Susan Wojcicki has died | Hacker News Reader

Susan Wojcicki has died

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721 pointsgrandmczeb452 comments

Was shocked to hear this news. I worked for Google years ago but I was in the NYC office, so we didn't run into the YouTube folks much.

Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined. It's a weird mix of a huge creator monetization network, a music channel, an education platform, a forever-store of niche content, and a utility.

It's also not a business that rested on it's laurels. It's easy to forget how novel creator monetization was when YouTube adopted it. They do a lot of active work to manage their creators, and now have grown into a music and podcast platform that is challenging Apple. To top it off, YouTube TV, despite costing just as much as cable, is objectively a good product.

Few products have the brand, the reach, monetization, and the endurance that YouTube has had within Google. And I know for a fact that this is in no small part due to the way it was managed.

I've probably watched tens of thousands of hours of YouTube at this point. Some of it sublime, some of it absurd, some of it critical for my work or my degree. I couldn't imagine a world without it.

RIP.

Agreed, I have gotten insane amount of value from YouTube.

>Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN

Who? Who has a negative opinion about YouTube? The occasional "My kids watch too much of it" != "mixed opinions" about the site in general.

A lot of YouTubers have been very critical of YouTube’s approach to things and treatment of creators in the past.

Also, just as an example, YouTube demonetises (and therefore effectively punishes) you for using words like ‘suicide’ so now we have to say silly things like ‘unalive’ — at least until Google/the advertisers catch on. These days YouTube is more censored than traditional TV.

I think the "unalive" nonsense is idiotic too, especially when it increasingly bleeds into elsewhere online (and probably offline, too). But that's not the same thing as "mixed opinions" in general on HN. That would be more accurate of, say, Twitter (where we are nearing two years and counting of the imminent collapse of the site any day now post-Musk acquisition, as opposed to seemingly every news event proving that it is more important than ever).

I think perhaps what there are ‘mixed opinions’ on is the actual management and day-to-day practice of YouTube as a company, rather than the site itself. We’re all very, very grateful to have such an amazing place to learn and be entertained. And, in my opinion, the website and apps are very nicely designed and work better than anything else.

I do wish the TikTokification would stop, though. But that’s never going to happen, given how effective it is at holding our eyeballs hostage.

Which is interesting because the news and media and movies and music videos can be as "advertiser unfriendly" as they want and still get ads to support the corporation that produces it. But indie content creators and the general public are punished for talking about the same topics.

Corporations get freedom of speech, freedom of reach, no consequences. The people do not.

To the HN crowd, sorry but I'm not going to hold back. Death does not turn you into a saint. Susan is the one who turned YouTube into the censored mess it is today, pushed for unliked mainstream channels over popular organic content creators (changed the algorith to push late night talk shows), ruined the algorith to always push "authoritarian" channels (CNN, CBS, MSN, NBC, PBS, etc), gave creators the option to disable the dislike button, permanently banned thousands of channels that even mentioned "pedophilia" like Mouthy Buddha's channel during the Q-anon nonsense. Creators at the time made 30 minute long videos analyzing data and proving that the recommended mainstream channels being pushed were inorganic.

She helped ruin YouTube. I will not apologize. Bye Susan. Come back in your next life and help fix it. Downvote away. I do not care.

How are you still digging in here? There are very clearly mixed opinions in these threads about youtube.

> These days YouTube is more censored than traditional TV.

This is evident in (e.g.) WW2 documentaries where an old 4:3 television broadcast is simply put online, and the original footage had perhaps footage of corpses but on Youtube it is blurred.

YouTube doesn't print money out of thin air. They make money by making advertisers happy, and advertisers will only buy ads if their customers are happy. This isn't anything new either. Creatives have always been beholden to censorship boards in traditional media too, which are typically much stricter. The fact that you so many YouTubers make money from criticizing YouTube is evidence of how much YouTubers don't understand their own privilege.

Are their advertisers happy?

They continue to pay for ads, so yeah for now. That is the kind of "happiness" companies care about.

Which customers are offended by the word ‘suicide’ and would prefer something like ‘unalive’?

As with all of this crap, it’s about taking offence on behalf of those who aren’t offended or don’t even exist.

> censorship boards in traditional media too, which are typically much stricter.

Which ones? In which country would the word ‘suicide’ be censored? There are countless other examples of topics that YouTube has decided are beyond discussion — even the left-leaning BBC aren’t as censorious.

Yes, they can do what they like on their platform. But by the same token, we can complain about it.

I'm pretty sure that unalive came from TikTok because they wanted to keep their app upbeat.

My point is that average YouTube is going to be less censoring overall. The perception may be that there is more censorship because there is simply more content on it that can be censored and they have more stakeholders that they have to appease. BBC released The Modi Question, which got censored on YouTube. However, YouTube has significantly more Modi criticism than anything on TV in India. Likewise, YouTube censors covid related conspiracy theories, but you're still going to find more of them on YouTube than the BBC.

Your point seemed to be that if advertisers are unhappy, then YouTube can’t make money. And advertisers are unhappy if their customers are unhappy.

This is true; the problem is that the customers aren’t unhappy. No sensible person cares about this kind of posturing, virtue-signalling, euphemism treadmill-riding for-lack-of-a-better-word ‘wokery’. It’s pushed by an incredibly small vocal minority of people who stand to benefit — mainly because it’s now possible not only to gain social cache but to have a whole career and make lots of money pushing this stuff.

Yes, YouTube may find that advertisers choose to virtue signal, ‘make a stand’ and leave their platform when their chosen magic words are not used, but ultimately they’ll come grovelling back. YouTube shouldn’t be so soft. Ultimately it’s just the endless cycle of unsolicited offence-taking.

And, by the way: this is all totally separate from Musk’s management of X, which purports to be rules-based and morally sound but is in reality entirely ad hoc. What Elon says goes… until he changes his mind tomorrow. At least YouTube has policies, even if they’re bonkers.

Demonetisation is not the same as censoring though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect

No — it’s not quite the same. But if you systematically demonetise any content you don’t like, in the long term it does amount to a form of censorship.

It’s as if a government said ‘we’ll tax you 1000% if you criticise us on social media’. You’d still get some bozos online saying ‘it’s not censorship; people are free to speak’ because you’re not directly prevented from speaking. But you can imagine the effect it would have.

Yeah, but there is always going to be different incentives for different content. Some content will always pay more. It is up to the author which kind of content they want to create.

E.g. clickbait content might bring you more, but it doesn't mean the other type of content is censored.

Clickbait content brings more via an organic process (because people actually want to click on it). The type of de facto censorship I’m talking about is anything but organic — it’s an unnatural distortion imposed on creators and consumers who don’t want it.

My complaint is that there isn't a family subscription option in my country. Also without Music. It's either personal with Music or damn annoying commercials. Another complaint would be non transparent and sometimes wrong censorship.

The fact that it’s a linchpin component of an illegal monopoly is one good reason.

Government-coordinated censorship during Covid. That’s my negative opinion.

Covid vax concerns were allowed during the last months of the Trump administration, but it suddenly became censored after Biden was elected.

The timeline of the election coincides with the development of the vaccines.

Moderna reported positive phase 3 trial results in November 2020. FDA’s review was completed in December and an emergency authorization was granted. The full trial results were published in medical journals a few months later, around the same time as Biden entered office.

So maybe it had nothing to do with Trump/Biden and simply was a reaction by YouTube to the proven efficacy of the new vaccines.

That’s not a coincidence—they deliberately delayed reporting the trial results until after the election because they were worried that good news would help Trump.

Haven’t heard this conspiracy theory before.

So which is it: 1) The mRNA vaccine was rushed out without sufficient clinical trials; 2) The results from the clinical trials were delayed to hurt Trump.

You can’t have both you know. So far the far-right argument has been entirely based on scenario 1, but it’s certainly interesting to know that scenario 2 also exists for some people.

Here’s reporting from MIT Technology Review, a bastion of far-right conspiracy theories: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign...

Operation Warp Speed was a signature effort of the Trump administration. As a result, the claim that the vaccine was being “rushed out without sufficient clinical trials” was made by just about all of Trump’s critics.

Nine months from formulating the vaccine to a successful Phase 3 trial is record speed. There’s no way the vaccine was held up to somehow politically hurt the president.

I’m a Trump critic and I was happy with the priority given to Operation Warp Speed. It’s the only thing he did right during the pandemic. But a lot of the MAGA crowd are anti-vaxxers, so he’s been trying to distance himself from the successful vaccine operation.

>But a lot of the MAGA crowd are anti-vaxxers, so he’s been trying to distance himself from the successful vaccine operation.

Exactly. Trump himself killed his own stance and delayed initatives that cost thousands of lives. Probably killed off a lot of his voter base to boot. if he managed to convince people to lockdown he may have still be president in 2020-2024.

The clinical trials were all done well before the election, and the FDA could have issued the emergency use authorizations in October, but they held off for a few weeks under the explicit political pressure discussed in the story I mentioned.

When it comes to “anti-vaxxers”, a lot of people, including both Biden and Harris, were outspokenly skeptical of any vaccine that would have been approved under a Trump administration (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/05/kamala-harris-trump...), so frankly this is largely an artifact of political polarization.

YouTube’s algorithm feeds increasingly radicalizing content to young people. It makes celebrities of people like Andrew Tate and is a primary enabler of fringe belief bubbles.

Any time someone posts a YouTube link to a political discussion, it’s guaranteed to be the worst nonsense that pries on people who “do their own research.” (No matter if they’re left or right on the political spectrum, there’s endless junk on YouTube for both.)

There’s surely good stuff on YouTube, but as a parent I honestly wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared overnight.

That is not an “algorithm” unique to YouTube. See 24/7 news channels for a much earlier example. It is simply the nature of loosening standards on broadly available media, and throughout history, even strict standards have not always prevented the “bad” stuff from getting through.

News channels don’t show random 30-minute programs created by viewers themselves. YouTube does.

Fox News and CNN may have low journalistic standards, but at least they have some. They also have liability. (Fox paid $787 million to a voting equipment manufacturer as settlement for lies they published in relation to the 2020 election.)

YouTube has neither. Their algorithm will happily promote any nonsense that has traction. The lies that cost Fox $787 million continue to circulate on YouTube unabated — and an untold number of other lies too. Alphabet has no reason to prevent this.

The greatest sin of YouTube's current recommendation algorithm is its optimization for eyeball time (aka more ad capacity).

Any tweaks around the edges will never be able to compete with that.

And unfortunately that central tenet incentivizes creators to make clickbait content that plays on emotions, because that's the most reliable way to deliver what YouTube wants.

(YouTube could decide it was optimizing for something else, but that would put a big dent in ad revenue)

How do you fix this without doing something even worse?

> It makes celebrities of people like Andrew Tate

By banning Indian school children and sucking the oxygen out of competing influences like Pewdiepie.

Who's banning Indian school children?

As targeted towards young people, YouTube's algorithm serves up a lot more Mr. Beast than Andrew Tate.

Considering the recent controversies, YouTube's algorithm recommending Mr. Beast to young people is no less of a problem.

> It makes celebrities of people like Andrew Tate

Legacy Media made celebrities out of people far worse than Tate decades before Youtube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Mesrine

Media's propensity to do so has been lampooned before as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Born_Killers

Tagline: "Media made them superstars"

> and is a primary enabler of fringe belief bubbles.

Oh? It's not like anyone's ever seen conspiracy theory programs on TV before Youtube. Heck, if someone re-rendered some of those with AI to use Alex Jones' voice, even his viewers might not be able to tell the difference.

I like a lot of content hosted on YouTube but that doesn't mean I like YouTube, especially under Google.

YouTube is how I got the education I needed to get into the tech industry.

I hope that when I die no one spends so much focus on the business aspects of what I built or the valuations

Doesn't that depend on what context a person knew you at - personal or professional?

The personal side typically will center on emotional aspects of being human. However what you do with your intellect is also a major part of being human. And that part is most often expressed only in our professional lives.

