To YouTube: I'd gladly pay you if your website was de-bloated and fast like this
piped.kavin.rocks
piped.kavin.rocks
If Youtube "owes" its user some service, which it provides for free, then it might as well be state funded or become non-profit. I keep asking people the same question; if YOU are the owner of Youtube, how would you stay afloat? Good will of the people to donate money? lol.
inb4 they make so much money from ads!! Well, there you go, theres the answer. They (and we) need ads to keep Youtube afloat.
For my purposes, youtube premium is 100% worth it.
As a listener, I use yt because it's easy to find new things similar to what I just heard. And people also do mixes of many different pieces together, like a mixtape from someone I don't know. Those are great for uninterrupted listening. Can you do that on Spotify?
It’s not exactly what I’d call dedicated watching. If you think I’m going to pay $10 for maybe an hour of video, I think we just have different standards of expense.
Their comment was to people who watch a lot of YouTube, but still whine about the $14 cost.
I use Youtube to watch Frontline, PBS, news, etc etc so its not just for entertainment.
State owned media outlets are only awful if the state is awful.
And sometimes, like with Youtube, many people wish they didn't use it. It's hard to get people to pay for something they wish they didn't use.
As if people haven't been addicted to watching TV for the past five decades. You decide for yourself what kind of content to get from YouTube, they don't force you into harmful habits.
Have you ever used Youtube? Serious question? There is next to no way to tell them what kinda of content I want. I pay for YT premium and recently my Android tv youtube is full of sports/football games at the top, never i have watched a sports game on YT. Shorts are shoved down your thrown on desktop or mobile, even with paid thers no way to turn that off.
If that doesn't work, you can use your subscription page as your entry to YouTube and you won't see any recommendations at all.
God forbid I watch a one-off video on a topic I'm not typically interested in, like woodworking. Current iteration of Youtube algorithm seems to boil down to "oh I see that you watched ONE woodworking video? Well half of your homepage is about woodworking for the next week!". I've started watching videos in incognito mode which I definitely didn't need to do a couple of years ago.
Current Youtube UX is beyond terrible, half the time I can't even find what I'm looking for through search because they arbitrarily cut off real search results to push clickbaity dopamine-sucking content.
If they want me to pay for Premium, they need to do more than just removing ads, the entire experience needs to feel, well, Premium. They could add customization options for the homepage and search results so we can remove shorts and all the "For you" crap, add knobs to tweak recommendations, return dislike counters which were the best way of quickly filtering out terrible/clickbaity/dangerous content. They could even add some power user features like being able to find videos by searching through their indexed transcripts rather than by the title alone.
YouTube search results are awful, can't disagree with you on that. The same for shorts. Searching for videos on Kagi or FreeTube instead of inside YouTube can be a better option. I've also noted that YouTube search results are much better on the TV than on desktop, and that they don't suggest "Others also watched.." crap there.
As for premium, I only consider it that I'm paying for the bandwidth to have the videos delivered to my computer, phone and TV without any ads. Just for that, it is incredible value already. Adding the features you list would make it even better.
I wouldn't call somebody who sits and watch YouTube clickbait "a victim".
Recommendations, promotion, automatically playing a related video after the one you watched ended, etc.
Even a landing page with "tailored for you" or "currently popular" is a distracting attention grab, and that attention grab leads to the addictive nature.
Combine that with how those YouTube recommendations and search rankings seem to prioritize click bait titles and cover image, and yes, I think you can start forming a thesis that in-fact, they are trying to force you into more screen time spent watching more YouTube videos.
Current Youtube: Well obviously this vital service needs to be slow-as-hell because ads, what are you gonna fund it by donations lol
Only thing different is that google is doing that in terms of decades.
No wonder it’s like no one wants to pay after decades of free access and no ads added to videos.
You realize YT isn't special, right? They are piggybacking on user content more than users are on their infra.
> They are piggybacking on user content more than users are on their infra.
Are you sure? How many people host their own content now? People that do that will soon become irrelevant because for half of humanity YT is THE video hosting site with the rest being Huabao, niconico or something. So in that regard it is special.
A bajillion times the content of all the other video streaming services combined, plus music videos, for half the cost of Netflix.
It’s the only monthly subscription I have anymore, despite despising Google as a company. Netflix/etc are a total ripoff in comparison.
- stop recommending videos from subscribed channels that are in some case over a decade old. Sometimes I want to watch those but I go directly to the channel to filter by oldest.
- stop recommending videos I've already seen. The fact that there's a "new to you" filter allllll the way to the right in what ever they call the filter bar is, tells me there's a user need for it that some product manager is trying to minimize.
- be more specific with recommended videos. Currently I am supremely interested in educational videos specifically related to new 3d printing videos where the creator takes 2d images to 3d printable models. Yeah that is very specific, and I absolutely know that new videos on that topic are being produced because different searches find relevant videos some times.
- search should only include relevant search results. Ffs it's so annoying that more than half of the search results are shorts and then "related" content. I don't give 3 shits about related videos. I just simply want to see all of the search results in descending order of relation to my search term.
- there are more
I do not care for any YT exclusive content, just the ad-free experience.
It's because so much of the slowdown is tooling for tracking, ad delivery, A/B test tooling, etc. that foss projects don't have to do.
It looks like the frontpage itself is aggressively cacheable (no personalization), so it's not too surprising it's fast.
no, you wouldn't.
Reality is so lame that even when we dream everything's still janky
Does algorithm need to think about which advert to put?
Is it because JS/CSS is so bloated?
Is it because everything corporate runs slower on firefox? Maybe youtube just runs faster on chrome? Dark design?
Most video platforms don't seem to give a shit whether their keyboard controls work consistently (or whether they have any), or being able to reload the page and resume playback from the last known video/timestamp when things fail due to some unrecoverable error. I've been too busy cursing every other site to notice whether YouTube is bloated.
I've been seeing the same thing. I want this to work on my browser because it's wicked fast.
Getting the error with LibreWolf (FF w/tweaks and a ton of extensions) with only occasional success. Also the same error with Firefox (some extensions) but I have slightly more success.
Flashpeak Slimjet (Chrome, closed source): Some error msgs but mostly trying to load the video with no success (ie, "hourglass", no error msg).
No issues with Vivaldi (some extensions) & Brave (no extensions).
I feel like the official web version is intentionally bad in addition to being unintentionally bad (breaking back button, refresh loading the wrong page, title being that of the previously watched video, getting stuck in ajax hell etc)
Large piped thread over here:
I realize the content is free to you, but surely the bandwidth is not?
People are weird...