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Comment by tkgally | Hacker News Reader

Just a personal note of praise for YouTube itself. I’ve watched videos on YouTube since it began, but it’s only in the past few years that I’ve come to appreciate what a great medium it has become. By allowing people to share content on all sorts of niche subjects and potentially make money at it, YouTube has become a fantastic resource for both education and entertainment. For someone like me who grew up with access only to television, radio, newspapers, and other mass media, it is a great advance.

That said, I wish that YouTube had multiple competitors of similar size, both commercial and decentralized. It makes me nervous that access to so much great content is ultimately controlled by Google.

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>That said, I wish that YouTube had multiple competitors of similar size, both commercial and decentralized. It makes me nervous that access to so much great content is ultimately controlled by Google.

If you worked in the SEO world after Google acquired YT it was a common hack to use YT videos to rank for hard keywords because it was proven Google gave YT favorable positions, even compared to other video sites. There were dedicated tools for quickly creating spam videos on topics and then linking people to your website.

YT wasn't completely dominant until they were acquired by Google and had their growth boosted via monopoly tactics using Google Search

IDT that youtube should get credit for creating "The Medium." Online, shareable videos were always going to exist, somewhere. They just had the deep pockets to finance the hosting of youtube and win a monopoly over it.

That's not to diminish the medium, or it's benefits over traditional, one-2-many mass media. It's also not meant to diminish youtube's role, before or after google acquired them. Certainly not to diminish creators. I just think it's worth thinking about where it all came from. Is it a quasi-inevitability brought on by technology

I think a lot of modern tech giants occupy spaces where it's hard to tell if they are building a thing, or squatting.

> it’s only in the past few years that I’ve come to appreciate what a great medium it has become.

I also love YouTube as there is a lot of high-quality content. But I'm sometimes a bit disappointed with the more recent phenomenon of professional YouTubers (sponsoring of videos, "please comment below") and also a lot of them getting uninspired after some time. Now that I think of it, I don't know if professional YouTubers are those who add more value to the platform.

The most important secret sauce is the recommender system. It takes into account transcripts, color historgrams of frames, actions and activities recognized in videos, frame cuts frequency, key personalities and entities recognized and what not. That's my humble guess.

Well, all we can really know is that it's a machine learning-based black box.

Sadly that secret sauce has become fairly poor. Recommendation issues is the biggest problem with YouTube right now.

I can open YouTube on any given day and will be given recommendations for things I've never shown the slightest bit of interest in.

For example, right now I've got:

- A clip for the big bang theory - Never watched anything on that show on youtube

- "Why does italy have 6000 ghost towns (Hidden Italy)" - Absolutely no idea why it thinks that would interest me, never been to Italy or watched any kind of travel based videos.

- "I hitchhiked Onto A Private Jet To Werever It's Going" - Again, I couldn't give a damn

- "The Legendary World of Spyro Games - Caddicarus" - I have no idea what that is, or why it thinks it interests me.

- "Singapore welcomes 2023 with New Year fireworks at Marina Bay" - Ok, and? Never been there, never watched any content about the place.

- "I called every U.S. Representative in the country. Here were the responses I got." - I'm not American, and give absolutely zero f's about US politics.

- "I've Been Living In A Ghost Town for Almost 3 YEARS!" - Good for you, I don't care.

- "Dark Secrets of the World’s Most Isolated Island" - Nope.

It has improved slightly from the looks of things. Usually I get videos about minecraft, or some twat gorping with their mouth wide open trying to make a mundane and uninteresting topic seem like something I should be interested in whilst remembering to smash the like button and click the bell.

The platform has so many problems.

My experience is different. My recommendations are all math and cs related. It is based in your watch history and you can remove things from your history and recommendations will change. If you haven’t watched many videos in your account then just find the type of videos you are interested in and prone the recommendations.

It's only partially based on history these days. The YouTube subreddit is ram packed with posts about the issue, it looks like 50% of your recommendations are relevent to you, the other half is randomly generated with seemingly nothing in place to at least try and match them up to your known interests.

It started approx 2 years ago and has gradually gotten worse to the point where some users see no recommendations relevent to them at all.

Don't take my word for it: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/search?q=recommendations&re...

Sounds like it's working as intended. They don't want any more echo chambers.

Sure, if the aim is to dive you away from YouTube because you can't find relevent content to watch then they're doing a stellar job.

I got this after I turned off personalisation cookies.

Until I did that, the algorithm was too good at showing me things similar to what I had already watched. I wanted a more varied feed.

I think this is a focused attempt to diversify the videos you watch and to avoid getting into a bubble. Journalists have dug into it and discovered that youtube's previous algorithms really seemed to automatically steer people towards the alt-right bubble. Before that, there was a bizarre trend of what looked like mass- or AI-produced kids' shows, but a lot of them had weird grooming shit in them like getting injections and getting pregnant.

Agree on both points. It's become fashionable to speak ill of youtube, but it's one of the very few major things that has truly changed the world for the better; not just entertainment but all fields related to education or life-long learning, or science vulgarization, etc.

And yes, YT should have worthy competitors, and it's surprising that it doesn't. YT is obviously very profitable; why don't other big competitors don't give it a try, with a similar angle? TikTok is wildly different, and so is Twitch; but a version of Twitch that would directly compete with YT doesn't seem that hard to implement if you're Amazon?

> That said, I wish that YouTube had multiple competitors of similar size, both commercial and decentralized. It makes me nervous that access to so much great content is ultimately controlled by Google.

Yeah, some hybrid of web forums but with videos would be great. No idea how I'd put these two ideas together design- product-wise though.

I wouldn't give Google too much credit here. Almost all of my love for Youtube is based on the creators which are on the platform. The platform itself is quite user-hostile, has bad UX, gives poor recommendations, and has too many overly obtrusive repetitive poorly-targeted advertisements. To me, Google is fully responsible for all of the bad, but can claim little of the good.

Recently I was considering auditing a class from a masters in public health program because I’m starting a niche population health management company and I need to better understand the economics. To my amazement the professor of the course that I wanted to take put all of her lectures on YouTube and I was able to watch them for free.

there's Vimeo but it never really picked up.

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