Celebrating a job well done and an outsized impact is a good thing - and if I may, the most "human" of things to do?

RIP.

HN is essentially a business development forum so it makes sense that's what people here would focus on.

It's also a science forum and a tech forum.

Luckily, you will never know, so I wouldn’t place much weight on it.

>Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years.

I was always critical of YouTube from the sort of technical perspective than just pure UX. The core product and the core UX are great and I'm even considering getting YouTube Premium because I use YouTube so much. All in all, YouTube was and still is internet phenomena and they definitely dominate internet video, imo one of the best internet product ever created.

YouTube has worked well.

However, I did try their YT Premium, for a while, and was incredibly disappointed in their UI.

I assume that the Premium UI was designed for people that use their free tier, but is very strange, to folks like me, who come from other paid services.

But I am likely not their target audience. I suppose that YT Premium does well.

I’m not sure what you mean about the UI, but I pay for YouTube Premium exclusively so I don’t have to see ads, and for that purpose alone, to me it’s worth it.

Also useful to be able to download videos for offline viewing, e.g., on a plane or when internet is spotty.

Also for background playback on mobile

Background playback works fine on desktop for any video site (simply put the window in the background) and the fact that YouTube gates this feature behind a paywall is a prime example of enshittification. It makes me want to never give them a dime.

Why not just use an ad blocker?

Well, YouTube premium will work on every device you can sign in to YouTube on. Adblock is available for the most part, but isn't easily available everywhere.

Why not pay for a product you use instead of being a leech? It is perfectly fine if you wanna leech, but understand not everyone wanna do that.

Not looking at an advertisement is not “being a leech.”

I glance away from billboards, I refill my drink during commercial breaks, I show up when the movie starts instead of when the preview starts. These are normal behaviors, not leech behaviors. The ads are not very sophisticated, so I don’t need sophisticated measures to avoid them. On the web, the ads have ratcheted up the intensity (tracking, targeting) with technology and in response I have augmented my ability to ignore with technology. That’s fair.

You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers. It is perfectly fine if you want to guzzle Kiwi Black, but understand not everyone wants to do that.

Reminder, or new thing for those not already aware: there was already a lawsuit about automatically skipping commercials, and the broadcaster in that lawsuit lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...

> Additionally, Fox alleged that Dish infringed Fox's distribution right through use of PTAT copies and AutoHop. However, mentioning that all copying were conducted on the user's PTAT without "change hands" and that the only thing distributed from Dish to the users was the marking data, the Court denied Fox's claim. Citing Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., the Court concluded that the users' copying at home for the time shift purpose did not infringe Fox's copyright. Then, Dish's secondary liability was also denied.

That's a false dichotomy. Rationalize not paying for content with whatever logical contortions you can come up with, leeching content and not paying for it clearly isn't going to encourage the creation of additional content. Pay for it via Patreon or some other platform if you don't want to give money to Google, but the leech problem is why so many things suck. Even BitTorrent sites hate leeches.

I don't think the GP cares about false dichotomies:

> You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers.

This is not rational debate, but activism and emotional manipulation. Recommend flagging and not engaging.

This is an extreme comparison, but there's more action in avoiding ads with an adblocker than by passively averting your gaze in physical media. It'd be more like if you chopped down billboards, installed a jammer into your router to deliver phone stats to tv ads, and blaring noises before the movie starts.

I don't think it's that extreme, but it's always hard making comparisons between physical and digital.

>You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers.

I prefer the framing that doesn't chastise those who are simply ignorant or have their own morals. I recognize adblock is technically "theft" so I don't want to go on a high horse insult the "normal people".

It's more like you have some magic AR glasses that can replace billboards with a blank space, and (presuming the theatre didn't let you in past the beginning of the ads or something) putting in earplugs/earbuds, closing your eyes, and asking your friend to nudge you when the ads are over.

Blocking ads and trackers is no more theft than blocking crypto miners. Malware is malware. You'd be crazy to consider running it as some bizarre form of payment.

Not quite AR because the loss isn't perceivable for hardware ads. No one will come to a billboard and reasonably say "how many people look at this space"? No one can say outside of metrics on traffic.

You can track a bunch of metrics for software and perceive ad blockers, so the loss is more explicit.

>You'd be crazy to consider running it as some bizarre form of payment.

I wont say reality isn't crazy, especially these days. But that's the reality, yes.

The technology is basically there for signage to track who looks at it (maybe not billboards, but that's a resolution thing).

In any case, why would I care about how people who are trying to scam me set up their business deals? If I don't run their script, they didn't "lose" anything. Their malware was never allowed to run on my machines in the first place. They failed to steal something from me.

Perhaps. It'd fall under another cost benefits analysis. I imagine it's not worth the cost. Software scales elegantly, unlike hardware, so it's another area where the metaphor breaks apart.

>why would I care about how people who are trying to scam me set up their business deals?

1. Because you are spending much of your energy and time getting around them. Because by silent consensus people would rather consume ads than pay for their content. Keep your friends close...

2. Because it's an indirect contract. I don't care if you don't care, but I'd at least wish people would be honest and admit that they aren't in some moral high horse for evading such a contract. People get so pompous as if they are combatting the behemoth by taking 10 seconds to download a program.

The house always wins. We're allowed to steal because the cost to catch us is less than the cost to lock the doors. And the company is profitable anyway. The main downside to this is similar to hardware: pricing is a bit more expensive because stores expect X% theft/defects/refunds. I'm sure the same thing happens where content creators get paid a bit less, and YT premium costing a bit more to offset adblock users.

I spend almost no time getting around them. As you say, it takes 10 seconds to install a malware filter to block them.

There is no contract with me at all. It is not theft. It is preventing others from misappropriating my computing resources, and in fact the US government recommends citizens use ad blockers. It's basic computer security.

You've been lucky in that case. Or you simply visit mainstream programs and never had to deal with not-ads-but-still-intrusive elements that you make custom domains to filter out. Google is doing A/B tests going to war with ads so it may be a bumpy few months.

>There is no contract with me at all. It is not theft.

Hence my wording:

>Indirect contract are those where there is no direct contract between parties but the law presumes that there is a contracts between the parties and such could be enforced.

>is preventing others from misappropriating my computing resources,

You chose to access their servers, I don't see how YouTube is "misapproiating your resources". You're basically getting a service and refusing to pay for it. That's theft.

It's like I said, I don't care if people still from a trillion dollar corporation. But people who really only think software can't be stolen really shouldn't be considered a software "engineer", as many here claim to be.

>in fact the US government recommends citizens use ad blockers. It's

1. The fbi is not the government. For good reason given their history.

2. Their context was for malware, not for getting around undesired ads for an otherwise "free" service.

As far as I can tell, this "indirect contract" thing does not exist as a concept in American law, and runs completely counter to the idea of a contract. Contracts must have mutual assent. How could you ever agree to a contract if you don't even know it exists? Do you have an example of case law for this?

On misappropriation, do you think it's okay if e.g. a blogger puts a crypto miner on their page? If you choose to request a web page, is it okay for them to run background workers on your computer, and in fact it is theft of service if you do not allow it? Do you also need to give them e.g. location, accelerometer, microphone, and local filesystem access if they'd like to have it? Why are ads special among malware payloads in that you must run them? Why are computer ads special unlike physical ads (e.g. in the mail or inserts in a free newspaper) where people toss them in the bin without opening/looking at them? Or an ad-blocking DVR?

Many of e.g. Google's tracking domains are simply blocked on my network. I don't have any idea of what web pages are going to try to get me to load them, but it doesn't matter because none of them are allowed to. It's ridiculous to say that I must allow my computers to reach out to malicious servers and run scripts they deliver. Must I allow random North Korean servers to run scripts too?

The FBI is part of the government, and the context was that certain search engines (e.g. Google) were presenting ads for scams, and so to protect yourself from fraud, you should install an ad blocker so that you do not see ads.

On morals, I'll put forward that if you have children, it is in fact a moral imperative to remove as many sources of advertising from their lives as you can. Ads attempt to shape them into worse people (pushing them to embrace materialism and hedonism), and their influence should not be tolerated.

I love that 1 and 2 contradict each other

1. Because you are spending much of your energy and time getting around them.

2. People get so pompous as if they are combatting the behemoth by taking 10 seconds to download a program.

Ad blocking is not theft (in quotes or otherwise), because no one is being deprived of property they own.

Property isn't the only thing that can be stolen.

The dictionary and US law disagree with you.

Edit: I’ve posted this argument on HN before, but if you insist on expanding the accepted definition of theft, then malware, crypto miners, video ads, and other garbage that is frequently served via ad networks are also stealing from me, by wasting electricity and possibly also taking my personal data. So I block ads to prevent this theft. Who is in the right in this case?

You already pay for YouTube with your data.

I, for one, will pay for good things.. but also, it’s worth it if you watch a lot of YouTube on things like AppleTV or Fire Cube. Ad blockers won’t work there.

I'd rather move towards a web (largely) without ads than continue to be the product sold to advertisers rather than the consumer served by the platform. The constant escalation of the ad blocker-ad server war has also contributed greatly to ballooning complexity in all sorts of technologies.

I hope YT Premium is a step in that direction, but only time will tell.

Well you are both the customer and the product with YT Premium. Yeah you don't see ads, but they are still tracking everything you watch and using that to deliver targeted ads to you on other platforms.

don’t know any for YT ioS, i used to live with ads on mobile but after getting premium, even though i use an ad blocker + firefox on desktop, i never canceled it for a reason

also YT on a tv is difficult to set up an ad blocker for

2 factors:

1. less annoying for non-desktop devices. Especially when casting content onto my TV

2. moral niceties: Premium viewers apparently help give more revenue to content creators, and I tend to watch smaller channels. It's nice knowing I can disproportionately help those kinds of creators out.

Also, apparently Google is in the middle of its latest clash with adblocking so even that can get unreliable.

There is no "Premium UI". Premium is simply regular YouTube without ads.

I think maybe the above poster is referencing the music product, but that's just a guess.

No, it was the movie channel. I tried it out, because YT Premium had a particular show I wanted to see.

The biggest issue that I had, was that I couldn't find shows that I wanted to see. YT kept shoving a bunch of stuff into the UI that I wasn't interested in. All my searches were littered with results that were not relevant to me. I suspect they were paid.

The Apple App Store has the same problem. It's infuriating.

Listen, I apologize for diverting from the real issue, that a tech luminary died young. I did not know her, but it sounds like she was popular, and did well.

Do you mean YouTube tv?

Sorry. I thought they were the same.

Anyway, yes. YouTube TV.

> and I'm even considering getting YouTube Premium

Why?

Serious question, too. You can sideload clients that give you every single feature of YouTube Premium for free. Unless you're expressly lazy, like being taken advantage of or enjoy watching advertisements, there's really no excuse. YouTube Premium is the "I'm trapped in this place and you people have finally gotten me" fee - you can circument it all together by just, not using YouTube's software. Newpipe is must-have on Android, I'm certain something similar exists for iOS. I run SmartTube on my dirt-cheap Amazon FireTV and don't get a single ad when browsing. Subtotal is $0.00 for the installation and usage of Open Source software.

I use YouTube a lot, but between uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (which I set-and-forget like 4 years ago) I don't have a single gripe with the experience. I hear people contemplate paying YouTube for a worse experience and it gives me hives. The content is on a server; you are making yourself miserable by acquiescing to a harmful client. Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.

Why do I pick up trash off the floor that I didn’t put there? Why do I tip for good service? Why do I bother responding to posts like this?

The answer is the same to all these questions: because I’d rather not live in a world where everyone is a taker.

You're not picking up trash. You're paying for trash and encouraging the ad-littering business by even acknowledging it exists. If you consider advertising bad enough to pay money to get rid of it, why would you pay that money to the business putting up ads? Because you refuse to leave their client? Because you don't want to acknowledge the scary world of choosing something better?

