The only thing irreplaceable for me is Youtube. Even if it's gotten worse as a platform over time, I still consume it more than any other type of video media and there are no good alternatives for much of the content that I enjoy watching.
In the meantime, try to give as little as you can to Google. Use Newpipe and youtube-dl so you never see an ad.
Google and Facebook have a complete oligopoly over the ads market and are manipulating it so nobody else can prosper.
You can't, "in a weekend" a youtube clone that can stand up to the first viral hit.
1) Hosting space/cpu/bandwidth. Video is one of the most intense data jobs out there, behind I suppose maybe AI and Big Data (if anyone is still doing that). You need Terabytes of drive space, petabytes of traffic, all the CDNs, processors capable of encoding inefficient video uploads to efficient video downloads. 2) Network effect. People need to actually want to come, so that people come. 3) Paying for all this - People don't like donating, don't like paying, but hard drives/servers/power banks are not free. So you either charge premiums or use ads.
I wish more people had been willing to pay for Youtube Pro, e.g. (I still do), they're (still) getting worse because the ad-supported version(s) are still the bulk of their income. And so the ad-supported version is messing up everything, being very aggressive, etc. You/I pay for Netflix, why wouldn't you pay for Youtube?
You can't influence the dynamic with capitalism at all when something is free. Sure, companies can "en-shittify", but at least for video this is fairly simple - when it costs too much/works too terribly on one video platform, you can move to the next one. 1) and 2) Make it harder to start a new paid platform, but not impossible - you can directly reflect the costs to your users. YT is just a black box at present...but would have been less so if Youtube Pro had been more popular (ads might have been easier to block, even).
All the initial groundwork is done.
All they need is a platform for the youtube class content provider. They already have ad deals too.
They could, if they found some model that works, snap up loads of talent.... and that talent could even stay on youtube too.
As long as they keep content in its own category...
It's a feed, and it responds to your use. I click on longform educational content, I get lots of longform educational content. I find the act of opening clickbait videos in an incognito window along with judicious use of the "not interested" button has kept it quite usable.
Yup. You still get the occasional dud, but most of the feed is relevant in my case.
I once browsed YouTube without being logged in. Do not recommend. I wanted to gouge my eyes out. I imagine it's a similar experience to browsing the web without an adblocker.
For any content I’m interested in, a blog post with pictures beats it. If it needs video then have it interspersed throughout the page.
LLM summarisers are the only thing that make YouTube usable for me in that I can still get the content without wasting time.
Depends on what you're watching.
I mean, everyone on YouTube is playing the algorithm game somewhat -- assuming they want to have their videos watched, and they do, or they wouldn't be there to begin with.
Having said that, I watch a ton of YouTube videos. Not randomly, like zapping through TV channels (do people still do that, by the way?). I watch videos from the dozens of channels I'm subscribed to, by authors I enjoy watching and about topics that are relevant to me. YouTube is unbeatable for this, because almost everyone is on YouTube, but few other video platforms are as universal.
And yes, I pay for YouTube Premium because ads absolutely break YouTube. Ads make everything worse. I'm still upset about the recent trend of authors placing "sponsor segments" embedded in their videos (looking at you, Squarespace -- you can go f*ck yourself); I wish paying for Premium automatically skipped these segments too, but oh well. At least some authors make self-deprecating jokes about their sponsored content.
May I introduce you to SponsorBlock:
I prefer to watch youtube with a custom player (mpv+yt-dlp on desktop, newpipe on android). I do not want to watch youtube on the youtube website or official youtube android app. The custom clients I am using are unofficial. They reverse engineer youtube to make it work. They often break when youtube changes something.
I also think YouTube has gotten worse over time and I'd be happy to find a workable replacement despite being a long time YouTube Premium subscriber. I do use SponsorBlock though as I found supporting creators directly while paying YouTube for serving the content left still getting sponsorship ads as a bit ridiculous. It's a good product, just often intentionally shy of being great in interest of metrics
I'm happy to watch an occasional ad. Maybe 2 minutes for every day, curated and high quality advertisements relevant to everyone. No, I will not pay with my data. No, I will not accept interruption in flow, within or between videos.
Interrupting during a video means adblocking is justified.
Adding adverts to nonmonetized channels means adblocking is justified.
It's my time. Google isn't paying for the use of my eyeballs, and I actively don't purchase things I see advertised via YouTube. I'm not alone in this; most people don't buy for digital ads. They already nefariously steal my data at every opportunity.
By the same logic I use SponsorBlock when I can because despite paying the creator and paying YouTube the hardcoded sponsors are still present (plus it has uses outside skipping just ads anyways).
Got it. So you are fine with adblocking; your take comes down to practicality.
Debate aside, I appreciate your thoughtful response.
