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Comment by stefanos82 | Hacker News Reader

Some things don't add up to my eyes...far too many coincidences lately that make no sense at all.

Far too many well-known YouTubers that have massive audience / subscribers decided to give up and claim burnout; fair enough I said, I understand.

Then one "goodbye" video after another, they started jumping the ship and immediately I went skeptical and said to myself: either they have some inside info that something big is about to happen (thus the need to get out ASAP) or they are about to push them to their limits with new demands and have said "enough is enough; we are not going to die for them; it's time to say goodbye, it was good while it lasted".

There's no other logical explanation, to me; this is my personal opinion which makes me very skeptical, that's all.

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Not a youtuber but i am aggressively degoogling. I imagine other people are doing it too. The regression in quality of google’s products is noticeable and frustrating. Even search results are unreliable as of lately. Search for one term and you get results for another. Email works in the sense the you get and send email but search broken. Google drive search too. I suspect they are experimenting with ai behind the scenes, otherwise i cant explain the sudden spike in unreliability.

Then there are features. Almost every product seems to suffer from the eagerness of mediocre managers to leave their mark. And sure they do, products are loaded with silly features no wants.

All in all google is now a mediocre company making mediocre products.

google maps is another example, it used to give me great paths but these days I feel that it is trying to kill me somewhat. I've switched to OSMAND which is a FOSS map app built over open street maps, and it is amazing how much better it is in terms of navigation. Search has a little left to be desired, but it thrashes google in actual navigation. It feels a lot more like what google maps was as opposed to what it has become. Voice recognition has become way less reliable as well.

I think you might be right about the experimentation though, because now google maps often gives me a "why didn't you do as I told you, was the path you ended up taking better?" style questionnaires afterwards.

I think google maps send you down weird routes to do traffic/police/accident reporting

I use gps all the time and go the same way all the time but it often wants me to take some side road when there is no accident or construction

Havent heard of OSMAND before - thanks for sharing. Downloaded.

Yeah google is likely training an ai at our expense. Not sure why they’d choose that over a deterministic approach that has been working reliably for more than a decade.

It's the same problem as Twitch: the ads are just too much. Youtubers have their own sponsor messages in their videos, so they of all people know that more ads = bad.

As for why they're leaving, word on the street is that Tiktok will be introducing 10-30 minute video lengths, which is prime YT territory.

TikTik barely pays though, apparently. YouTube people can make a very very decent living, if they're good.

Does YT really provide a decent living? Retro YTs I follow complain ad revenue trends downward.

Pretty sure they pay the best out of any video platform. So jumping ship to somewhere else doesn’t make sense.

better than tiktok. I think you can use tiktok to go viral but YouTube to actually monetize

$1000-$7000 for a million views. It’s better than anyone else by a mile.

I doubt YouTubers quitting is anything except availability heuristic and a combination of burnout + bandwagon effect.

I know of ~5 well-known people who have decided to stop making content, out of 100+ if not 1000+ of the "well-known" people on YouTube. Tom Scott was the first one, and his plan to stop was years in the making. I suspect the others were already burnt out, and seeing him leave gave them the initiative to do the same. A couple other YouTubers have made videos signaling they will pivot to different types of content, further reinforcing that they're burnt out with what they're doing but nothing is convincing them to stop making videos in general.

From what I've heard in the Patreon updates from several YouTubers I watch, it's that YouTube ad revenue has dropped precipitously in the past year. Like, it's down to 20% of the peak 2020/2021 income. Now everyone is relying on diversified income like merch/brand deals and other projects or just living off of Patreon support. If you've already made lots of money so that you can retire, it seems obvious that just quitting is better than burning yourself out further for pennies.

The same thing is happening in podcasting - podcast advertising has almost completely dried up.

The 8 bit guy made a post at the beginning of the year saying he makes maybe 8 times less than during covid and that it's not unique to him. I imagine that alone would cause people to quit youtube.

Being a YouTuber has always been an absolute shit career, citation: literally every YouTuber I've ever heard speak on the subject thinks that. It's shit for work/life balance, it's shit for stress, your "boss" is nothing but a confluence of automated things that break fucking constantly and make your job harder for no benefit on your part, and if you do have good ideas, it's highly likely some jackoff with a business degree is going to copy your idea, do it with a better thumbnail and post it to a larger audience and crush you in the algorithm.

All that to say: I don't think they had inside knowledge. YouTubers quit constantly for very good reasons, most of them are just all the benign ways that YouTube makes itself worse just, all the fucking time. And the site stays around because any serious competitors to YouTube are immediately flooded with low quality, low effort, offensive, or just stolen content that YouTube used to host before that creator was banned. That's what you get when you make an alternative to YouTube: Naturally, the first people in line to sign up are the ones who were too toxic for YouTube, which is a pretty high bar.

> It's shit for work/life balance, it's shit for stress, your "boss" is nothing but a confluence of automated things that break fucking constantly and make your job harder for no benefit on your part, and if you do have good ideas, it's highly likely some jackoff with a business degree is going to copy your idea

ngl, this sounds like the life I had in startups as a sysadmin/devops/platform dev

I’ve noticed several YouTube channels that have hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers but new videos are watched only by a fraction of a fraction of that subscriber number. iJustine has 7.1 M subscribers but her latest videos have between 0.05 M to 0.15 M views.

Either TikTok and Instagram pull all the viewers over to their platform or there is a problem with YouTube’s subscribtions feed. In any case, many YouTubers are frustrated by the few views.

There's definitely a problem with Youtube's subscription feed, well, many problems. Recommendations suck and I can't find anything even when searching for it explicitly. Who could've predicted that user-hostile crap would get users to leave? Not Google!

If people stop watching a channel, even if they're subscribed, unless they have all notifications enabled for the channel, YouTube will just stop recommending it to them and notifying them about new uploads. This isn't a conspiracy; it makes a lot of sense for a recommendations engine, and it more accurately models a pattern that repeats itself time and time again: person gets big off of something popular, that something falls off a cliff, and unless they pivot and their audience pivots with them, they also fall off a cliff as their audience gets bored and stops coming back. Why should YouTube keep prioritizing and recommending videos to the people that no longer watch them?

IMO, YouTube has done a much better job recommending content from small channels the past couple years, and has introduced me to some great creators I would otherwise never have known about. Perhaps part of the recommendations have come at the expense of "channels you used to watch and maybe still would if they actually put out something fresh for a change," and there certainly is a conversation to be had there about the lack of transparency from YouTube whenever they change the algorithm, but as to which is better (subscriptions vs. small channels tangentially related to your viewing habits) is a matter of personal preference.

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