I see a lot of people say this, where they despise YouTube and it's advertisement scheme but somehow mentally justify it to themselves that Google deserves their $10/month. Before any of you ask "What's wrong with the world these days!?" again, reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it. The free market can pound sand, Google has you right where they want you.

> Because you don't want to acknowledge the scary world of choosing something better?

You could choose something better by consuming media from sources that don't engage in the malpractices you're complaining about. There's plenty of media available for purchase without advertisements or subscriptions attached. There's also plenty of media on offer for free from the people who created it.

I'm not even anti-piracy, but your rationalization is just ridiculous. No, you're not sticking it to the man; you're being subsidized by people that are willing to pay for content they consume.

I've pirated a ton of content/software in my lifetime and I use adblockers. Countless mp3s, video games, applications, movies, tv shows, and articles online consumed by me without paying for it. Sometimes it was impossible for me to pay for it because of regional licensing, but a whole lot more of it was simply because I didn't want to pay for it or I couldn't afford it.

Now I pay for music and other media streaming services, including Youtube Premium. I pay for the games I play and I pay for a lot of software that I use. Does that balance things out? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm definitely not someone that is pretending I'm on some moral crusade against advertisements by circumventing them.

I'm not pirating media people put on YouTube. When you upload content to YouTube, you are generally taking unlicensed (or provisionally legal derivative content) and sublicensing it to YouTube for distribution and monetization. You can argue that I'm pirating Google's copy of the content, but I'm not short-changing the original uploader by refusing Google's ads. I'm exclusively ensuring that Google's business model is less profitable.

> you're being subsidized by people that are willing to pay for content they consume.

Good! Those people hate YouTube too, otherwise would be perfectly satisfied with the default service. If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it. Google doesn't deserve this content, they are poor stewards of the service and deserve to be deposed for their lazy management of a shared resource. If we were talking about ad-free Facebook subscriptions HN would be wearing the shoe on the other foot, ripping people to shreds for supporting a demonstrably destructive business. But YouTube is different, because we all have some incentive to prop poor Google up.

I feel zero empathy contributing to "the problem" of ruining the service. This isn't the tragedy of the commons, it's the progression of corporate greed. Keep paying for YouTube Premium, tell me with any honesty your contributions are making the world better or providing a more complete user experience. You can't.

>but I'm not short-changing the original uploader by refusing Google's ads.

I'd be surprised if Google didn't take adblocked users into account when administering pay, because the pay scale isn't some flat "X money's per Y thousand views". So yes, you are indirectly short-changing them.

>If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it.

or we get a worse format like Tiktok taking over. The most popular reddit alternative during its "protests" was Discord. I don't consider that an obective net good for the free web.

That's not to say Reddit deserves to stay alive, just a consideration that this forced migration will not necessarily lead to a desired solution of "new website like X but without the bullshit"

> I'm not pirating media people put on YouTube. When you upload content to YouTube, you are generally taking unlicensed (or provisionally legal derivative content) and sublicensing it to YouTube for distribution and monetization. You can argue that I'm pirating Google's copy of the content, but I'm not short-changing the original uploader by refusing Google's ads. I'm exclusively ensuring that Google's business model is less profitable.

If I write a song and put it up on bandcamp for purchase and on youtube with the intention to monetize it through Youtube's monetization options, how do you arrive at the conclusion that you're not pirating my content when you're circumventing the medium through which that is monetized? Advertisers will pay Youtube for an advertisement on their platform -> Youtube places advertisements in front of my video -> Revenue from advertisements is determined by how many times an advertisement is viewed on my video. So circumventing advertisement reduces the view count and thus the revenue. This is making it both less profitable for Youtube and for me.

> Good! Those people hate YouTube too, otherwise would be perfectly satisfied with the default service.

The willingness to pay for no advertising is not equivalent to hating Youtube. If you hate Youtube, why do you use it?

You might say it's because the content is there. Why is the content there and not somewhere else? Because Youtube incentivizes people to upload their creations to it. If it is somewhere else, why not watch it there or pay for it there?

> If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it.

Why would Google killing off Youtube force any change to how content ownership works?

> Google doesn't deserve this content, they are poor stewards of the service and deserve to be deposed for their lazy management of a shared resource.

If they didn't deserve the content, then people wouldn't upload their content to Youtube. It is every creator's prerogative to choose how they distribute their content and there's a reason many do so on Youtube.

I could levy plenty of criticisms against Youtube just as many creators on the platform could but there's no coercion involved here. People want what Youtube has to offer.

> If we were talking about ad-free Facebook subscriptions HN would be wearing the shoe on the other foot, ripping people to shreds for supporting a demonstrably destructive business. But YouTube is different, because we all have some incentive to prop poor Google up.

What incentive are you speaking of? If ad-free Facebook subscriptions were tied into revenue-sharing with content creators on the platform, it'd be as reasonable as Youtube Premium.

> I feel zero empathy contributing to "the problem" of ruining the service. This isn't the tragedy of the commons, it's the progression of corporate greed.

I don't care that you're a selfish person acting in their own self interest; I'm no different. I dislike that you're trying to portray your behavior as righteous.

> Keep paying for YouTube Premium, tell me with any honesty your contributions are making the world better or providing a more complete user experience. You can't.

Paying for Youtube Premium supports the upkeep of the platform and directly contributes to creators through revenue sharing. Both the platform and its creators make for a better world. You could absolutely replace the platform, but there's undeniable value in one that allows basically anyone to share what they have to offer to the world and create mechanisms to monetize their content. The content speaks for itself. There's countless hours of educational and entertaining content. There's content for niche subjects and hobbies that would never have appeared in traditional media.

> If they didn't deserve the content, then people wouldn't upload their content to Youtube. It is every creator's prerogative to choose how they distribute their content and there's a reason many do so on Youtube.

...and the reason is: they were the first. Now they are so huge that you can't go past them. If you want to have your video seen, you HAVE to go to YouTube. It's not an argument for them. It's just a quasi monopoly. Every Smart TV these days comes with an YouTube app pre-installed. It has it's app on most of the phones on this planet.

There is no real choice.

> ...and the reason is: they were the first. Now they are so huge that you can't go past them. If you want to have your video seen, you HAVE to go to YouTube.

I think you're understanding the value in the platform itself, then. It is pretty trivial for someone to share their video online but it's extremely difficult to get it to propagate.

> There is no real choice.

There is kind of a choice. You already added the primary condition for uploading it to Youtube and that condition isn't something that matters to everyone for everything. Traditional media is Youtube's competition for attention on long form content.

People who upload their content to the open internet usually want to have it seen by others. So no...there is no real choice.

Also, suggesting that this "value" is something YouTube still delivers or creates, is ridiculous. It was luck and from then on the value is being provided by the people who upload content there. What they get in return is ridiculous compared to what YT generates financially. This is nothing to be proud of. It's your usual digital rip-off through privilege.

> It was luck and from then on the value is being provided by the people who upload content there.

Content means absolutely fuck all if it can't reach its audience. Youtube hosts, encodes, streams, distributes, and circulates the content and has recommendation algorithms to increase the productivity of every public video published on the platform. It was lucky that it was a first mover and gained the momentum that it continues to enjoy from its massive user base, but a massive user base means fuck all if you can't deliver a product that they want to use... and Youtube as a platform means absolutely fuck all if people don't create and share videos.

If you want to argue that Youtube takes too much of a cut because of their position as a natural monopoly in the long form video content market, you might have a reasonable argument. To say that Youtube as a platform does not provide value to both its creators and its regular users is simply asinine.

> Content means absolutely fuck all if it can't reach its audience

Obviously no, or YouTube wouldn't be where it is today...

> Youtube hosts, encodes, streams, distributes, and circulates the content and has recommendation algorithms to increase the productivity of every public video published on the platform

Nothing of this is in any way special. Nobody would care if they wouldn't already have their quasi monopoly. The algorithm is a topic for itself. Enforcing hate, misinformation, etc. but in the end always working in such a way as to maximize YT profits and not recommend useful content to the user. What are you trying to sell here? The way the algorithm got terrible is a meme by ow. What is it even supposed to justify?

> but a massive user base means fuck all if you can't deliver a product that they want to use...

The fact that the algorithm was much better before and works perfectly on other pages who actually care about what you wrote more then about the artificial limits YT forces on their content providers shows that this approach at justification is ridiculous.

If there would be even one competitor out there with the same amount of luck and YT would work exactly as it does now while the other would actually care about their content providers, YT would go broke.

> Obviously no, or YouTube wouldn't be where it is today...

Youtube is where it is today because the content on it reached its audience.

> Nothing of this is in any way special. Nobody would care if they wouldn't already have their quasi monopoly. The algorithm is a topic for itself. Enforcing hate, misinformation, etc. but in the end always working in such a way as to maximize YT profits and not recommend useful content to the user. What are you trying to sell here? The way the algorithm got terrible is a meme by ow. What is it even supposed to justify?

I notice sometimes if I watch a video outside of what is normal for me on Youtube, I'll see more videos on that topic. If I stop watching them, they go away. If you are consistently seeing videos of hate or misinformation, that is because you're engaging with those videos.

The reason the algorithm is important is because it is how you deliver videos to users. Several of the topics that I watch are fairly niche, so I do end up receiving recommendations for videos of creators with very low sub counts and view counts. I would never have found these videos without the recommendation algorithm.

It's not perfect, but it's simply incorrect that it doesn't recommend useful content to the user. It is optimized to maximize engagement and it does that by recommending videos that it thinks the user wants to and will watch to completion. That can be at odds with user's interests, but I'd say typically it's working how it should.

There's another can of worms of rabbit holes and echo chambers, but that seems to be an internet issue and more broadly a people issue, not solely a Youtube issue. How Youtube should handle this is another deep and nuanced issue.

> If there would be even one competitor out there with the same amount of luck and YT would work exactly as it does now while the other would actually care about their content providers, YT would go broke.

Same amount of luck, how? Be there at the same time? because Youtube did have competitors like Google Videos and Vimeo and it was the one that won out.

It's obvious that if someone had a better product in every way including luck and youtube didn't change anything that youtube would die out.

First of all we are talking about YouTube here, not Google as a whole. Secondly, my argument is simple and basic physics. If everyone behaved like you, YouTube and services like it would not exist. Your straw man arguments aren’t needed for me to justify my decisions.

> You're paying for trash and encouraging the ad-littering business by even acknowledging it exists.

This feels like a "you participate in society" argument. Yes, it'd be better if all intrusive ads were banned or heavily regulated. But that's not reality and I can't simply withdraw from the internet in protest.

>If you consider advertising bad enough to pay money to get rid of it, why would you pay that money to the business putting up ads?

it's a calculus of "energy spent" from fighting vs value gained from "giving in". There's fortuntaely more value than "remove ads" so that's how I justify it.

>Because you refuse to leave their client?

because I can't leave the client. I've been de-googling for the past year or so and I realize the main two things I can't leave are

1. Youtube, because it basically has a monopoly on video content.

2. gmail, mostly because there'd be a huge burden ediing almost 20 years of accounts all through the web to leave. From random sites I visit once in a blue moon to my banks and bills. I'd have gmail haunting me for years even if I dropped it today.

If there's one thing that has a reckoning coming, it's Youtube.

>Because you don't want to acknowledge the scary world of choosing something better?

I do it all the time. There is always friction so I think it's a bit dishonest to phrase it as "choosing something better". Firefox still has quirks with translation and the occasional weird interaction with factors like video calls, even after days of researching tweaking settings and installing extensions. Picking up PC gaming still has tons of configuration issues and hardware considerations compared to popping in a disc into a console. There's simply a lot of intersting information I miss out on from not browsing reddit, things that the other 3 forum social media (including HN) just don't catch. It's never objectively better.

>reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it.

I suppose you can criticism any bill with that logic. Water is a natural resource, why am I paying for plumbing? video games are just code, all code should be free, why pay for video games? Why am I paying $100 for this art commission when someone in Venezuela would do it for a dime (disclaimer: this is probably a very wrong conversion)?

