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Comment by anon-3988 | Hacker News Reader

But you're not going to pay because it is quite literally the biggest library of high quality videos ever existed? It is so weird how people can buy ridiculously expensive coffee but cannot fathom paying 2x that monthly for a service that they use almost 24/7 for music, videos and most importantly, for archiving. As it stands, Youtube have absolutely zero obligations to store any videos indefinitely.

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.

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Places like Youtube are now a public platform serving many important purposes. Designing for addiction, vague policing, and arbitrary trends is a problem. Are the videos on YouTube worth a payment? Yes, but there is an arbitrarily frustrating and exploitative user experience that comes with it. I pay for premium, but have stopped watching Youtube out of frustration with the addictive nature. I will probably stop paying for it soon as it is currently harming me and designed to do so in exactly that way. I would pay more for something where I have more control over the content I receive and has a more transparent way of governing content creators, and slightly less power over content creators. Moderation is well and good and necessary, but Youtube has failed unrepentantly many times in this regard.

> Designing for addiction

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.

> 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 you subscribe to only high quality channels you will almost exclusively get high quality recommendations. Except for the shorts, those are a plague. I have a YT account only for the TV and the recommendations are incredible.

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.

That's not true in my experience, I only subscribe to the type of content I want to watch, but my homepage is still filled with tons of garbage.

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.

Like I wrote, use your subscriptions page as your YouTube homepage, and you wont be pestered by irrelevant stuff. I also have a separate account for watching work or hobby related instructional videos or other crap, so as to not mess up the recommendations on the TV. YouTube makes it very easy to switch between several accounts.

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.

What's TV got to do with anything? Your whole argument is wrong. People have written books and books about how a technology encourages a particular way of interacting with it and discards the rest. Youtube carefully encourages addictive watching. Blaming the victims and saying "it's your fault" is an argument from two decades ago, before we knew better.

Because people want to zone out with their addictions. If they didn't have YouTube or endless scrolling, they'd stay in front of the TV just as their parents or grand parents, and if they didn't have that they'd spend every evening drinking and playing cards or dice for money.

I wouldn't call somebody who sits and watch YouTube clickbait "a victim".

TV also followed that addictive formula though, because it too was just a means to show you ads.

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.

You definitely have control over what you get from YouTube. You can delete certain type of videos from your watch history so that such video will disappear from the recommended list. Pretty easy. As for regulation, mega-platforms like YouTube are facing pressure from governments from all over the world, and each government has its own concern and requirements. It is pretty hard (or impossible) to come up with an explicit policy that satisfies every user and government.

To me, it seems to be merely the illusion of control. Sure, you can teach it what topics you prefer, but it'll always be tempting you with what is truly addictive and crap. Trying its luck like an adversary. It also punishes creators who create their content at a pace that's more sustainable for both producer and consumer. There's plenty of really good bait, but in the end a trap is a trap.

I specifically started paying for youtube premium because spotify just didn't have nearly as much of the music I listen to, and specifically the artists I listen to, and the youtube music app was good enough. The fact that I can watch youtube without ads is a nice little bonus.

For my purposes, youtube premium is 100% worth it.

I'm actually not super familiar with Spotify. Does it not allow users to upload their own music? I understand YouTube, it's easy to upload to it, so all an artist needs to do it add some cover art and upload the music. Surely Spotify wants to encompass the SoundCloud functionality.

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?

If you make something free at first to get people hooked that is a scam and is called bait and switch.

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.

If your choice is between no YouTube vs ad-supported + premium YouTube, what would you rather have? How would you keep YouTube afloat?

Should be premium from the start. It would probably not be as popular so no YouTube would be the answer.

People sometimes forget this - people don't pay just because they use something.

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.

Yup - why would I pay for it when I'd prefer not using it at all and getting that time back? They're helping me with that.

I watch maybe 6 YouTube videos a month. We’re talking videos shorter than 10 minutes

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.

Then I don't the 6x 5sec of ads a month should be a problem either

This, with sponsorblock that also skips all the hardcoded ads and filler, the playtime is even shorter. Highly recommend sponsorblock and clickbait remover

Their comment was not targeted at you. It's not even worth the effort for you to install YouTube Vanced, etc since you watch 6 videos a month.

Their comment was to people who watch a lot of YouTube, but still whine about the $14 cost.

What about musics? And all the videos that you indirectly watched through links on the wider internet? It is pretty impressive to only watch 60 minutes of Youtube per month, unless you consume media from other places. Otherwise, good on you for not spending as much time staring at videos.

I use Youtube to watch Frontline, PBS, news, etc etc so its not just for entertainment.

Archiving? Wut? If you find anything you really like on YT, you better download it before it disappears.

I would love YouTube to be state owned. The same with a state backed digital identity and social media.

Because state owned media platforms has such a great track record across the world, right? Go watch Chinas CCTV or Russias RT if you like state-owned media outlets.

Australia, the UK, France, Germany, Qatar and many many other countries have state media companies with high quality content. They have bias, but so do private companies.

State owned media outlets are only awful if the state is awful.

I'm building a locally hosted app I use to download videos async. So the downside is I can't watch videos instantly. The upside is I can't be advertised to.

You realize YT isn't special, right? They are piggybacking on user content more than users are on their infra.

I think being able to host petabytes upon petabytes of videos and serving them at a pretty good speed is pretty special.

> 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.

If Government Ran Youtube: This vital service is slow as hell, goes to show government never does anything right

Current Youtube: Well obviously this vital service needs to be slow-as-hell because ads, what are you gonna fund it by donations lol

agreed. youtube is allowing so many people to make decent income as independent content provider. I'm quite tired of these hipster posts making egregious demands from youtube. Make your own youtube.

2x? More like one cup in this economy.

Speak for yourself. Most normies I know are not using Youtube anywhere near 24/7.

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