YouTube’s chaotic rise to world domination | Hacker News Reader

YouTube’s chaotic rise to world domination

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30 pointsbelter23 comments

I think now we are seeing them trying to cut costs. You can no longer sort a channels videos from Oldest to newest. So if you want to watch a channel in chronological order, you are out of luck. I guess this was done to avoid hitting cold storage as much as possible.

Also no 4k anymore unless you pay, I think.

That's not correct.4k is available for free users. https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/17/youtube-ends-the-test-aski...

Didn't know this! It never defaults to 4k for me anymore so I assumed the need to pay for premium was still a thing.

YT will default to the lowest resolution it can get away with without you noticing, usually 720p

This is also false. Mine defaults to 1440p on Web if the video has it, if not, 1080p which most videos have. On mobile you can set a Quality vs Performance default in settings, or just leave it on Auto. For videos with 4k, it will sometimes try to play those as well without me asking (but I always turn it down to 1440p because my fans go crazy.)

If you have crappy internet, yes it will give you lower resolution as the resolution is dynamically adjusted unless you specify otherwise.

There's so much FUD out there now that it's cool to hate on Google.

My connection doesn't suck. It's 1 gigabit down, and the same service I had back when YouTube seemed gung ho on defaulting to hi-res video for me. I suppose it's always possible that an ISP could throttle connections to YT. Judging how fast torrents download for me, there's no good reason why bandwidth in and of itself would cause YouTube to only load up to 1080p for me (though often 720p) unless I force it to use a higher res.

The default is chronological sorting.

You could just go to the bottom and work upwards.

Would Bb tedious with a lot of videos but it's still trivial to make a playlist in whatever order you wish.

Yes the default is newest -> oldest sorting.

What you want many times is the reverse, which is not possible anymore. For any channel with tons of videos, you would just default to not bother with watching everything.

You can just start at the bottom, with a keyboard you can just hold END

If the flow reversal is so bothersome it's possible to put it into a playlist.

My biggest issue with YouTube is that the search doesn't work properly any more. It shows you a handful of results related to your search term and then goes off into the weeds showing you videos that "people also watched", videos "for you", and videos that you previously watched.

Obviously the goal is to distract people with something that they'll click on, rather than to help them find what they are looking for. Very frustrating.

I have resorted to using Google for youtube searches. Works well.

A lot of Google core products feel like that now. The core features seem to have been abandoned, and in some cases only get updated to make them worse.

To get the more traditional results you have to go into filters and choose "video", but I'm sure they'll eventually remove the ability to search for only videos eventually, too (ugh).

It's the "news feed-ification" of search.

Nice, I didn't know about this option, thanks. Sadly it doesn't appear to be sticky, it gets reset every time you make a new search.

> It's the "news feed-ification" of search

I can see the future of ChatGPT-like search working like the free tier of Pandora. If you search for something, you’re given results like it but not the actual thing you looked up.

Results you want will be paywalled behind subscriptions.

Why do i feel that its history was far more incremental? It started off with piracy, jokes and pranks. It becaome serious because it could leverage google's advertising monolith to pay for videos, which turned users to creators.

And now they are again trying to dominate "shorts" by silently encouraging users to copy-paste videos from tiktok indiscriminately. There are hundreds of channels that have grown millions of followers by doing just that.

> Clearly, YouTubers never would have existed without YouTube.

Youtube is just convenient and technically superior for uploading stuff. There are many platforms with more engaged followers, from twitch to onlyfans. And tbh i don't think "youtubers" is such an important cultural force as are e.g. redditors. They are just random people

Shorts is extremely weird to me. It really looks like a super cheap clone with a scraper that downloads the top500 tiktok videos and inserts them on youtube.

I check it occasionally. It really never has variety (for me, who knows what anyone else sees), it has no recommendation tuning, it's just terrible. It's even made worse, every twenty or so videos, it hangs for a few seconds. Trillion dollar company. Can't even copy paste from a competitor. It's amazing.

Anybody else feeling that the selection of shorts has dropped a lot the past month?

Before there were a lot of good shorts. Now all I get is bad junk.

It feels like i has one theme selected every day, so a large fraction of shorts that day is for that theme no matter how much I downvote or block channels. The next day all shorts for that theme is gone, and it is now something else.

While I agree that YouTube is quite a technical feat, for me it seems a big time waster and a huge mess filled with more and more ads.

You can find genuinely interesting things but is more like finding gems in pile of dirt.

It's a shame we do not have the equivalent of HN for video creation. Small communities of video creators which make videos out of passion and covering a certain area.

> “It’s hard to imagine CBS or Netflix broadcasting a trans woman unpacking Hegel in lingerie or the Hammurabi Code in cat-eye contacts,”

Actually that's not hard at all. It's even expected.

It’s not hard to imagine but the point is they don’t broadcast that because it’s too niche.

> “It’s hard to imagine CBS or Netflix broadcasting a trans woman unpacking Hegel in lingerie or the Hammurabi Code in cat-eye contacts,”

Has this author been on Netflix?

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