Some of these are societal (we're never going to escape taxes, some of these should hopefully be so you can support other workers instead of exploiting them. It's your call either way, but I won't fault someone (especially someone decently off) for choosing convinience of entertainment over some grand stand against "the free market".

OK we get it you’re so cool for being cynical

I will proceed to live my life paying companies and creators that provide me value and you can continue feeling like a victim where every action you have the option to take is exploitation

> Unless you're expressly lazy

Yes, that’s me. I sometimes even pay other people to prepare meals and manufacture clothing for me!

> I run SmartTube on my dirt-cheap Amazon FireTV and don't get a single ad when browsing. Subtotal is $0.00 for the installation and usage of Open Source software.

I have YT Premium and it works perfectly on every device I have and I have never had to configure anything nor research anything to not see an ad. I only vaguely understand some of the phrases or words you are using (have no clue what a newpipe is, but kind of understand what sideloading) is. I do not care to ever fiddle with my devices, there are more important or at least gratifying things in this world then futzing around with and tweaking devices.

> Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.

If this is the great battle you have chosen to wage with your precious, fleeting time on earth, by all means, go with God -- but a lot of people really don't give a damn about Walled Gardens.

I use revanced, smarttube, and yt-dlp. but I also have premium, because it is an exceptional service.

It's about 2 things

1. the principle. You get something, you pay for it.

2. the practicality. Youtube cannot run on fumes. It needs to generate funds from somewhere

If everyone decides to not take premium, it only incentivises youtube to harvest your data for a profit (yes, they're already doing it but that's not the point). Premium immediately pays for the product, and provides Youtube with the cash to run it's servers and pay it's content creators.

Not to mention, premium is pretty darned good, provides almost all the features and functionality that are available through other clients.

I didn't mind the ads on YT but this year the unskippable ads on TV platforms is abusivel, eg., a 20-30 seconds ad(s) for a 1.5 minute video. Ive seen unskippable breaks of up to 200 seconds with 5-8 advertisers in some long form YT vidoes. YT claims the breaks are less frequent but I dont beliveve it.

That was it and I side loaded STN. I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.

I agree. That is quite painful and is obviously motivated to force people towards premium, which I highly disagree with. I think such actions should be regulated though I don't know if that can legally happen.

>I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.

Same. Sometimes I try to support my fav ones with a nominal patreon subscription whenever I discontinue my premium.

I dont think they want us to transition to Premium, they like that on smarttv platforms they can sell unskippable ads that are similar to cable/broadcast TV

YouTube wants you to transition to Premium because it is more profitable for them; they earn less with selling ads on the CPM and the CPC basis than they get from Premium. And they are pretty intrusive about it e.g. when you watch videos and you exit the YouTube app and shortly after that come back, pop-up says: "Wish videos kept playing when you closed the app?", "Get background play with YouTube Premium". Also when comments are disabled by content creators on music videos, they sort of hijack comments section and say: "Listen on YouTube Music", "Timed lyrics, sleep timer and more". Plus on top of that, they also got pretty aggressive with blocking ad-blockers....so definitely they want you to purchase and transition to YouTube Premium.

Not going to say you are wrong (+1), but look at the streamers who now overcharge for an ad-free version of their services. Part of that is to get scale for the ad-supported tiers.

I've heard that Premium viewers account for a better income for content creators in comparison to ad-supported viewers. That's enough for me to be happy to pay.

I pay for Youtube Premium. I never see this, and I don't understand how suffer like this. You don't have to. I also use Revanced on mobile.

My reasons are: it's a great product, it's very convenient, it's the service I watch the most content on, part of the money goes to creators and I'm not broke so I can afford it.

Then don't come whining to me when YouTube gets worse on your dime.

It's been probably the single most valuable content resource in my life.

I owe so much to YouTube. The price I pay is small for what I get in return and I only see the service getting better over the years.

I'm not asking you to agree with me. But I hope you find this perspective useful in seeing how other people view it.

> It's also not a business that rested on it's laurels.

I would say it’s more a business that rests on its monopolization of the market. As a product there’s plenty I like about YouTube, but it dominated the market through the use of many highly anti-competitive strategies, and has what many would consider (and what may well be proven to be) an illegal monopoly.

You can’t deny its impact, but to give such high praise to the management seems rather misguided to me.

In what way is YouTube an illegal monopoly?

Alphabet has engaged in many anti-competitive business practices to promote YouTube's monopoly.

To name a few, Alphabet is currently being sued by the DoJ for illegally monopolising digital advertising technology. That technology, which directly integrates with youtube (and which you or I could not integrate with our own competing youtube-like product), is one of the key reasons that youtube has become as successful as it is.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...

They have also recently lost a lawsuit regarding the legality of their search monopoly, which likely also contributed to the success of youtube.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us...

The way they leverage the OHA to ensure YouTube is shipped with every Android phone is also highly anti-competitive, and isn't too different from the IE case against Microsoft.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...

The same concern exists in the smart TV market.

While it's not illegal (as far as I know), the practice of burning through billions of dollars until your competitors are gone and you have an unassailable market dominance is also certainly anti-competitive, and that really has been one of the other key ingredients in youtube's success.

None of these are management practices that I would consider worthy of congratulating.

The irony is that despite all of this monopolization and lying to advertisers about the reach of their ads YouTube is still not profitable.

Alphabet don’t publish YouTube’s profit margins, so I don’t think you know that to be a fact. I’d personally be rather surprised if it wasn’t profitable though.

I know this is horrible logic here but: Alphabet not wanting to publish the margins of what is otherwise their top3 best known product says a lot in and of itself. Either that it wouldn't be a pretty image (even if it is in fact commodifying other profitable sectors), or it'd reveal some skeletons (which are being revealed in real time, but it slows down the reveal).

Leveraging YouTube's market share to hobble Windows Phone. https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-orders-microsoft-to-remove...

Carriage dispute with Roku. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/roku-reaches-agreement-with-...

YouTube is absolutely the business that is resting on laurels, just like Google Maps and Gmail. Sometime I wonder if these products have any real active development teams at all besides ads. YouTube massively screwed with users by forcing poorly executed botched migration to YouTube Music. Even outsiders can see that this was entirely internal Google politics which powerful people like Wojcicki should have been able to avoid but she didn't. It just makes me wonder if these billionaire leaders of Google products really care anymore about anything. There is visibly an utter lack of hunger at the top and these people clearly should have been spending more time with family leaving these products with more hungry minds. YouTube recommendations are crap and it's still amazing that in 2024 just clicking one video will fill up most of recommendations with same thing. It never got around to incentivize creators to produce concise content and to this day creators keep producing massive 30 min diatribe that could have been done in 3 mins. TikTok took full advantage of this but YouTube CEO just kept napping at the wheel. Ultimately, the original product mostly just kept going but the measure of success is not about retaining audience but what it could have been if there was an ambitious visionary leader at the helm.

> It never got around to incentivize creators to produce concise content and to this day creators keep producing massive 30 min diatribe that could have been done in 3 mins.

Why on Earth would you want shorter videos? The best thing about YouTube is that it's one of the only places you can find quality medium-to-long-form content.

Why on earth you want 10X longer video with same information content as the shorter video?

Clearly the add-supported side, that likes to pad and pad and show more adds, is working against the premium/fee-supported side, that wants to maximise value and engagement. Premium subscribers should be able to give feedback on a video's density IMHO...

Length is shown in the thumbnail. Too long, no click, less views. I also wouldn't be surprised if the recommendation algo uses premium status as an input

Why on earth would you watch a 1.5 hour movie when you can watch a 2 min TikTok that explains the entire story?

In a world full of distractions I for one love the more slow-paced videos than “shorts” churned out by content mills designed to feed the modern day digital ADHD…

Few years ago “long burn” story telling was hot and we are still feeling the effects. Take any show on Netflix and it will be 8 45min episodes from which first 3 are absolutely garbage filler.

Youtube learned the wrong lesson and started to optimize the algorithm for retention and length. It is annoying to click for a review of some product that looks like a lengthy one with probably tests and what not only to see painfully slow unboxing and a wikipedia read of the history of the product and company and then sponsor read and then they turn on the device for a minute and give arbitrary score.

Exact same info could have been communicated in 30seconds, but then they wouldn’t get sponsor money and mid video ad roll

I beg to disagree. I don’t watch movies to “get information”. I watch movies (and long form YouTube videos) to be entertained. Why travel places? You can look up photos and videos online and get the same “information”.

I don't get the strawman you are trying to construct here. Most of Youtube is not movies

10 minutes of a shitty movie is too long, but one great movie might be not enough and I want a TV series out of it!

I find it a small price to pay if a few videos are too long (you can usually tell within three minutes anyway), to have a platform that generally encourages 30 minute videos and even 3 hour videos that do have content.

There's almost no meaningful 3 minute content possible, so a platform like TikTok that only works for short videos is basically condemned to be meaning-less, to be pure entertainment.

Maybe not what the commenter was saying, but there is a difference between great multi-hour essays and pointless rants stretching out their length to meet a minimum ad requirement. I like watching a lot of multi hour videos, but you can tell the difference between one with substance and one repeating the same thing over and over so they can "clock out."

That's all due to changes by YouTube to reward length and frequency, which of course makes sense for maximizing their ad revenue. But the result is creators are incentivized to pump out 20-minute fluff videos, not well edited/written videos.

People on here complain about SEO sites being filled with meaningless garbage. That's what YouTube is starting to be. The difference is their search bar still works whereas Google's will only give you the garbage. Though I still get "such and such breaks down their career" even though I've never clicked on that.

I agree that there are a lot of inflated videos to hit some ad target. But the solution is not to encourage people to create short videos, or at the very least, not the way TikTok did, making it almost impossible to popularize anything longer than 3 minutes.

And despite all the dredge, there is a lot of good content on YouTube, at least in certain niches. Video essays on media and politics, lots of video-game analysis and other fan communities, history content, lots of e-sports to name just a handful that I personally enjoy.

> The difference is their search bar still works

Search is literally one of the things YouTube is poorer at than ever and it blows my mind. I get a handful of results that might be relevant and then it’s just pages and pages of completely unrelated content that has nothing to do remotely with my search.

YouTube videos were originally limited to 5 or 10 minutes I think. And probably 480p or so. You have to remember when it started, video on mobile didn't exist and there was absolutely no bandwidth for it. So people watching YouTube were watching it on their PC, probably with a 1024x768 CRT screen, and that's assuming they had something faster than dial-up internet.

Oh, I do remember, I was around in the early days. I think (but maybe that came later?) longer form videos did exist, but only paying accounts could post them.

I think googles peering agreements are possibly the only reason YouTube is viable as a free service. Hard to compete against a company who basically doesn't have to pay for bandwidth.

Google also invests many billions of dollars to build their internet network and parts of the public Internet so it is hardly free

Eh close to free. This is the Google edge nodes in ISPs. But Google isn’t the only one with such an arrangement. Akamai, Netflix and a few others have same cost structure for in isp nodes.

There's a big stand-off between ISPs and CDNs over payments. Some ISPs insist they want payments to peer and others agree that it's mutually beneficial, but even where the ISPs stamp their feet, they rarely win the argument. Netflix started publishing rankings which showed which ISPs were good and which weren't, which drives them to improve. If content providers start saying to customers that they should change their ISP, then the ISP is going to hurt, so they might as well peer on a neutral basis.

Some ISPs have been lobbying governments and the EU to ask them to tax the "significant traffic generators" based on the traffic volumes and then use that to pay for the telco infrastructure. But that's an argument I am not convinced by, I think the ISPs will take the money, just reduce their own investments and make more profit.

I think the CDNs (including Google) need credit for the infrastructure they build.

To a fairly casual observer like myself, YouTube early on looked like mostly a platform for massive video copyright infringement--especially before home video became so relatively cheap and easy. I don't use it nearly as much as some here but it definitely transformed into something much different for the most part and managed to make it work as a business (at least as part of Google).

Younger folks forget that YouTube launched (2005) a few years before both the iPhone launched and Netflix pivoted to streaming (2007).

