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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

Was it really the fallout from this video? William got hit by the same thing most other good Youtubers like him struggle with: Burnout. Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day, and will penalize you, and literally give you less money if you don't. This sucks for the "science" youtubers because their videos are projects that often require months of work and sometimes don't pan out.

NileRed, and close friend of William Osman's, has also significantly reduced his output, because it's absurd. Google wants you to kill yourself putting out as much content as possible, and doesn't care if you have to reduce quality or literally die as a result. If you quit, someone new will take your place.

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This sounds like an opportunity for multiple long-form video producers to join under a single co-op owned channel. The channel can meter out a video a day or so, from a group of several dozen contributors, each one getting a share of the profits based on individual video popularity.

This.

Though the risk of the channel being the victim of a Google ban-hammer goes up given more contributors. Assuming some incident in which Google's response is warranted, they won't care if told that it was one "bad apple". Chances are they'll hit the channel (and in typical megacorp automated governance mode, not hit that "bad apple" user/contributor).

If Google were smart, they'd see this as an opportunity to "do better" and facilitate these kind of co-ops, with appropriate technical, financial and governance support.

That's clever, but I would be hesitant to join such a co-op because you also share strike count with the others, and if another creator gets your channel banned for wondering about the lab leak theory (back when that was still verboten) you are screwed.

Also I would make sure it's not against the terms of service somehow.

You mean likea Patreon or an OnlyFans? I think this is what OF was originally intended for, and they were kind of caught by surprise that adult performers flocked to the site.

What they're doing is working on Nebula.app

Where the creators themselves have strong say in the platform policies and the recommendations system is much simpler and more transparent. Money comes from subscribers, not ads. (sponsor segments seem to still be allowed)

His followup video about burnout repeatedly referenced the comments he got about the X-ray video. So I'd say it was a large contributing factor.

> If you quit, someone new will take your place.

Why is this a bad thing?

You wouldn't actually prefer if Google kept new creators from getting views just to benefit old creators who aren't producing as much content, would you?

> Google wants you to kill yourself putting out as much content as possible, and doesn't care if you have to reduce quality or literally die as a result.

No, Google does not want you to "literally die". They aren't taking anything away from old YouTubers by letting users watch content from new YouTubers.

YouTube is an increasingly crowded content and more and more creators are vying for views and advertising dollars. You're ascribing a lot of malice to Google, but you're literally just describing market competition.

The alternative (keeping new content creators locked out so old content creators could continue to profit more) is obviously not viable.

>Why is this a bad thing?

Because it's a systematic force affecting any and all content creators on YouTube.

Both the first person, and the person replacing them, would be under the same pressures.

The incentive is for frequently released bites low effort content at the expense of high quality content.

>You're ascribing a lot of malice to Google, but you're literally just describing market competition.

Sometimes the product of market competition is a race to the bottom, which is great if we're talking solar panels, but less so if we're talking viability of a job and quality of a work product.

I think the more charitable way of understanding the person you are responding to is that ought to be ways of rendering the model sustainable even for those not interested in racing to the bottom.

Google is constantly in the process of restructuring the contours of the experience, the relationship between the audience and the creators, and we're calling everything that happens within those strictures "the market" even though they're a product of Google's discretion.

> Because it's a systematic force affecting any and all content creators on YouTube.

It’s a systematic force for creators across all platforms, with or without YouTube. People make content on the internet and compete for attention. Google didn’t invent market competition.

It doesn’t make sense for you to blame Google for new creators making new videos.

> Both the first person, and the person replacing them, would be under the same pressures.

To compete for viewers? Again, how is this Google’s fault?

I have no idea what you actually expect Google to do.

Limit new creators so the old creators don’t feel competitive pressure?

Hide content from new creators so old creators don’t have to compete with it?

I think you’re angry at the fact that competition exists in the free market, but you’re laying the blame at Google’s feet instead.

It turns out competition can lower overall market quality.

