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Comment by itiswhatitis1 | Hacker News Reader

Simple - youtube doesn't suck!

Even in 2025 every other streaming site is unwatchable because of video buffering, videos not loading, and other hiccups in service that make it annoying as hell to use.

99% of websites in general suck, and the ones that don't get millions and billions of users.

Arrogant programmers think their products are great and they are geniuses, but in general 99.9% of their work is glitchy unusable trash and going nowhere.

Say what you want about youtube, it simply works better than anything else.

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Yes, this is all true, but the monopoly part is YouTube was supported by Google search profits for most of its existence, which its competitors don't have. The good part is YouTube is a really good service (ignoring their handling of gun related videos), the bad part is there are no viable competitors. If you like (legal) content they want to limit, block or otherwise hobble, you don't have any other great option.

If their competitors were any good, then google would have given them the money.

So YouTube is subsidized by Alphabets profits. Basically everyone in the world is better off apart from Alphabet shareholders and maybe a few giant corporations slightly smaller than Alphabet that want to compete if they were able to sell a worse product for more money.

I find YouTube's UI performance quite bad but at least the performance of the videos themselves is good.

By UI performance I mean I click to go to the homepage and it loads a blank homepage with placeholder video thumbnails then spins for 5-10 seconds. I have fibre.

Also, you open a video and want to click fullscreen? Oops, [ ] button just-displaced due to reflow.

You press up arrow to up the volume? Oops, the seek bar had blue focus frame and you skipped five seconds instead.

You wanted to skip five seconds with a right arrow but missed and pressed numpad 0? Oops, you jumped to 0:00 and there’s no way back, not in this 5 hour stream record.

Buttons load for extra ten seconds, there’s a visible delay between click and actual pause, non-16:9 videos break the layout below the player, moving a song in a playlist jerks as hell or crashes the tab, and so on and so forth.

The usual “you are product not a client” is incoming, but I think that youtube ui team is just trash. There’s no prioritization of these issues, right, but having these in the first place on a site like youtube means you’re just incompetent.

> By UI performance I mean I click to go to the homepage and it loads a blank homepage with placeholder video thumbnails then spins for 5-10 seconds. I have fibre.

I’ve never had this issue with YouTube ever and I also have fibre. I never had this issue with YouTube when I didnt have fibre.

I pointed out that I have fibre to preempt anything about it being designed for rich people in rich countries with good internet or whatever. The point was that it isn't an internet issue or a connectivity issue, it is a YouTube bug.

I am glad you havent had the bug. It is an annoying one. Your not having it does not make it any less of a bug for me though, unfortunately.

This. Just look at Nebula in comparison - it's positioning itself as a competitor and yet their developers didn't even think supporting landscape mode on Android tablets was important for a VIDEO app. It's so riddled with bugs that it's mostly unwatchable.

It's hard to take these "YouTube is popular due to monopoly" arguments seriously when the competition can't even get the basics right.

> It's hard to take these "YouTube is popular due to monopoly" arguments seriously when the competition can't even get the basics right.

I feel the same about a lot of online shopping. In Germany people often moan about Amazon and while it's has it's share of issues, the competition is often so bad. Really slow processes that feel like someone adopted a "submit order via fax" process slightly for the web, horrible web sites, sometimes next-to-non-existent customer service. No wonder the alternatives aren't taking off as they fuck up the basics before we even get to the point of starting to compete.

I don't know? I order from plenty of non-Amazon online shops and they are fine. mindfactory.de, alternate.de, booklooker.de, akkushop.de (they messed up and order, I wrote an e-mail about it, and the company owner answered on a Saturday - the missing item went out on Monday) etc. No really bad experiences.

I don't see Nebula as a competitor to YouTube. They're both streaming platforms and have some of same content.

Nebula isn't free. Only invited creators are on there. Seems like they're clearly focusing on a niche.

I also had issues with Nebula at first. It's been steadily getting better. When did you try it?

I think now it probably performs more reliably than Youtube + Firefox on my Android.

Wow those were some strong words, that I’m not necessarily disagree with. I think one company that would be a counter argument is twitch, it’s main business is definitely live stream but it also hosts a lot of clips generated from the various streams, the user base is happy with the product I think.

Not as an argument, but a side note: this is an effect of webdev being a ball of mud with wires sticking out of it. They couldn’t make a bad video player if <video> was good enough as is. Same for forms, layouts, etc. The huge upside of desktop frameworks around 2000 was that they just worked as designed, and if you weren’t skilled, that was a big barrier for making bad ui (not a barrier for true idiots, but still). Web though, it is basically a recipe for making something so idiotic that you couldn’t even imagine, and it invites, when not requires, you to try.

Youtube may work better than “everything else”, except for basically any mainstream porn site. It is just so trash compared to pornhub or xvideos that according to your theory these sites could just start serving sfw content and destroy youtube. Idk about that.

Exactly. It's bizarre to me that there's this idea of "fairness" that we have to purposely degrade a great product just so others can create a bad (but now relatively less bad) product, to stick it to Alphabet. Wasn't anti-monopoly policy supposed to benefit the consumer and not the corporations that are just behind the #1 product?

Antitrust/competition law was originally aimed at improving competition because anticompetitive conduct harmed competitors. Over the 20th century it evolved. Today it is squarely aimed at benefit to consumers long term. But that can be long: if anticompetitive subsidising makes things cheaper but kills competitors then (1) there will be low investment in the market, leading to less consumer surplus in the future and (2) there is the potential to abuse the resulting market power in the future.

I don't know that anyone wants to make YouTube worse to improve competition. The allegation is that YouTube is subsidised by other Google ventures so as to drive other competitors out and that it abuses its market power to harm competition. That doesn't ultimately benefit consumers in the long term.

But I have no idea if any of that is actually true. Maybe YouTube is just better designed and developed and has natural network effects so Google would win even if they didnt do anything anticompetitive.

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