In that weird era, (a) average home Internet connections became fast enough to support streaming video (with a healthy adoption growth rate), (b) the most widely deployed home recording device was likely still the VCR (digitizing analog video from cable to burn to DVD was a pain), (c) there was no "on demand" anything, as most media flowed over centrally-programmed cable or broadcast subscriptions, and (d) people capturing video on mobile devices was rare (first gen iPhone couldn't) but obviously a future growth area.

So early YouTube was literally unlike anything that came before -- watch a thing you want, whenever you want.

The slogan "Broadcast Yourself" was really inspiring at the time, because it actually was kinda hard to do that at scale in video.

And Cisco didn't acquire Flip until 2009.

Really most of the content that YouTube had available was material recorded off of broadcast/cable which was mostly not available otherwise unless you had recorded it or gotten it off a torrent.

Flip has a special place in my heart, right next to my memories of my Diamond Rio MP3 player.

Wow I just realized how old YouTube is. My video on YouTube was uploaded on 2006 and it is still there.

I remember uploading it from my Sony handcam, then editing it in Sony Vegas and exporting it to make sure it hits the required YT file upload limit.

And it was a video dating site when it started!

That was also an era where bandwidth to serve content was extremely expensive, I still don't know how 2005 YouTube was able to find a way to make serving user-uploaded videos for free financially viable, but that was a HUGE component of their success.

Self-hosting video at scale is still pretty expensive although using CDN can reduce it.

At YouTube scale, it feels like that quip: 'When you need to serve a few videos, it's your problem. When you need to serve video everyone watches, it's the ISPs' problem.'

I'd be fascinated to look at their peering terms.

Also, the DMCA had just passed, which basically eliminated liability for hosting copyrighted video content as long as the infringement was laundered through a service provider.

I honestly don’t think YouTube would exist without that particular piece of regulatory capture.

Contrast the video and podcast ecosystems.

Podcasts are arguably much healthier (the publishers maintain creative control), and are certainly decentralized.

I think the secret was being acquired by Google. Without the deep financial pockets and strategic patience of Google, I doubt they would have been able to become what they are today.

How YouTube would pay for itself was one of those top topics back in that thin slice of time between when YouTube took off and Google bought it.

The Techmeme page from the day of the announcement (October 9, 2006) if you want to dig into it: https://www.techmeme.com/061009/h2355

On-demand was a thing before, but it was mediated through slow, glitchy cable and satellite boxes. There was also a thriving scene of RSS-delivered web TV shows.

Even cheap digital cameras back then could record video + audio.

True, but scale drastically changed once there was serviceable video recording in every mobile phone.

Lots of people carried digital cameras, but even more have mobile phones.

Yeah I remember watching Seinfeld and full seasons of cartoons on early YouTube. People basically just uploaded their whole pirated video collections there

To a less casual observer like myself, early YouTube looked like a bastion of protection for fair use of copyrighted material.

Sadly, the copyright cartel swiftly attacked and all the regular people lost their rights. It seems like the lesson learned is that the copyright-owning corporations can't be trusted to play fairly or meet in the middle on fair use. We really need to just abolish copyright laws entirely.

> I've probably watched tens of thousands of hours of YouTube at this point.

More than 20,000 hours over at most 18 years is at least 3 hours per day on average. That’s a lot of watching.

The average person spends 5 hours/day on their phone and it’s likely most of it is passive watching (YouTube, TikTok, etc). So 3 hours/day doesn’t sound like too much.

My dad uses it to get fascist/right-wing propaganda for about 4 hours every night. All nicely monetized for any grifter willing to debase themselves for a potential fortune. Truly novel, but not well thought through or done with any care at all besides profits which is par for the course in silicon valley.

Your idea of fascism must be rather tame, considering YouTube’s active censorship of anything even slightly right-of-center.

It hardly needs to be violently racist or whatever conception you have in your mind to be fascist propaganda. Rather the opposite if you take a minute to consider what makes for effective propaganda.

The word fascism needs to stop being tossed around so carelessly. Words ought to be precise and meaningful.

You sound radicalized.

What do you watch? Sounds like we need to ban it.

Tech companies should spend more time banning people from talking about things I would personally prefer they didn't.

YouTube has very much been resting on its laurels, they were innovative 20 years ago when they started. For the past decade or so they have mostly just rested on their laurels allowing the auto-moderation to rampage and destroy people's livelihoods.

They've been way behind on adding standard features that their competitors see lots of benefit from. For example, YouTube was years late to the 'channel memberships' game despite the popularity of Twitch and Patreon. YouTube still lacks many of the popular streaming features from Twitch, and only relatively recently got around to adding stuff like polls. I can't think of any feature in the past decade that was a YouTube innovation rather than an innovation from competitors that was copied over years later.

I've often wondered why YT hasn't released a subscription fee or donate type button where they could easily take a small nominal processing fee while removing the friction of forcing use of 3rd party services. Is liability from that kind of money movement too much for them to care with all of the much less risky money they are making?

They have Memberships now and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have a donate button hidden away somewhere.

They have both. Subscription fee is channel memberships, and donation is the “Thanks” button.

As others said they have both now. Main issue is the same with any other kind of charity: most people won't do it so it's a neglible factor without incentive (which makes it cease to be a donation in my eyes).

But youtube's main services are free, so that's harder to pull off compared to stuff like Patreon. Offering exclusive videos probably doesn't outpace the ad revenue from "free" videos either (and if we're being frank, you're still bound to YT's rules. So you can't offer truly "extra" content free from censorship or copyright or whatnot.)

You're allowed to have content with unpublished links or not discoverable by search. I guess you could publish that content via email to sponsors that could obviously be forwarded, but that would be such a small number. I'm not familiar with peculiarities of subscription to channels as I never browse logged in, but do they not allow for videos to be visible only to subscribed users? Seems like that would be simple enough to do.

>but do they not allow for videos to be visible only to subscribed users?

They do. But as explained, the revenue gained by maybe 100 users paying $5/month won't necessarily exceed an average video release of 10,000 "free" views. It's a " free service", so most subscribers (let alone unsubscribed viewers) won't join the membership for a few extra videos. It's a similar issue Reddit is trying to do right now with paid subreddits.

The idea can work, Nebula as a "competitor" works off this model. But I don't think it can be tacked on 20 years later onto a "free" service.

Isn't you watching commercials and promotions your 'donation'?

It's still for me much more useable than the competitors. There have been quite a lot of features added in the 20 years - being able to choosse the viewing quality, variable playback speed, rapid transcription for subtitles, live video where if you join late you can start from the begining at 2x till it catches up. I still interenally curse if I'm made to watch video on a non youtube player as there's usually something that doesn't work. Youtube is often the only one to work ok on slow connections.

Even if the tech was better, the network effect has long taken place. Content creators get paid, and a few get paid enough to do it full time. They can't just jump to another platform and expect to maintain that, and without that the fans won't migrate either.

Mixer is one of the best examples of this. MSFT paid hundreds of millions for exclusivity for some of the most popular streamers and people complimented how it felt much smoother than Twitch. But that wasn't enough to get off the ground for MS. Youtube is an even bigger behemoth to tackle.

YT could learn a lot from bilibili. They've slowly crawled their way to reasonable feature set over the years.

The way YouTube was caught offguard by TikTok is even more significant than than the way Google was caught offguard by ChatGPT.

Well said! Having used almost all video learning platforms (Oreilly, skillshare, pluralsight, Coursera etc.), I now believe that YouTube is the superset of all platforms.

> Whatever is here, is found elsewhere. But what is not here, is nowhere

I'll preface this with the most important part that cancer sucks and I wish it not even on my worst enemies. I hope Susan's family can find some peace.

>but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined.

it's very weird because "successful" doesn't mean "makes the most profit" here. It's undoubedtly a huge and challenging infrastructure to manage, but it apparently took Google over a decade to start being profitable. I don't know if that's some hollywood accounting or commodification to ads, but in many ways I feel like YT outspent the rest of the competition and in some ways stifled more efficient ways to deliver video content.

I feel a bit bad because it's clear YT has been turning the script for some time, and while Susan took a lot of that blame these wheels were turning long before she became CEO (and turn long after she stepped down). But that just shows why monopolies are bad. I do hope something better for creators takes over eventually.

> objectively

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

What makes a business successful and what makes a good product are both highly subjective.

People of course associate her with YouTube, but Susan Wojcicki has had an overall fascinating career.

Page and Brin started Google in her garage. She was employee #16 at the company. She was behind the Google logo, Google Doodles, Image Search, AdSense, then all of advertising, and ultimately YouTube.

Safe to say Google would not be where it is today without her role. RIP.

Yeah it's interesting to see the press and others really pushing on the YouTube thing when it is AdSense that made Google what it was and is still today. An advertising revenue money machine. And it was in many ways her baby.

I personally wouldn't be where I am without her. Google wasn't my first job but it was the first one that mattered and I was there pretty early (2004). The founding team set Google up for success. The tech was obviously key but you can still ruin good tech by running a bad business. She earned her success, multiple times and I have a deep appreciation for what she did and what she was part of. It's a sad day, for sure.

I always wonder how many people could have replicated similar successes if put in similar positions and i always feel like it is a lot. Like i can't imagine you taking someone from the same time period as newton or einstein and replacing them and seeing similar success but in a rich environment surrounded with bright people like early google, i feel like just being early to google is enough to guarantee that you'll have some good ideas. Using advertising to make money has always existed that is what tv channels and magazines did for a long time before the internet, i'm sure google would have been just as successful without google doodles or put another way - google's success allowed it to be whacky and not vice versa.

You're very wrong. Most people put in her position would be a disaster and they would either leave quickly or would be kicked out. Lots of people at Google left or were fired because they were crap, and they were definitely not randomly picked up from the street. She stayed and wasn't fired and that's because she was of the highest caliber.

> Safe to say Google would not be where it is today without her role. RIP.

So she made some of the most user-hostile, internet-ruining products and created one of the most evil companies currently active? Great obituary going on there. With apologies to the people grieving her, she is basically 2024 Thomas Midgley Jr.

Thank you for your opinion.

FYI Sundar Pichai posted a tribute: https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/1822132667959386588

> Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.

I'll say personally it's tragic to see someone like this pass in their 50s. Given Susan's impact on both Google as a whole and more specifically YouTube it's no understatement to say that she changed the world profoundly.

I don't think that YouTube, in its current form, or the creator economy that it produced, would exist in anywhere near the same shape had Google not acquired and then spent years funding the company at a financial loss.

She had a huge impact on YouTube and with it the world as I personally feel YouTube has become one of the largest resource of information on how to do almost anything for the newer generations as well as for people that had no access because they could not read. And as ai translation get better the impact on billions of people will be huge.

Posted by Sundar Pichai.

This sucks. I was at Google many years back and I remember her to be an awesome product leader. In fact even though I was another org, she was helpful and really helped me and our team.

excuse me for this offtopic (?) tangent, but can you please expand on what does being a good/amazing product leader mean? every kind of context helps, as I have no experience working inside these huge super-successful corps. thanks!

Feel good adjectives.

Makes insightful directives on what to put in as the core value of a product. When you are making stuff that the world really hasn’t seen before, it’s really hard to know what people want, as they often can’t tell you directly.

I’m not familiar with Susan’s work directly, but for example, it’s widely accepted that YT has the best revenue share and payout for its creators compared to competitors like twitch or TikTok.

Someone has to really sit down and figure out how getting paid for making internet videos works. It didn’t exist before.

Also great product leaders give team members principles and tools to work with (like metrics), so they don’t need to micromanage every decision, and the product can still be cohesive.

RIP. Her son just died early this year, from a drug overdose.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/05/31/marco-t...

> Troper's autopsy found high concentrations of cocaine, amphetamine, alprazolam (Xanax),

What a strange mix.

The amphetamine is almost assuredly from the cocaine, so that just means they were doing coke and Xanax.

Xanax as a party drug is just strange in general.