Popularity and quality do not necessarily equate either, but I think there are many people not competing in this arena that would boost the overall quality. I remember the old commercials on TV about Slim Whitman claiming to have sold more albums than Elvis and The Beatles combined. Can anyone here name more than one song, if that, from Slim Whitman? I am in my late 50s and when I take a glance at the most popular Tik Tok or Instagram or YouTube accounts, it makes me think that a culture with lots of time and luxuries on its hands produces mainly garbage watched by people with seemingly nothing better to do, a lot of narcissism; I get guilty reading HN more than 20 min. per day, but I find the discussions thought-provoking, and having programmed since 1978 on a Commodore PET 2001, among familiar folks and subjects.

"Why is this a bad thing?"

It is not necessarily a bad thing, cause good and bad are metrics determined by different people's relative preferences. But I would say it would be nicer if there was more even spread in recommendations between the stars and the people who put out quality videos every so often but don't dedicate their life to being a superstar, rather than a heavily-lopsided. The original spirit was supposed to be "You"Tube, and now it is more like SuperStarTube.

(But I don't want to come across as hating YouTube...I can accept it for what it has become and get my enjoyment out of it and I enjoy the benefit from people stumbling across my videos. I just want to present a different perspective.)

I don't think that's what's happening, I think these quality niche creators are just flooded out by the views from videos that get much wider audience adoption. Stuff like "Win/Fail Compilation 246" that gest 10mil views with a new release every day is more profitable for YouTube to show than a science video that gets 1m views with a release once a month, which is high for a science video.

I guess there's always a trade-off and fine balance between suggesting older good quality videos vs giving chance to the new ones. YT algorithm is probably skewed towards quantity than quality.. that means often favoring someone who releases more frequently with decent quality compared to someone releasing great videos at a far less frequency.

> Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day

I follow a bunch of YouTubers who put stuff out less than weekly, and make a decent (in some cases huge) living off it. Their content is a bit niche, has zero outrage value, and is incredibly well produced.

Maybe I’m just in a very different part of YouTube but I can’t even think of anyone who posts content daily.

I was going to mention this: on 2019 I started a niche channel, through some good timed posts on reddit I gathered traction, and then my own interest in the channel waned. I still have ~400 subscribers (it stayed at about the all-time high level) and the channel is still gathering about 100 views a month on content that is 2-years old for the newest.

I'm not sure "The Algorithm" is really such a beast as it's portrayed, and some of these takes seem like reductionist views on something that is complex to understand. Two other important metrics that YT checks on videos are watch time and watch %. If those are high, they know the content is good for recommending, even if it's sporadic.

And yes, I also follow channels who post content on a per-week/fortnight/monthly basis and they do fine.

William himself said the reason he is stopping is because of the trolls. I don't remember him mentioning the algorithms at all.

> Youtube and the algorithm want you to put out content every day, and will penalize you, and literally give you less money if you don't.

I am not familiar with Youtube's payment system. Are you saying they do something like reduce the $ per ad / per view you receive based on the age of the video?

I think it works a little different.

I think your best videos don't get recommended in the sidebar of other videos as much, unless you prove to Youtube that you can keep your subscribers coming back to your content daily.

I think its why you see the Trend in higher quality creators, of cutting out snippets of their longer videos and posting those clips daily. That way they can achieve the frequency without needing to put out brand new content every day.

That's why a lot of project based channels lean more on sponsorships, patreon and youtube members for a regular income.

For example, thought emporium (my favourite science youtuber) puts out videos very rarely but they're always big innovative projects and he makes enough to have bought a new lab recently.

I'm not surprised most tech youtubers don't suffer with burnout with the amount of work and manual labour that needs to go into your standard NileRed, Stuff Made Here, mark Rober, Simon, Giertz, etc. video compared to the rest of youtube.

And that's even before you consider that his house and all his tools burnt down. It's heartbreaking to see that the same has happened to How To Make Everything and I hope he doesn't burn out too

In this case, I think it's safe for the viewers to share some of the blame with Google.

I think it's certainly part of the discussion. The truth is that these 'big' creative channels often pale in comparison to the channels getting the big views. In their categories they're probably amongst the best, but YouTube also has thousands of videos every day of really lowest common denominator content that gets a much wider audience.

So what people are asking for I think is a way to make sure these niche channels are still viable, so that they don't get overwhelmed and ousted by the waterfall of wider audience content that gets the majority of the views. That may not make financial sense for YouTube, and I suspect there's room for a new platform that focuses on higher quality content creators.

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