YouTube is A/B testing limiting logged out access to videos | Hacker News Reader

YouTube is A/B testing limiting logged out access to videos

twitter.com

60 pointsndiddy26 comments

This tweet is speculation, there is no evidence presented in the thread that it is A/B testing.

The message says "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot." Given that this message is being presented to Cobalt, an automated downloader tool, it seems likely that YouTube has detected bot activity and is throwing up barriers to stop botting.

That is very different than the implication that YouTube is testing out the idea of blocking human users from watching while logged out.

The YouTube experience just keeps getting worse. I do the majority of my watching on my couch, casting videos from my phone to the TV via Chromecast.

It seems like every time I watch a video now, it adds a "Mix" of similar videos to the one I watched to my home feed. Unlike other videos, I can't remove these stupid Mixes, and so they just remain there, even though I have no desire to watch them. They're like half the videos in my feed now. The other half is uninteresting echo-chamber stuff based on channels I already follow.

It seems like once your YT profile has accumulated enough history, it stops being able to organically recommend anything new or interesting.

Though I don't use the mixes, they are at least an improvement back on whenever they would guess that you wanted to see top trending videos on the whole site, which was usually lowest common denominator stuff (live sports, gaming reaction videos, livebloggers with drama), none of which I actually wanted to see.

> It seems like once your YT profile has accumulated enough history, it stops being able to organically recommend anything new or interesting.

They could be continuously tweaking the recommendation algorithm. I have an opposite issue. If I watch a random video outside of my usual themes, suddenly my feed is filled with similar stuff.

Personally, my main grief is that they promote mostly professional youtubers and SEO stuff. This is usually the content I don't want to watch. That, and the removal of the dislike count of course.

The quality content is still here, we just need to be very disciplined to find it, without getting trapped into watching the junk.

The tweeter is an application that is used to download YouTube videos. They got a “confirm you’re not a bot” challenge which is very different from the headline “blocking logged out access”.

Do we have this from a source that is perhaps more reliable?

I received that today on Reddit where I previously had never seen it. It would certainly make sense to see an uptick in bot activity right now given the upcoming election.

I don't think that's the case. Purely accessing information isn't useful for influencing elections in any way, any bots would have to interact with the website to have an effect, and you need to be logged in for that. Since the prompt is to log in, it's more likely to prevent scraping.

The only way I view Youtube is through FreeTube (desktop Linux [1]) and NewPipe (Android [2]). I would not be surprised it Google finally killed their access in some way.

[1] https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/ [2] https://newpipe.net/

Theres also smarttube for Nvidia Shield and Android tv.

Don’t do it, I stopped using Twitter because of this friction

Assuming that this is actually a thing, I'd like to know why exactly.

Obviously YouTube would prefer that its users watch the ads, but are they currently not making enough money of their advertisers? At some point there should be a realization that after a certain point, you can dial that ad money knob over anymore, without hurting the product. YouTube hit that limit long ago and YouTube is unusable without an ad blocker or a Premium subscription.

Ideally they could dial the number of ads back a bit, and require higher quality of the advertisers, but I doubt that an option anymore, I don't think users would uninstall their ad blockers at this point. YouTube damaged their product and now they are screwed an is attempting to "fix" the issue by force.

YouTube ads was always a shit show though. They never had enough "inventory" and the quality of the ads was always really low. So you saw the same bad ads over and over, and they where never relevant to the content (still isn't).

YouTube doesn’t care if we actually watch ads but they have a limited ability to completely lie to advertisers (the real customers for everything now) about what is happening, despite all the self reporting.

It’s tempting to just let them all spin in circles whIke me and my eyeballs leave the room. Let YouTube rabbit hole itself with unlooked for autoplays wasting their bandwidth and wasting advertising budget from megacorp. Self reporting on the total effectiveness of advertising and marketing departments everywhere will gradually hollow out budgets for everything else and then humanity returns to the Stone Age, problem solved! :bitter weepy laughter:

Due to uptick in ad harassment and general user hostility I mostly quit using it many years ago. The last use case was the long format streams of rain, static, lofi etc. but those chill vibes are now interrupted with super obnoxious commercials that are 20% louder, and sometimes literally including screams or bangs that are intended to be attention grabbing.

The internet is closer and closer to unusable these days.

People will download those video from p2p if they do this.

I can bet some people will mirror youtube just like 12ft.io and similar.

I guess youtube doesn't publish their number, but with GDPR and people caring about their privacy, I can imagine their revenues have been dipping.

Some creators are interesting on youtube, but the ad model doesn't sound very solid, especially since ad blockers work well.

Creators have been moving to patreon to gain money. Those people can easily put their videos on another platform if they want to.

I think youtube will slowly die. Maybe it's time.

YT alternatives would rejoice if YT self-sabotaged YT market share.

Google continues the war against its own users.

If you look here [0], it seems that they've stopped fighting [or lost] the ad-blocker arms-race, so that's something at least!

[0] https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

They have just changed the angle of attack by baning effective ad-blockers from chrome

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-starts-deprec...

I don't know for sure, but I assume the people of Google like that there isn't much of an alternative to YT. Waging war on your users seem to be a bad way to keep your monopoly. I'd accept that the reason YouTube is adding more friction is because the revenueOfNewChanges() > currentRevenue(). To me, it seems that YouTube is in a "race to the bottom" to hit the dopamine receptor of the masses. It's why it's competing with TikTok.

YouTube should be made into a public resource, forcibly unshackled from Google if necessary.

Why do people and governments pitchfork about the monopoly and lock-in of the App Store but not about YouTube?

YouTube is the one of largest vaults of human knowledge and history, gated behind all the advertisement bullshit (and the clickbait clutter which seeks to profit from that) and vulnerable to removal at the whims of a single corporation.

What efforts has Youtube made to maintain its monopoly? The actual truth is there's very little actionable material - people use Youtube because it has a good business model, kind of works for a lot of cases, and it's an excellent way to create your own business as a creator.

So yeah, why would they go after them?

Streaming video is not a proprietary technology.

There is nothing stopping governments from offering free video streaming infrastructure. Other than governments/voters not wanting to pay for it.

There already are other video hosting services. The problem is that most videos are on YouTube.

Then the next conclusion would be the problem is that other video hosting services do not sufficiently incentivize people to upload videos to them.

Although, I would disagree with the premise considering the popularity of TikTok/Instagram.

Unfortunately, due to the network effect, the main incentive for YouTube is that all the videos are already there.

App stores are not a proprietary technology.

There is nothing stopping governments from offering free app store infrastructure. Other than governments/voters not wanting to pay for it.

Irrelevant to this topic about video streaming services, but correct, yes. The government is also free to spend the money to R&D new devices such as smartphones. And medicine (incl paying for the expensive trials to prove safety and efficacy).

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