Maybe it was the end of the night? People take benzos to calm down and/or sleep. And I guess some people to just feel like zombies

perhaps he took prescription xanax on the regular, and, feeling anxiety, popped some

Depends on the half life and concentrations.

Daily adderal RX for ADHD or studying. Coke at night to party. Xanax at end of night to come down from the uppers and try to sleep. That mix is pretty common.

We argue about agile processes, front end frameworks, languages, microservices, revenues, fundings, options, shares, hustles and all and at the end of the day we return back to the earth.

The thought helps ground me(no pun intended), whether during aforementioned battles at work or worrying over something in life.

Not really religious, but always liked the short line

'For dust you are, and to dust you shall return'

Her sister, Anne, is the ex spouse of Google founder Brin, and 23andme cofounder.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Wojcicki

I can’t get the link to load, but here’s Pichai’s take:

https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/1822132667959386588?s=46

I went to school with her starting in elementary school on the Stanford campus through high school at Gunn.

My mom was one of her teachers and just told me “this is so sad, she was such a beautiful kid. She went on to do amazing things.”

Yes, she did.

Susan lived four houses away from me on Tolman Dr.and I remember walking to Nixon elementary school carrying our instruments for music on Thursdays. Such a rough final year and such a wonderful life. RIP

Humbling that you can literally have it all and still not even make it to 60.

This is a very sad day. For her to also lose her son in February too.

I admired Susan in the early days, long before Youtube. She did a remarkable job earning respect and leadership roles in a company that mostly only valued engineers. Also she was kind and humane in a way that was not entirely common at the company.

Wow. Terribly sad series of events for that family. Life is not fair.

Crazy how so many young people are just dying of cancer these days.

Crazy, right?

You are getting aware of it more due to social media.

No, there is a rise in colon cancer among people in their 20s and 30s, and scientists are saying it's probably ultra processed foods

Overall, the incidence of cancer in the US among people under the age of 50 rose from 95.6 per 100,000 to 103.8 from 2000 to 2021.[ Colon cancer is one of the biggest drivers, but there are also a few others like kidney and thyroid that have seen big increases. Some of this, like thyroid cancer, might just be due to better detection of smaller, less serious cases. Fortunately, there are also some positive trends, like much lower rates of lung cancer (due to less smoking and cleaner air, presumably) and a decline in melanoma (skin) cancer after an increase in the early-to-mid 2000s (related to the rise and fall of tanning salons, I assume).

https://seer.cancer.gov/statistics-network/explorer/applicat...

She was the same age as Steve Jobs when he passed.

56 isn't young.

I always thought it was cool that Google started in her garage in Menlo Park. Too young to be gone :-(

Such a devastating news from the human therefore emotional perspective; just 6 months after her freshman son overdosed, now she is gone too. I hope they will be reunited in the afterlife.

whoa, I believe her son also passed away like ~5 months ago.

Yeah super sad recent events in the family. Reminds me that no matter how much money you have life can still hit us hard.

[flagged]

Yes just read that in Wikipedia. Really sad.

An accidental drug overdose on campus at UC Berkeley.

One wonders if his mom having terminal cancer was a factor in his overdoing it.

And I cannot imagine how news like that would hit a mother with cancer, when the only thing left for her is legacy.

Truly tragic.

Rest in peace. A true SV legend.

Rest in peace Susan

Can’t say I will miss her. She was a tyrant who bragged about shutting down free speech and censoring people she did not agree with, the standard communist tactic of controlling language.

One thing I've heard is that before age 40, people die of trauma or suicide. After age 40, people, including the healthy, just starting dying of everything.

as a "youtuber" (yet to paid for their videos), SW was from my memory the only public leadership face of youtube. being ignorant to her role in the parent company, i like many directed all of our frustrations of the platform at her.

definitely miss that now after the switch back to the faceless leadership, and saddened by the loss. condolences to the family.

Susan not only built up YouTube but also the community around her. She will be missed but not forgotten

Interesting how it's a threads link, and how it loads infinitely faster than Twitter

Regardless of how people feel about it, Meta/FB is sure putting a lot of resources into it and it seems like it's growing even on people who didn't do a text-first social network in the past.

what a tragedy... I can't think of many sites with the impact that YouTube has had, especially during her tenure as the lead.

lung cancer as well, I don't think she was a smoker so what a bad stroke of luck.

She is internet history.

More familiar information about her and her successful family [1]. The book is available here [2] (the Kindle version is more expensive than the physical book editions though).

Interesting to mention about the Polgar sisters again [3].

Z''L.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-godmother-of-silicon-va...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/How-Raise-Successful-People-Lessons/d...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

it looks like she resigned as soon as she got cancer. crazy that it ended in such a similar way to so many ordinary people

Same age as Steve Jobs when he died.

are we not going to put a black bar on HN for her?

Tragic loss to the world

RIP she will be missed.

Wow. Way too soon :(

Rumble and X posts are gloating that she blocked/delisted anti covid vaccine videos on YouTube, and then gets cancer, something the videos tried to warn people of related to vaccines.

I'm not sure what to say about that anymore.

just say that there are a lot of idiots in the world

On both sides probably. One side exaggerates statistics to make their point, and the other wishfully accepts unproven statements to feel better.

I've taken basically all vaccines ever recommended while growing up and traveling, but to say that the covid vaccine was "safe and effective" a year after coming out was a crazy stretch. Why couldn't they just say "we didn't have time to do long term studies, but we think it's fine and worth the risks"? But to say it's safe was a lie IMO and lost the vaccine side a lot of credibility.

She was someone who left a huge mark on my life. Though not in the forefront, but in the backend, so to speak.

Fuck cancer.

R.I.P. - too soon.

I'm not a Googler, but would still ask commenters to show some respect for the person who died, and save your opinions about youtube for another day.

Maybe I am a callous person, but I have never agreed to this "don't speak ill of the dead" thing.

People live and die. It is inevitable. To the grieving family, I can understand why refraining from insulting the dearly departed is necessary. They are grieving and can be irrational. No need to make things worse for them.

But between unrelated people? Why can't I discuss the legacy of the dead? We are defined by our deeds in life. It is only natural that in death, people will talk and opine about what we have done. Nothing wrong with it.

I feel like there's an unwritten "recently" in there. If you were to speak ill of Colonel Sanders, nobody would berate you for speaking ill of the dead. But when a CEO like Wojcicki, who made changes that were unpopular to the end-users (but helped turn YouTube into an actual profitable company) dies, it's considered very impolite to use that opportunity to bad-mouth decisions she made. When her son died earlier this year, that would've been a bad time to speak ill of her, as well, even though she herself was still alive.

A better phrase may be "Don't say things that will hurt the feelings of those who are grieving," but that doesn't roll off the tongue so easily.

> "Don't say things that will hurt the feelings of those who are grieving"

I for one would prefer "don't get attached to evil people"

Few people are comically evil enough that you can look at them and say "Ah, yes. You are evil. I will not get attached."

Yep. Feathers of the same birds flock together so one is just a little bit worse than the other and nobody feels ashamed.

You haven't talked to enough people. I probably have that inner-thought at least once a month.

She was a public figure. If millions of people around the world know your name then when you die, people will have things to say. Some will be good, some will be bad.

The custom about “not speaking ill of the dead” makes sense in a small IRL community, not for internationally famous people.

Socrates never wrote a single thing down and was, somewhat ironically, opposed to writing. The reason is that he felt that words cannot defend themselves. They can be twisted, taken out of context, and misrepresented, with none there to defend them, provide that missing context, or what not. Fortunately his student Plato disagreed so here we can discuss him 2400 years after his death.

With a dead person, I think this logic holds to an even higher degree. Personally I'm not really sure whether I agree or disagree with it, but it seems pretty reasonable, especially if we don't hyperbolically immediately leap to absurdly extreme examples like Hitler or whatever.

>But between unrelated people? Why can't I discuss the legacy of the dead? We are defined by our deeds in life. It is only natural that in death, people will talk and opine about what we have done. Nothing wrong with it.

unless you have a magical way to make your comment here invisible to her family and friends, posting it to the internet is not keeping the comment exclusively "between unrelated people." Many of those replies to Pichai are vile.

There's an implied "reasonable chance" in there.

Agreed, I don't get it either. I also wonder how many people saying this sort of thing expressed the same sentiment when someone they had a strong dislike of passed or had a close brush with death.

We've had many such incidents over the recent years and at least in my anecdotal observations, people do not consistently apply this.

"We are defined by our deeds in life"

We are but most folks here basically know nothing of her deeds, or really anything about her. They see one piece of a thing she was a face of for some time period, and that they also knew mostly nothing about, but appear to love to have strong opinions on!

If you want to speak of her deeds then go and learn about them. Otherwise, people aren't speaking of anything other than some small myopic view of a human being they knew nothing about. Folks don't get to say that she is defined by the small piece of stuff they saw, just because they want to have an opinion on it.

Besides being disrespectful, it's not even interesting, and it says more about the people doing it than the person they are talking about.

It's like saying you are defined by the small and short interactions you had with grocery store cashiers who happen to like to post about their experiences with you on the internet and nothing else.

> Maybe I am a callous person, but I have never agreed to this "don't speak ill of the dead" thing.

If they're rich and powerful who cares... here's John Oliver's reaction to Kissinger dying [0]... tl;dr "not soon enough"

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HmrJmq7d1c

When is there a better time to discuss the works of a famous person than when they are in the news?

In particular, Susan was a lovely soul and specifically deserves all of our respect.

If you want to hate, then hate the game, not the player (especially in this case).

This saying never made sense to me as a game is only a game if there are players.

The point of the saying is that the player is not necessarily in position to change the rules, or at least not in the immediate short term. How far one wants to accept this as acceptable reasoning is a subjective matter.

Or maybe not that subjective when looked at closer. It may just as well be a saying that the entitled classes use to defend their selfish and less than good behaviour. Beacause the classes of the not-entitled buy this as somehow having reasonable meaning.

The entitled classes have no reason to change rules that are clearly stacked in their favour. But it sounds way better to say the rules cannot be changed. But it is hard to see why this should be self-evidently true.

You can offset basically anything with it. It's another way to say "it's just a collection of atoms working by the laws of nature".

Most of these proverbs are just selling bs.

A good example is taxes. Many people think the 'rich', including the rich, should pay more. Every tax form in the US has a spot where you are free to write in a larger amount to send, but I wonder how many actually do? Unless the game ends collectively, it doesn't make sense to stop playing. I will continue to pay as little taxes as possible until the game is changed.

I'm sure she was, but I did not personally know her and I'm pretty sure few others here did as well. It's newsworthy for what she was, her role, not really for who she was as a person.

I certainly wouldn't mind reading some personal eulogies about what a great mentor her was etc., or about how she influenced your life with her work even if you didn't know her.

But I also don't mind reading critical posts about the role she played, I think that's part of the picture for someone who's famous as a business leader. If people weren't willing to speak freely about the dead, we wouldn't have had the Nobel prizes.

She censored things because of politics. That’s not “lovely.”

YouTube has videos on the dangers of GMO crops, despite the scientific consensus for their safety and utility.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8959534/#cit000...

YouTube has plenty of videos about electromagnetic sensitivity about which the WHO says: “EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure.”

https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-hea...

And more stupidity: “Eating these foods kills cancer”

https://youtu.be/WGbFnp56csg?si=t54Pcr3uqjrXRx9f

“12 foods that can fight and cure cancer”

https://youtu.be/FdlKCpEzSAE?si=J6rtKs6valWnamBP

Interview with Robert DeNiro 8 years about his concerns about vaccines and autism and his doubts about the vaccine effectiveness statistics.

https://youtu.be/FJ7iPn39i08?si=mRYD3a3y9HdMPMQ8

Covid censorship was political and not from some altruistic “goodness.”

