Co-Founder of Youtube makes his first comment in 8 years
youtube.com
youtube.com
They have search and ads, and an utter inability to actually build anything else or connect with a customer base. For a company this is like having cancer. It's astounding that they can ignore the situation to such a degree.
Youtube is already an amazing force in the world, and that's with google half-assing so much of it. With enough work it could be a multi-billion dollar business and the next generation of media. Instead it'll probably take years while individuals and 3rd parties figure out ways to do what google fails to do (make content more explorable and discoverable, for one, make paid revenue models possible, for another) for them to catch on and build the functionality into youtube directly.
Meanwhile, instead of building improvements they're paying this stupid google plus strategy tax.
Google is chasing facebook when they should be chasing HBO, and amazon, and the discovery channel. It's like they live in a giant mansion with a huge lawn where a bunch of super talented people have been camping out for a while, trying to figure out how to make the next generation of video work. And everyday google gets out of bed, looks out over that scene, grunts, scratches its ass, thinks maybe they should just call the cops to get rid of the hooligans, then goes off to watch Judge Judy.
I really like the way you put that.
This is a result of perhaps super success at an early age (the founders), not enough hunger (to much money), hiring what you think are the best and the brightest (surprise - all those tests don't really work as our high achievers who designed them thought they would) and not recognizing the role of luck in your previous success. Used to be known in the past as becoming "fat and lazy" - I think that was the saying.
But that's pretty much exactly it. Google managed to build something early on that is difficult to compete with, and now they are resting on it. The company revenues are split up into 3 parts: search/ads, backbone internet, and "other". Where "other" is a tiny fraction of the whole that is almost inconsequential to their profit margin.
It's a "problem" that a lot of companies have where they are in a position where revenue is actually too easy. That may seem like a blessing but it has many downsides and typically chokes growth potential. The consequences for failure at a functional company are usually pretty significant. If SpaceX builds a rocket that doesn't work or if Toyota builds a car that absolutely nobody wants that hurts the bottom line. And it drives the company to do better. But at google what are the consequences? If someone at google makes an unprofitable product, well, that's the norm. It just gets tossed in the "other" bin with everything else and everyone laughs and goes back to their free lunches and complementary massages.
It's a romper room filled with nerf toys. And many folks at google are seemingly content to luxuriate in that environment. Why would anyone at google willingly push themselves out into the cold, unforgiving, and desolate world of real-world business where actions have serious consequences when they can just futz around in the "other" play room, slap ads on their "products" and call it a day?
Google has no drive to make youtube the best it can be. And the same goes for gdocs, gmail, app engine, or any other thing they make.
Another example would be the entertainment industry. Or I guess advertising industry or sports team...
Creative or highly competitive. Because you can't hit it so big that the losses don't matter. You are only as good as your last hit film, tv show, or game win.
Google has this tremendous cash cow.
Warren Buffett has plenty of cash. But for him the game is taking that cash and trying to get more cash. (And of course keeping up the image of being Warren Buffett drives him as well). And he has competition for his investment dollars as well.
But then they succeeded so quickly that they haven't had that same level of hunger to actually do something risky that needed to succeed. Today google is just as likely to shut down an old project than to launch something new.
We are resorting to working on a platform for video discovery and monetization, since we just got disgusted as both content creators on YouTube and also as consumers (and found so many other people have the same disgust).
You are not forced into anything, if you don't want to be put into "bubbles" use other services.
Pretty sure that's incorrect. If I want to rate an app I purchased on Google Play with my Google account, with my Google smartphone, I need to post that review to Google+ even if I don't use or have a Google+ profile. That is lame, because I am forced to create a profile and use Google+ (in addition to having a basic Google account where my credit card and email are) just to submit a feedback score to the developer of the app.
Google forces its way between the task I'm undertaking - leaving a rating, and their Buzz 2.0 product which has nothing to do with me leaving a rating on an app I have paid money for.
Google can force whatever it likes on users as defaults, and I won't care one bit if they just allow options for users to change those default settings. Eg "don't use Google+", "don't hide editable subject field in the compose new message gmail window".
And ... this may be news to you, but every once in a while a large bubbling company may actually buy some upstart service where their own attempts at NIH entry into a niche fail.
You know, like Google buying YouTube in the first place.
I was wondering if it was possible to be accountless on Youtube while logged in in Gmail, in the same browser, or if one needed to use two browsers.
It turns out, blocking all cookies for youtube.com and www.youtube.com does the trick!!
And it also solves the very annoying name change prompt that blocks every other video when logged in.
Now they believe that because I live in Spain I have to speak Spanish, or be interested first in Spanish stupid things, or be only interested on the topics I searched in the past.
Now while using gmail I search with Bing, so it does not mess anything.
Going to google.com helps somewhat
it used to be 10 pages of relevant results.
Use DDG: http://dontbubble.us/
Now I'm listening to Spindrift, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Rebel Drones, BRMC, Money...
The only reason I post on YouTube is to share small clips with people (all my videos are unlisted). Vimeo takes ~40 minutes to encode, whereas YouTube is a lot faster meaning it's far more convenient.
Checking out my Google account, it seems I have Chrome on here. I'm outraged as I never signed in with Google on Chrome. I always clicked "Not Now". What does "Not Now" even mean? Where's the "Never" option?
This is why I hate Google. I probably made the mistake of signing into my YouTube account on Chrome which has been infected with Google+ and that leaked through to Chrome. Apparently that means my bookmarks can be stored without my permission.