Excluding some other somewhat reasonable scenarios which break the mold in corner cases (like accessing the dozens of subscription news sites that get posted on HN with no way to actually pay for them properly except spending more time managing the subscriptions than actually reading article or two a day) my "I paid everyone for the content so I can consume it the way that works for me" stance and reasoning doesn't really apply when you intentionally skip the first step "I paid everyone for" out of disinterest in doing so.
Google just pockets all the revenue if you have fewer than 4,000 "public watch hours". If you put together an a concise 4-minute DIY video, an average view time will probably hover around 1 minute, and you will need 240k views to qualify. Most videos on YouTube get under 1k views.
There is a negligibly small percentage of content creators / content farmers who live in a symbiotic relationship with the platform and actually make good money, but let's not pretend you're patronizing the creators when you're paying for YouTube Premium.
With less than 4k public watch hours your channel has barely made any money. It is accumulated for your videos for the entire channel, that isn't per video.
And no, youtube isn't making money on those videos, it costs them more to store etc and most of them aren't getting any ads anyway. Instead you get free video upload on youtube, normally you pay for that.
Youtube makes their money from the big creators that draws in a lot of views per video, there efficiency of scale lets them get over the profitability hump.
I pay more for Netflix, and I use it a lot less.
So I’m airing on the side of agreeing, but I also think Googles tactics have been incredibly shoddy, and I can understand someone not wanting to support that.
I would have written a similar comment and I pay for Premium. I don't use any other Google service at this point, but I do have an account just for YouTube (I dig into the privacy settings to disable all the things I can).
It wasn't really that hard if you use Apple for almost everything and Fastmail for mail.
I use DuckDuckGo for search and occasional search again on Google, but that's becoming less relevant over time with LLMs (and generally reddit or youtube is the best place to search anyway for most things).
I watch quite a bit of videos by creators with very lower viewership and sub counts and I suspect they're not seeing a penny.
Also I believe the payouts are split entirely by watchtime. Three minutes of watching an original song with a high-quality music video is worth more to me than 8 hours of some game stream or rambling video essay I happened to have on in the background while doing chores, but if YTP values both equally per minute it'll basically send no money to the creators who I believe bring the most value to the platform. There's even a like/dislike system, but there's no indication that it matters for Premium money. Channel memberships and superchats don't even remove ads, so even if I did decide to sub on a per-channel basis, I'd still need an ad blocker.
How do you expect all this content to be made without any sort of money? You’re basically leeching off the rest of us, in this case, IMO.
I hate ads, but right now that’s the only ticket, or paying for premium. Perhaps that will change, I hope.
Ads are cancer and should be excised at every opportunity. Ad companies should be destroyed. Ad tech workers should be blackballed. Shilling is shameful.
I cannot agree on blackballing workers. That’s just another form of control we shouldn’t exercise. Imagine if someone blackballed you for your career doing whatever you do? They’re just trying to survive and earn a living. Maybe I’ll agree on shaming and calling out execs though.
It should be hazardous to your career to engage in certain types of business. Mass murder, advertising, spyware, spam, network abuse (DDoS), or conspiracy to commit same should always make people think twice about hiring you.
Like the OP I consume a ton of YouTube and despite my misgivings about Google, I was a long time subscriber to the YouTube/music combo deal until they started showing ads despite my subscription.
It would happen a few times a week, and if I'm being charitable I could chalk it up to a deployment error, but it happened too many times for me to not get the impression that no one at YouTube gives a shit about subscribers.
I think most of us can agree that many videos are unnecessarily long (as it's incentivized by the creator for ad revenue), so there's far more fluff in it. With the rise of LLMs, etc for getting knowledge fast , I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph. And when you add 30 second ads every 5 mins it makes it even less compelling
There’s a few other new options I’ve seen through Reddit for web viewing, iOS content blockers, or hosting your own VPS invidious/piped instance with rotating ipv6 servers (not google/aws/digital ocean as they require using a web panel).
You can leave ads on for whitelisted creators sponsored advertising content also.
For example, I can watch videos, but I often get an "error" if I try to seek in the video.
The ads are indeed insane. They break YouTube in practice. YouTube, in its wisdom, much like a mobster in the protection racket, offers you an out: pay for Premium. I ended up doing this because YT is one of the things I use the most. The alternative was having Firefox with uBlock Origin on every mobile device in my household, I suppose, but this wasn't feasible.
YouTube Premium took the win :(
> I just can't see how this model is sustainable. I don't want to waste time watching videos that could have been a short paragraph
Depends on what you're watching. I always disliked, say, programming tutorials in video form -- give me text, to read and understand at my own pace. Many video tutorials are unnecessarily longwinded and always go at the wrong pace for me, either too fast or too slow.
But I watch tons of videos about other topics where video is the right form. I watch hobby tutorials, I watch videos about cinema/art, etc, and I feel video is the right format for me.
As for the video being unnecessarily long - I have played with copying the transcript from the video into ChatGPT, but they tend to be too long for ChatGPT to handle.
I don't mind these so much because they are easy to skip, but ad-blockers don't catch them.