked at a few videos in my feed to see the number of likes and it's abysmal. 40k likes for a video with 4M views. 18k likes for a video with 800k views. They're all like that. The like/dislike metric just doesn't have much engagement. While you predict dire consequences for YouTubes future and panic among their employees, I am thinking that casual users probably have not even noticed at all.
The fairest critical take I've seen (not that I totally agree with it, but I respect his experience as a creator) is probably Linus' "rant": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN3ojSzyIG8
Different use cases for YouTube, presumably? If you're listening to music or watching well-established content creators, then dislikes are basically irrelevant. But if you're looking for a "how to" tutorial, dislikes and comments are the only way to quickly sort the good from the bad.
This is the "edge case" (not the best term for it, but whatever) I'm talking about, but I still don't really buy it. There are a lot of signals for how worthwhile a video is going to be, and frankly I'd rank likes/dislikes as the least useful one, mostly because they provide no context and aren't normalized to the video's view count.
If we see an epidemic of amateur electricians getting zapped, etcetera, I suppose YouTube will have some egg on its face. But somehow I don't think that's going to happen.
What are those other signals to help filter quality? Because in my experience, the dislike-to-likes ratio is the #1 statistical signal. It beats the #likes/#views ratio which is far weaker. Comments are not a better signal because (1) they can be deleted by the channel and (2) they take more work to scroll through than just looking at the public dislikes number.
It doesn't even matter that dislikes don't have "context" (do you mean "downvote reasons"?). To me, the context is the video itself.
If I come across a plumbing how-to and it has more dislikes than likes, it's a junk video. MKBHD is another youtuber that explains the usefulness of dislikes counts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaaJyRvvaq8
EDIT add: also note in the MKBHD video the comments from other famous youtube creators that they also depend on public dislike stats when they themselves consume videos.
This is because dislike counts are in my experience extremely unreliable—they may be elevated for stupid and irrelevant reasons on a really great video, or they may not be significantly elevated on a video that is very much not worth my time. Anecdotally (though no more so than any other account in these comments, AFAICT), I've found this to be true even on videos with relatively objective subject matter.
This is not as good a signal because for many long-tail videos, the topmost video in the search results has a bad dislike-to-like ratio.
>and 2) the video itself.
This is not efficient use of time for the viewer because the point of a quick statistic is to avoid watching the video in the first place.
>This is because dislike counts are in my experience extremely unreliable—they may be elevated for stupid and irrelevant reasons on a really great video,
Totally opposite experience. For thousands of videos I've consumed that are not-politics and not-music such as tutorials, the bad dislike ratios were the most reliable indicators Youtube had for trash videos.
To be clear, I'm talking about dislike ratios and not absolute counts. Maybe that's the source of the disagreement? E.g. if I see a video with hundreds or thousands of dislikes (absolute counts), it's not a problem unless the ratio is out of whack.
So what is the point? Unlike a lot of people I've discussed this with, I can at least respect your position as being based in some kind of believable and relatively well-developed use case. But nothing we've said here has even touched on the (alleged) negative externalities of visible downvote counts that (allegedly) motivated this change in the first place. And, again, we just don't have the data to understand the tradeoffs there.
I entered this discussion because I really, honestly don't understand why so many people are so angry about this. And, despite your efforts, I still don't. I have no trouble believing that these legitimately bad, long-tail, high downvote count videos exist, but I still see them as exactly what my original comment characterized them as: an edge case.
I guess I'm just looking for a bombshell that will make me understand, because that's how obvious the downvote count stans make this issue out to be. You aren't wrong just because you don't have such a bombshell, but you aren't going to convince me you're right just by telling me that the way I use YouTube is wrong.
Because the public dislike counts are now gone, examples are hard to find. In any case, here's a screen shot of a popular video from The Verge that's not long-tail. The deep link showing 1200-dislikes-vs-839-likes: https://youtu.be/WuunLhXcUo4?t=15
That's an example of a high "dislikes ratio" alerting the viewer to a trash video. Lots of bad videos with corresponding dislikes on Youtube are not an edge case. I encounter them every day (e.g. product reviews, DIY how-to, etc)
>, but you aren't going to convince me you're right just by telling me that the way I use YouTube is wrong.
If you're happy using Youtube without considering dislikes, we're not saying you're wrong. The point is that your dismissal of public dislikes is not relevant to how _others_ depend on it to avoid wasting time. The examples of famous youtube creators also looking at dislike counts to save time is very telling. Even though they themselves suffer from dislikes on their own channel, they still depend on dislike counts when consuming others' videos. The youtube creators are also some of the most sophisticated viewers of Youtube content and their usage of dislikes ratios matches the reality of many in this thread who use the metrics in the same way to filter out bad videos.
When downvote brigades are brought up, the first response is always something along the lines of "all engagement is good" and "downvotes aren't a negative signal in the algorithm", the thrust being that downvotes don't actually hurt creators and they're just being a bunch of crybabies. But it is, frankly, totally incoherent to claim this and then turn around and also claim that downvotes are an important signal for deciding which videos to not watch. I hope you can see the contradiction there.
I point this out, and the next claim they trot out is "downvote brigades are rare to the point of being insignificant". To which I say, well, prove it. Prove it, show me the data, and make the case to me that saving X man-hours of wasted time watching unworthy how-to videos is worth crushing Y creators' nascent careers.
People asked why disliking POTUS matters now, when it didn't before.
People asked why big media gets to fact check everyone, despite obvious, daily bias and error, and dislikes are hidden for them and this helps everyone how exactly?
People noticed some creators are widely disliked consistently, yet enjoy consistent promotion. They noticed money seems to matter.
Creators who generate many ratioed videos are different from those who don't, or who have a mix of some kind too.