And YouTube experienced very significant growth during the pandemic. So that “lovely” soul was profiting because of the lockdowns. Lockdowns that were possible due to fear and a lack of any permissible public debate — partially thanks to YouTube. Would lockdowns have ended sooner if there was more debate on the topic allowed? Definitely. What about school closures? Absolutely. But videos debating these things weren’t allowed.

So no, the game and the player in this case are one and the same. I’m not going to respect anyone that supported lockdowns or supported suppressing scientific debate. Curating opinion (and facts) while pretending to not to isn’t worthy of respect.

And, YouTube still allows those addictive kid videos where the narrator says “If you love your parents, like and subscribe. If you don’t love your parents, don’t like and subscribe.”

The people in this thread and elsewhere online are generally arguing that she was not a lovely soul.

I’d take it as a time to reflect that no matter how much profit you make, people will remember you for what you’ve accomplished. Think about that when you get to your coveted position of power in the industry.

Those people won’t matter. Your loved ones do and will though, and they won’t measure you by your accomplishments and net worth.

I have no dog in this game - literally no opinion on what kind of person she was.

I use YouTube, even though I don't particularly like it, much like every other Google product. Not sure how much of what I dislike on YouTube is her fault or not,and it doesn't really matter anyway. It is not like I hold any hopes of YouTube becoming any better now.

But I find this kind of comment curious. Someone noteworthy and controversial dies, critical comments are sure to follow.

Happened when people such as Kissinger or Chomsky died. No one was saying "show some respect to the person who died, save your opinions for another day". It would be fairly ridiculous to say so.

Don't kill Chomsky, he is still alive

Oh lol. I thought he was dead.

The point still stands

The point doesn‘t stand, because you made a claim about what people supposedly said or didn’t say after Chomsky passed away. And he didn‘t even pass.

A lot of people thought he did die and they did say things about him.

This is pedantry at its finest.

You can remove the name and still have a point left there. Just pretend the comment only said Kissinger, it’s really not that hard.

Honestly if you are 50% wrong about a point you are trying to make that doesn't look great.

It does, because people thought he died and commented about what he will be remembered for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720876 - We Remember Noam Chomsky, the Intellectual and Moral Giant

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40721208 - Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky dies at age 95

He is living in Brazil, but unfortunately it seems to be his ending days too. Every other week there is a fake news about his death.

You know that Google has an intranet, right? The CEO of a division that extracts rent from almost every living person doesn't deserve more respect than a homeless person in SF

On a 1-10 scale of nefariousness, I would classify Youtube as pretty low, it's a manageable addiction and with a little bit of self control the videos you watch will be worthwhile. I am a subscriber. Then there is Youtube Kids, and whoever worked on that deserves a 9, and good bye.

Why? If a person has done measurable harm to you, and your community, why is it not acceptable to say, "this person's legacy was one of harm. They chose to hurt vulnerable people"?

I associate her with censorship. Should I respect her for that?

Original post on fb: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/qe2ZMcs9Bz4K1SPt/

Next time you're thinking "I wish I was the one who had made a billion dollars with my startup idea", remember that only health and family matter, and to have fun while you're alive. RIP.

Edit: some people misinterpreted my comment. I'm just one anonymous voice on the Internet, but am deeply saddened by the passing of Susan Wojcicki, who meant a lot to me as one of the many people who crossed paths with her professionally. I wish her family strength in a very trying moment. She did not deserve this. I've not met another business leader demonstrate everyday kindness to the degree that she did.

Her untimely passing is also a reminder to those of us who sometimes look up to such successful businesspeople that we should all appreciate our luck to be alive and enjoy it to the fullest, as I hope that she did as well, and as I'm sure that she'd prefer we did. RIP

As far as net worth figure goes your health is the first significant digit, everything else come after.

> first significant digit

Big endian

This has nothing to do with business or entrepreneurship. It's cancer, it's a bitch. It can take a 10 year old boy, or an elite athlete.

You can’t really say it does or doesn’t. Research shows stress can be a contributor though.

https://med.stanford.edu/survivingcancer/cancer-and-stress/s....

Well, yeah. For the sort of people who have "Title: CEO" on their Wikipedia page I suspect we're overdrawing from the pool of people where mission implicitly matters a little more than taking it easy. One way or the other you're going to die, but if your response to that is to relax and try to eke out a few years by keeping your stress down then CEOing is probably not for you.

You can change it if you want to. An extra 25 years seems worth it to me.

Being on the wrong side of the wealth-gap can also induce stress ...

Main factors are sleep, sunlight, diet and exercise as well as stress. You can see her schedule here:

https://press.farm/susan-wojcickis-daily-routine-youtubes-ce...

Sleep about 6hr, which isnt ideal. Not much chance to get sunlight which significantly reduces cancer incidence. Not much relaxing time.

The question becomes, is the work worth it?

That's probably not her real schedule. It looks like clickbait and was probably invented by the author. (Who might be our prolific friend Chat-GPT.)

Besides 10:00pm to 5:30am is 7.5 hours, which is either optimal or (arguably) too much.

Lastly, there's no clear evidence tying sleep duration to cancer incidence. See, e.g.: https://bmccancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12885-...

She starts exercising at 530 and goes to bed at 10. Im assuming she wakes up 30 mins before, and it takes her an hour to get to sleep.

They weren’t arguing the specific times, but the article itself reads as if AI generated and not as a real report of someone’s schedule, by someone who would know that person’s schedule.

The follow-on conclusion from that is that the times are highly suspect.

Yes, i think youre correct. I cant find an original source.

Why would you assume an hour? That’s considered to be quite a long sleep latency. Your average individual is at like between 10-20 minutes.

Yes, me too. I was just referring to the time between entering the bedroom and actually sleeping.

arguably too much sleep? what world are you living in that seven and a half hours of sleep is too much?

6hr, as per my comment. Its enough for some people, but average is 7-8. I go to sleep 45-60 mins after going to bed, and i wake 30mins before exercising. Im assuming that is fairly typical.

Yeah, that article definitely looks like ChatGPT imagination.

Funny that watching YouTube was not one of the things she did, whereas most people spend hours on YouTube/social media.

Where’s your scientific report that says sunlight significantly reduces lung cancer?

We shouldn’t have people making such claims on HN without providing references.

She was also home having dinner with her family by 6:30pm.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/joim.12251

This seems key:

“ Following sun exposure advice that is very restrictive in countries with low solar intensity might in fact be harmful to women's health.”

Thanks for the link. Now we know with certainty that lack of sunlight wasn’t a cause.

I think you have misinterpreted that sentence. It is saying that too little sun exposure is harmful to health in women. See also this study which found the same for men in Norway:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...

Yes, we agree. Very restrictive exposure in countries with low solar intensity “

Susan lived in Northern California. How’s the solar intensity where she lived?

“ sun exposure advice that is very restrictive in countries with low solar intensity might in fact be harmful to women's health

Oslo is about half the UV of SF, so you would need to spend half as much time in the sun for the same benefit. If you are not outside much during the day, its still a risk factor no matter where you live. This would apply to most office workers.

“ Research on a link between vitamin D and cancer is mixed. Some studies have shown a link between low vitamin D levels in the body and a higher risk of getting cancer or dying from cancer. However, it’s not clear if taking vitamin D or having certain vitamin D levels might help prevent cancer. It’s also not clear if vitamin D can help control the growth and spread of cancer. More research is needed to know what role vitamin D does or does not play in helping to prevent or control cancer.”

https://amp.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/sun-and-uv/sun...

Yes indeed, it is sunlight that has the most evidence. Sun also releases nitric oxide in the skin, which reduces blood pressure, and high bp is associated with increased lung cancer hazard ratio, even for nonsmokers.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12936899/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13399-4

I’ve tried to google with no success but is it known if she smoked or ever did? Or is she part of the unlucky cohort (~12.5%) of non-smokers that get lung cancer?

But it is more likely when you are old. It is you your immune system unable to kill mutations.

I took that to be OPs point in a way. Death comes to us all, rich and poor. True wealth is your good health and the relationships it lets you foster.

Absolutely this.

That’s BS.

Yes, both rich and poor die of cancer.

But being rich or even just comfortable gives you a completely different experience during the end of life.

You can afford to quit your job and be with your friends and family.

You can afford to see that best doctors that will ensure you have as comfortable as possible end of life.

Your kids can afford to take a sabbatical to come spend time with you.

You can be sure that no matter what your kids will be financially secure.

You know that you got the absolute best care that you could.

The list goes on.

Cancer is horrible and everyone who loses someone hurts the same. But you absolutely cannot keep saying that being poor and rich doesn’t make a difference during the progress of this awful disease.

Only someone who has never been poor would ever say that.

If you're poor you won't even officially have cancer, because no one will diagnose you, since then you'd be entitled to services. Someone who's actually been poor would understand this.

Lots (if not all?) of hospitals offer free care options for patients in poverty. I grew up poor and had a family member who was able to be diagnosed, for free, a university clinic that offered free care, and then was able to receive free care through a program offered at one of top 5 ranked cancer systems in the US. Although the premium quality wasn't even that big of a deal. The overwhelming majority of care can be provided pretty much anywhere. It's not like a premium hospital offers super chemo or super radiation. The treatment is what it is, and all the money in the world isn't going to significantly change your odds of survival relative to basic treatment provided at any clinic anywhere.

The US healthcare system is broken beyond belief, and I do think there is some degree of managerial sociopathy around profit (particularly in the pharmaceutical and insurance wings), but by and large there still remain options for people even if they may be arduous, and I do think that hospitals and doctors are still significantly motivated just to provide good care.

The problem is that, for patients in poverty, the chance that cancer will be detected early enough for treatment is much, much lower. Cancer is often detected during check-ups for vague symptoms that most people can't afford to go visit a doctor for. By the time the symptoms become alarming or even debilitating it is often already too late.

Eh, I made 75k on my IRS forms last year and don't have health insurance. The poor people I know all have way better access to treatment through medicare/medicaid and various subsidies, and all use the medical system multiple times a year while I look up videos on YouTube (thanks susan!) to learn how to perform minor surgeries on myself

When my mother died of cancer (also in her 50s, still working as a public teacher in NYC so should have had great insurance for this) the hospital went after the estate with a million dollar bill. I couldn't even afford a lawyer to contest it at the time and ended up not inheriting anything except what I could take out of the house.

The only people with good outcomes are the rich who can afford it, and the poor who couldn't afford anything yet are still being treated because other tax payers are paying into this system.

it's not just access to healthcare, it's time, convenience, effort, whatever.

an impoverished single-parent 4 member family will not have time to exploit whatever medical care options are made available to them. this time deficit is one of the more common characteristics that impoverished families have in common.

in a way it's similar to the healthcare problems that startup people see early in the business; 'no time for the doctor, I have meetings -- i'll live with the ulcer' , just from a different angle.

lack of opportunity for time management.

Two things can be true.

Money does buy comfort and care. Also, it does not make one immortal.

We can choose what we take away from events. I could choose to feel unlucky that I haven't made as much money as someone else, and I would be justified in it, because being rich absolutely makes a difference. I just choose to feel lucky to be alive instead, and I'm just as justified. You are free to choose your own perspective.

“remember that only health and family matter”

Those were your exact words. But nice backpedal.

Edit: I don’t want to get into an argument but just beware that your original post rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I respect that’s the pain and sorrow of a loss are the same but please don’t dismiss the power and need of money. It makes a world of a difference in the process of dying. You don’t want to sound like someone living on an ivory tower.

Let me put it this way. I don't think you and I are fundamentally disagreeing: money matters, to the extent that it allows to buy statistically better health outcomes and quality time with family. I don't personally think it matters more than that.

In general if you want people to take you seriously, don't make statements like "Two things can be true." It reeks of reddit condescension where they can't make a simple statement without implying the other party is stupid enough to think that only one thing can ever be true at once.

For what it's worth, I thought his comment was fine whereas yours is insufferable.

It's not worth much!

I mean, considering that people harped on about one specific thing being more true than the other, it certainly seems like people think that only one thing (being rich) can ever be true at once.

