Comment by ssenssei | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ssenssei | Hacker News Reader

you know what... besides everything, good for them.

I don't know if many of you remember the olden days of Youtube, when it wasn't lead by corporate greed, and before it was infested by greedy abysmal shitty people - When profits weren't the driving force behind content creation.

Whenever I see content creators like that on Youtube right now I just wish them the best, and if they have a platform currently that supports them financially, well good for them. I still remember the 2018 fiasco when the Ads bubble burst because of the bridge incident, and lots of them didn't know what to do cause the revenue was very shit for years and the future looked bleak.

My favorite channels thread: - Watch Wes Work: Car Mechanic but super funny - Super EyePatch Wolf and Worm Girl: Niche Horror Video Games and Topics. - Lots of Japanese Drawing Channels - Devaslife: Japanese Developer and Creator of Inkdrop - Miziziziz and countless game developers that want to show their games and tutorials. - Acerola: Best Youtube Content on Graphics Development - jdh: game development in C and super amazing content truly - Ethoslab: He'll always have a spot on my youtube world

I've been getting off of YouTube more because now creators censor themselves even more than network TV does.

You can't say "kill", you have to say "unalive" or "took their life" or shit like that. You can't say "rape", you have to say "SA". You can't say "porn", everyone called it "corn". Apparently you can't even say 16, because I saw a YouTuber say "61 backwards" when talking about a creep on the internet. I remember one YouTuber censored "damn". It's one thing when it's like a comedy video, but what bothers is when you have "true crime" YouTubers who end up censoring half the video because it turns out that you really can't talk about murder without saying the word "murder", or "killed", and in the case of serial killers "rape".

I can watch Law and Order: SVU that uses all those words, and that was on network TV, the one where the FCC could actively block bad stuff.

So at this point, YouTube has become a pretty sanitized place filled with sanitized content, even more sanitized than network TV, which is fine, but it's sort of the opposite of what I liked about it from the get-go, and it has gradually become less appealing to me. I understand why these creators are afraid to use the actual words (advertisers and the like), but I have found a lot of content to be pretty bland as a result.

Part of why I got into YouTube as a teenager and onward was specifically because creators were allowed to act candidly. They would say curse words and talk about things that interested them. It was cool.

the problem is these "creators" want to get paid by generic advertisers, so they have to conform to the clean standard.

if they just wanted to express themselves, they could.

Yeah but then discoverability becomes an issue, I think. YouTube obviously wants to push things that will make them more money, and I suspect popular channels that can have regular ads are more profitable, so they are incentivized to push those.

I grew up as a guy with stairs in my house and part of why I got into the internet pretty early is because I found the fact that people were willing to express themselves using non-sanitized language to be appealing. I liked Something Awful, I liked Newgrounds, I liked YTMND, and I liked them specifically because they weren't safe for TV.

Different time I suppose. At least Something Awful is still around.

This just highlights how YouTube is a different thing for all users. One person's experience can be radically different from another's. I wouldn't even know someone like MrBeast exists if Hacker News hadn't told me about it. Most of what I watch on YouTube is regular media that would otherwise only be available on obsure local networks or DVDs that I don't have, like Thrasher's skateboarding videos, broadcasts of the X-Games and Red Bull action sports events, ESPN/CBS/NBC highlights of yesterday's major pro sports events I didn't watch because they're on too late for me, or music videos via YouTube music. None of these are YouTube "creators." They're just normal media that uses YouTube as an additional distribution channel.

Honestly, my favorite channel is probably BBC to watch snippets of classic BBC Earth series narrated by David Attenborough. I'm pretty sure I could get them through HBO Max, which I believe is the US streaming that has distribution rights for BBC Earth, but it's convenient to get stuff like this all from one place and pretty much everything has a YouTube channel.

I watch more YouTube anything else combined by a pretty significant margin. I'm sure there's a lot of crap, but it doesn't show me too much of it. It has learned my preferences well enough to know that it should show me chess, Mario Maker, Australian machine shops specializing in resource extraction industries (a very specific genre to be sure, but I'm subscribed to two separate channels here) and various other things of that nature.

Things don't sound completely rosy for creators who want to actually make money from it, but it does seem like they manage to get by. From the perspective of a viewer, they absolutely deserve this.

The thing that makes me a little sad about Youtube's dominance is we haven't gotten to a place where you can easily host video on an RSS feed like podcasts, and distribute discovery across many platforms. Paying YouTube so I don't have to suffer their egregiously bad ads feels like a shakedown more than a valuable service.

I'm happy to pay for YouTube since it's so good, but otherwise I totally agree. It's a bit odd, audio in the form of both podcasts and music seems to have settled on a model where creators and distributors are separated and pretty much everything is available on pretty much every platform, whereas video (both amateur and professional) has settled on a model where any given piece of media is typically available from just one place, at least when talking about subscriptions rather than "purchases." I wonder if there's something about the format that prompted this or if it just happened to work out that way.

the fact that I'm into a lot of the topics that you've listed but have never heard of these creators simply underscores the sheer scale of youtube

Me too. Youtube must know better than me what to recommend me out of all the videos... still, I get presented the same shite again and again.

To be fair: not everything is shite and Youtube is my favorite social media (especially for discovering new music), but I noticed a big drop in quality from one day to the other a couple of years ago.

Thanks for your favourites/recommendations! I'm definitely gonna check them out, already watching Acerola's "Why I'm Moving To Godot In 2025".

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