All of these were brought up in discussion, brought to me by normies basically unable to buy into the, "you do not need that info because..." line they were given.
And now that they are talking about it, topic of interest, they are wondering about other things, like why their Facebook keeps removing what they thought were private exchanges...
Your bomb shell is watching people lose trust and see less value in all of this than was true a year ago.
In fact, this sort of thing is IMO one of the best arguments for removing downvote counts.
Beyond that, I frankly don't think people should have trust in "platforms" telling them what to think, so if this change wakes up some of the "sheeple" I can only see that as a good thing. I certainly think that taking away a tool that allows people to trivially express their shallow hatred of a thing can only improve the state of discourse and critical thought in society.
Pages of discussion on how data should be interpreted.
All the while ignoring the big players who did not like the fact that they are widely disliked.
As for taking away a tool...
POTUS has a very low approval rating. The dislikes follow, as they should.
That same POTUS getting after long overdue policy with majority public support would very likely see a different outcome.
People disliking big media and government sell jobs? SHOCKER!
Of course they did, and of course it leads to questions which, of course led to eliminating the source of those questions.
Finally, "I don't think people should..." Full stop. We need to realize those other people have agency and work from there.
It feels like people are imagining some fantasy scenario where there are hundreds of similar videos with not that many views but very different vote count patternsm...
100% this will end up killing someone.
Someone just commented this "check out flat earth videos... they remove all comments that are critical and now with the dislike counter gone i guess the earth is flat.".
Indeed. In this case for example it should not be flagged, but down-voted by the community.
I don't really buy it.
I do not think so either, to be honest, but perhaps there may be something to it.
By that I mean for example, I knew of many people who were outraged and dismayed when RSS feeds started to disappear from websites. They belonged to a class of individual who prefers things to be categorized as granularly as possible. That kind of person is highly upset when their categorizing toolset is downsized.
But other people never bother with those tools, don't care if they're eliminated, and frankly find it hard to sympathize with their hypercategorizing comrades.
I'd seen some; wishing I could unsee those.
I get that creators want to be paid and need a better home than youtube, but none of this bodes well to me yet.
They did this with an understanding of its impact on engagement.
Right now, I enjoy having a broad mix of people, young, old, men, women... to talk to. One thing I love is when they bring me stuff to discuss.
The trick is to express an interest and make those conversations fun, real gives and takes.
The numbers on people seeking news outside the established media are pretty high.
YT and the White House did that public beta and that was noticed! Brought to me by others who probably would not otherwise.
"Why hide dislikes for POTUS?"
Why indeed!
The people saying few care about the details like the HN crowd usually does are not wrong.
But there is more to this than that.
Discussing whether dislikes is useful to understand potential video quality is a mixed bag like proponents of that idea say. And in some instances, say for how to videos, it is a great metric, like those proponents say too.
A higher order look at this is more like what normies are into.
They ask how come this became an issue after POTUS, CNN and Fauci got ratioed non stop?
They ask, "who decides what is misinformation? Is it the same people getting RussiaGate wrong for years, and who always seem excited about endless wars?"
I can make a case for how hanging out here alters perceptions in like kind.
Maybe more people talking outside their comfort zone, with a more diverse set of people and contexts is a good thing. Having done it for a while, I sure think so.
People do not care too much about the details. They care a lot about being managed, essentially told they need to be guided in this way.
I have a solid mix, and have cultivated that over a considerable time too. Started a decade ago.
Indies, Dems, GOP, you name it. I enjoy politics and culture. No judgement, just frank talk.
More people than you know find that to be high value and it is not easy.
Those questions are not partisan.
They do speak to class though.
Just saying...
They still do not make sense, and I do not care who was POTUS.
Personally, I do not feel POTUS needs dislikes hidden, no matter who the POTUS is. Biden, at this time, has a pretty low approval rating and has not made good on many promises people value highly. And I only mention that to highlight the large number of dislikes make sense! Same goes for CNN and friends, who regularly get major things wrong, and who are being held up as authoritative.
Generally speaking, these disconnects are not partisan at all. People in general are going to oppose this kind of information management, and it's implied they are too stupid to do it for themselves and need the help.
Viewed through this lens the broad and sustained opposition to this move is no surprise at all.
Changes to favor big media are unpopular. Changes to hide dislike data, which further underscores the favoring of big media, are unpopular.
There are other things, and I see no need to detail them.
This is all about both suppressing dissent and the support for it.
Unless you have a super compelling alternative...
Stupid "I don't want to think" content got replaced by twitch, even through many twitch streams contain hardly any interesting "content" they are sadly stile miles better then most/close to all "dump" YT content (because "dump" YT content has gotten pretty bad).
And high quality YT content often gets demonetized and seldomly recommended, because its either not advertisement friendly enough or doesn't cover a wide enough audience spectrum.
Isn't that good for them though? Generally speaking, it's a lot easier for youtube to do a few red carpet partnership shenanigans with the ssniperwolfs and mrbeasts in the top ranks and screw the long tail. That story has played again and again all over the entertainment media industry.
If everyone does what you're doing, they can potentially even get away with having to do less content moderation, or quietly "disappearing" channel categories, etc. You're already getting sort of played by relying on recommendation systems in the first place. People seem to think recommendations scour the deep web to cater to them personally, but the Occam's Razor take is that you get shown whatever the algorithm determines is clickbaity enough for your general flavor of hivemind.
>because I can no longer gauge how worthwhile they are to try and watch.
That is YouTube's job. Their recommendation algorithm will try and suggest videos that are worthwhile for you to watch. The order that videos are recommend is how know which videos are likely more worthwhile for you to watch. After clicking on a video most people judge the video be just watching the first few seconds an opposed to looking at the likes. They will switch to a different video if they didn't find that one interesting. Another common behaviour is just skimming through a video.