Stupidity is entirely your implication, but people generally like to see things in binary. It’s far easier than acknowledging that most things live on a spectrum.

Health is only temporary, and everyone in your family is going to die, until someone makes a trillion dollar startup to cure aging. So it is fundamentally wrong to put health, family, and work as things opposing each other, ultimately they are all needed on a way to get all of the galaxy filled with life. And as Susan have shown one can both do great work, and have a big family with 5 children.

High levels of stress (often related to work) have been shown to impact health. So I think it’s a fair thing to oppose them.

Isn't that person and stress source dependent. Also working until late in life actually improves mental acuity and fights off dementia.

So maybe work but not in excessively high stress loads is your point?

Though i think your implied underlying assumption that because she was a leader in tech and under a high workload somehow caused this is unfounded and unnecessary.

There must be a difference between the stress experienced by a financially independent CEO and a marginally-employed gig worker.

One is the stress of essentially playing a game or working on a challenge and the other is existential.

This sample size of one would seem to disagree. Stress is stress, and the outcome can certainly be the same in the end. RIP

Why it's a good idea to fill galaxy with life? Why should we care about it? Also, seeing that our current civilization-system is already at the brink of catastrophe, we should focus on less ambitious goals, such as preserving life on Earth.

Absolutely worth it. We wont fill the galaxy filled with life because the galaxy is huge and we are but one tiny tiny portion of it. For us to survive and do anything impressive takes all of human ingenuity.

Also those two items aren't mutually exclusive. Both can and should happen in tandem. Anyone arguing otherwise is just a mentally lazy person.

Whenever you have two goals competing for the same resources, you need to prioritize. I'm for preserving life on Earth first, and spreading it to other places as a distant second.

Again you aren't competing for the same resources. Our global resources are plenty. You are unnecessarily making a dichotomy.

Of course preservation of life on our planet should be paramount. We can also pursue space travel. Space travel research isn't whats killing our planet.

1. I don't want my children to die. And i don't want all the life on earth to be eliminated by a random asteroid.

2. Imagine two planets, people on one of them believe that expanding is the moral imperative, and the other want stay where they are. Eventually the people from the first planet will be technologically as far away from the people on first planet, as we are from people on Sentinel island. And therefore will be completely reliant on goodwill first people.

3. The only way to preserve life on earth is to develop space technology, once we have sufficient industry in space, controlling whether on earth will be a simple task, trivially solving climate change issue.

Cure aging? We could relieve a lot of pain in the world by just curing cancer(s), or at least make them treatable like HIV.

Jake died yesterday. I don’t even think he was 40 years old.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201555

Susan was only 56.

Let’s at least give everyone a chance at a full life.

Yeah, but magnitude wise it doesn't seem like a huge difference of 56 vs 90. 56 to me now looks way early, but I assume when I get 70 then I start to think that 90 looks way too early. When I was 10 years old, 56 seemed miles away though. So there's always going to be this problem. Especially since supposedly the older you get the faster time seems to go. So the fact that I and we are all going to die at some point not too far away is still something that is constantly in the back of the mind and frequently on the front.

E.g. compared to being able to live more than 1,000 years or forever and with body in its prime condition recovery etc wise. E.g. having a 25 year old body for 1,000+ years.

Sure, I’m all for living to 1000. Curing cancer(s) likely needs to happen first. The war on cancer started in 1971.

We’d likely need trillions of dollars of investment, and a lot more people working on it, to increase our lifespan/healthspan.

But hey, we can hope together, for what that’s worth.

Living in poverty and Being broke is stressful too. Living in a shit family as well.

Yes the upside of being rich and stressed is that it’s all your choice. You could retire at any moment if you wished to

It's not about them opposing each other, it's about priorities.

Your message is very powerful, for the good, and I think people nowadays are used to extremes instead of the balance when they read something like your comment.

Susan didn’t start YouTube.

Who is this guy on Threads? Sundar's tweet should be the canonical source:

https://x.com/sundarpichai/status/1822132667959386588

[flagged]

No? The person on Threads does not appear to be her husband. They're merely posting a screenshot of her husband's Facebook post.

The link now points at Facebook fwiw

Huh I swear when I was looking at this post it was the Facebook thread

Not the depicted post, the dude on Threads. The link has been changed now.

Casey Newton, former editor @ The Verge & who currently runs platformer.news, a pretty significant tech news site in his own right. I'm not sure why he's going by 'crumbler' these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Newton

RIP. I hear that not everyone liked some of her decisions.

Personally, I wish I had any control at all over YouTube Shorts.

I would also vote for the black bar if possible

I want to vote against this. Thanks.

I'm honestly curious, why? I didn't expect to be downvoted.

Can we have another black bar at the top of hackernews? Feel free to delete this comment, dang, et. al. She’s just obviously had an outsized effect on us all whether we realize it or not.

You have to email to request.

I love all of these ironic black bar request posts.

I might be drawing too much from one specific example (although there aren't many examples to draw from in this case) but it smacks of ...something, that the passing of a female leader in the tech industry seems to draw a lot more ire than others, and also doesn't meet the standards for a black bar at the time of this comment (unless I missed it).

Perhaps not as much of a 'technical' contributor to tech world, but one of the largest companies in the world started in her garage, she was an early employee and served in senior leadership for decades.

Susan's impact on the world and on those who knew her is undeniable. May she rest in peace.

I always assumed that ultra wealthy people can utilize preventive medicine to the max and catch stuff like cancer as soon as it appears - but i guess not?

Her son just died of a fentanyl overdose just a few months ago too?

Not even a billion $ will protect you from America's problems with cancer and fentanyl. We need to fix this. I mean, just look at this chart:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-incidence?tab=char...

Is it pesticides like this recent HN thread alludes to?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41182121

Idk. But the US is uniquely doing something very wrong.

the pharmocracy will allow a cure for cancer?

We've got a number of working cures and preventions for cancers, just not most types and many are not 100% reliable. I'm happy to complain about pharma and we've still got a long way to go, but this is a bad take. Yes, they've "allowed" it for years. (Did you get your HPV vaccine already?)

+1 - cancer prognosis used to be treated as a death sentence for most forms of cancer and "stage 4" was almost immediately referred to hospice. Amazing progress in our lifetimes, and an impressive roadmap ahead.

As I understand about the HPV vaccine: It only prevents new infections. It does not cure existing infections. And you need to get it very young to reduce chances of infection before vaccine.

Correct. That one falls under preventions. But that one also protects your partners.

Why not? Isn't it in "their interest" to keep people alive longer and longer?

A cured customer is a lost customer. Indefinite remission while taking a daily dose is plausible, or maybe $2.5M per head as Zolgensma.

How many people simply wouldn't be able to afford that and thus die?

Wouldn't it be better to have them cured and live longer and just spend their money on curing other illnesses we're all going to have anyway?

There is something about this cynic explanation that just doesn't sound right to me

Anyone who claims that there's a 'cure for cancer' somewhere that some company is sitting on for profit betrays their complete lack of understanding of oncology.

And also a complete lack of misunderstanding of profit

EDIT: lack of understanding

Other than cynicism, what is the basis for this argument? The economic and social interests of the pharmaceutical companies are to find a cure. If a company came up with a single dose pill that cures colon cancer, they could charge up to the cost of a full course of chemo for that pill and insurance companies would line up to cover it. Go see what has happened with Hep-C and DAAs.

Also, the industry and brand cred that would accrue from being the company that cured cancer would be immense. Think about what that would do for recruiting, influence and access. Ask yourself if Novo-Nordisk is in a worse position today for pretty much curing obesity.

But that profit margin would only exist initially. The cure would be much much cheaper than the ongoing treatment once the research pays off, making future margins for smaller yet simultaneously encourage ongoing research to discover a cure to the next disease.

So, Zolgensma is cheap?

Their argument is just that: 'The reason Zolgensma is so expensive is because that is the price Novartis has decided it is worth because it “dramatically transforms the lives of families affected by this devastating disease”'.

Basically it's "isn't you child's live worth 2.5 million?"

If someone found a one-shot no-side effects cure for a particular type of cancer there's no way they'd price it the same as the full course of chemo, they'd price it at "how much would you pay to be alive again". Insurance companies don't pay shit, their customers do.

If you live long enough you will most likely die from either heart disease, #2 killer, or cancer, the #1 killer. Accidental self inflicted injury is #3. We're not doing anything wrong. Quite the opposite.

Since not even having a billion will allow you to cheat death, perhaps we shouldn't allow billionaires to cheat everyone else in life.

Certain other countries in that chart have longer average lifespans than the US, eg. Canada, Germany, Australia etc.

And fewer billionaires too, I bet.

Health outcomes in the US are bimodal -- the wealthy have the best health care in the world, and the longest lifespans. The poor basically have the equivalent of 3rd world care.

That makes the average come out to less than other countries with universal healthcare.

But it also explains why wealthy people are against universal care in the US -- because they believe their level of care will go down so that everyone else's can go up.

Cancer _incidence_ is likely only loosely related to the healthcare system. Cancer _outcomes_ probably are but incidence is more related to lifestyle choices (active vs sedentary, smoking vs non-smoking etc)

    > Accidental self inflicted injury

What does that mean?

  "The leading causes of death for unintentional injury include: unintentional
  poisoning (e.g., drug overdoses), unintentional motor vehicle (m.v.) traffic,
  unintentional drowning, and unintentional falls."

From the following page. This is talking about only ages 1-44, but probably the "accidental" category means the same.

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h...

Typically? Falling off a ladder and cracking your head.

It is a strange chart. It for example shows that Belarus has pretty much the same rate all those 30 years. Cancer takes bunch of years to develop, and Belarus has had significant cancer numbers increase starting 10-20 years after Chernobyl. You can look up the articles on doubling rate of say breast cancer there which even without Chernobyl like events presents like 20% chances - now calculate what doubling of those chances means.

When it comes to US that chart looks a lot like the obesity rate chart, and obesity is a partial gateway to cancer, though they may just correlate too stemming from the same reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

The problem with pointing obesity as the culprit is that ourworldindata has the same chart for obesity, where almost all countries are increasing at the same rate as US. But just US has this stark high cancer rate.

US is a standout in obesity - only Arab countries and Native Pacific are close to it where obesity has different character than in US. And may be the obesity and cancer has the same cause - high processed sugar diet for example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.16.24302894v...

"The United States (U.S.) is the leading country in ultra-processed food (UPF) consumption, accounting for 60% of caloric intake, compared to a range of 14 to 44% in Europe. "

It doesn't pass the smell test.

In 1990, US was 18.7% obese with a cancer incidence of 1,760, UK and Australia at 780.

Most recent is 2016 showing Australia and UK at 30% obesity, yet their cancer incidence is lower than ever at 750 and 682, respectively.

Everyone but the US (and Poland) are increasing their obesity while their cancer incidence is flat or decreasing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...

Something fishy with the data there as here

https://www.wcrf.org/cancer-trends/global-cancer-data-by-cou....

age standartized rate:

USA - 367 UK - 307 Australia - 462

Very strange chart. The US has more relaxed regulations on food additives, pesticides, hormones used in livestock farming, and environmental pollution compared to the European Union. But that still does not explain the differences with, for example, Australia or Asia. Obesity may play a role, but obesity has also been on the rise in the EU for a few decades.

I don’t think the tox report showed fentanyl.

Looks like Xanax and Cocaine.

https://nypost.com/2024/05/30/us-news/cause-of-death-reveale...

Ok corrected. I was going off a cursory quote from the grandmother.

You may ask me where my tinfoil hat is, but something strange seems to be happening. My neighbour who never smoked suddenly discovered he has terminal lung cancer. Radon tests in his house were negative. The cases of early lung cancer in healthy non-smoking individuals seem to be on rise in Ireland over last 5-6 years according to the official statistics. In the news I'm reading about massive amount of cases of persistent cough which "takes weeks to resolve".

> In the news I'm reading about massive amount of cases of persistent cough which "takes weeks to resolve".

There is one more covid wave going on, so that could be a reason for many people coughing.

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