The best way is to deal with this issue is to delete my Google Account. Unfortunately, that's very problematic and I've been spending the last few months trying to move to other services. I'm slowly migrating my mail (admittedly to Google Apps but I'll be switching to a different provider soon), once I'm done I'll nuke the account.
That's along with Google Docs/Drive. BitTorrent Sync actually works very well as an alternative.
I can't wait till I get to hit delete on this account. Good fucking riddance.
Rather pay and know what I'm getting than not pay and not know.
It's gotten better recently. On my first connect to YouTube after signing in, it asks if I want to use my YouTube account or my Google account, and then it never asks again as long as my Google session doesn't time out.
Not sure I really believe your Chrome story, but I'm not really going to argue about it either.
My only consolation is that Google+ is accumulating a lot of vitriol and hate across the web. It's shaping up to be the most hated "social" product in the entire Internet.
Maybe a little offtopic: I have multiple GMail accounts that I use. Now (since maybe 2 weeks?) after logging out and trying to log in with a different acc I get a 'account chooser' dialog where I can only select accounts I have linked to my person. To get the 'enter email / password' prompt I have to turn on private browsing or delete all cookies.
Maybe someone from Google reads this: Please add a small link (or a different easy to access way) to completely log out. There are accounts that I don't want to link together. (Hint: Google Apps for Business)
Also, had a fun bug recently with the G+ Page/Profile bullshit where I deleted my Youtube Channel account so it would stop asking about G+ integration at the cost of no longer being able to post videos or comments. (However, jokes on me, as they just forcibly integrated my G+ with Youtube ONE WEEK after I explicitly deleted my Channel account to prevent exactly that from happening. Thanks, Google.) It didn't erase all of my subscriptions, but it made them all nonfunctional. My feed was completely empty despite the channels having many new videos, so I had to drop and re-add all of my subs to fix the feed.
I take solace in the fact that this most recent forced integration and re-purposing of G+ posts has been an unmitigated disaster.
It's very entertaining to see videos a few years old just FULL of G+ Posts, not Youtube Comments, from people who don't even realize those posts were public years ago. And now they're getting tons of attention of G+ posts through the Youtube website from mean and vicious Youtube commenters.
It's basically the exact opposite of what Google used to stand for online, with regards to privacy, safety and respect for users.
Probably my fault because I always decline these things until Google forces the integration upon us anyway.
Myself, having already been thru a Google domain account merge fiasco, when confronted with the gaccount merge at YouTube just created a new useless account.
its amazing that they host video by artists and yet do not allow the artists to use their artist names. all in the name of stamping out comment wars.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs
Edit: NSFW- language/curse words.
Turns out she was completely wrong about having lost her data, the UI was just confusing in such a way that she thought she had. Don't get me wrong, that kind of confusing UI is very much Google's Problem, but "confusing UI" and "lost all my videos" are _very_ different in magnitude.
Most people seem to hit trouble when they have a G+ account or have accepted any of the changes that Google suggests. Which is really lousy user experience and Google should really know better.
So far, keeping out of G+ has kept things usable for me on Google. I am heavily dependent on Gmail, consume a lot of content on YouTube and use Keep extensively. There is a different G+ account that I use for Hangouts for work.
But I don't see things getting better from hereon. In fact, I fully expect Google to mess this up even more and I am saying that as a fan of the company. That's the day I'll pack up and leave. It has been a good 10-year run, and all good things have to come to an end someday!
My YouTube and G+ accounts merged just fine, and I've never lost a playlist, favorite, submission, comment, or anything else.
The only pain point you can have is if you refuse to use Google Play for installing apps. Well, Android allows you to install apps from third-party app stores or websites (e.g. Amazon's App Store), but most devs are on Google Play.
I'm a heavy Google services user, however I'm using lately K-9 Mail instead of the GMail client, because K-9 does encryption. I'm also using OsmAnd+ in addition to Google's Maps. I don't even have Google+ installed (though I do have a Google+ enabled account).
I've read reviews saying that SMS has been integrated into Hangouts.
And if you don't like the Hangouts app for some reason, you can easily replace it with one of the many SMS apps out there.
The only place I could think of where the integration is jarring is the photo uploading feature, but I've simply told Dropbox to do it instead.
And that isn't worrying to you? People can add you to their G+ circles and there's no way to stay hidden. So Google gets to collect all the information about people you associate with in order to sell your personal info better (to the NSA, among others)
I'm under no illusions that there is much I can do to stop Google tracking me, occasionally pushing stuff at me addverts and so forth), and trying to "lock me in" where possible, as I use my stock Android devices. I'm sure both MS and Apple either d the same sort of thing or will as soon as opportunity presents itself.
I'm not saying it is right of course, just that if it is a particular problem for you then it should inform your decisions before buying a device. Also I suspect buying and returning devices as a form of protest is not seen the same on relevant internal reports, and is likely to inconvenience your retailer more than the manufacturer, so if you wish to protest the behaviour you will find simply not buying to be more effective.
Gotta love that lock-in.
Seriously, Google, if you're going to make shitty changes to the second-largest website in the world, at the least make sure user data is preserved.
Buzz was fine, if ugly. The only real problem with Buzz was how they leaked private GMail information.
If I go to a viral video, and I see comments on it from people I actually KNOW, I personally think that would be really cool. That was completely impossible, the old way.
I keep seeing companies pushing this idea on us, but I just don't get it. The math doesn't work. There are umpty millions of pieces of "content" that might be reviewed. I have at most a few hundred actual friends. (I imagine those who push beyond that have also pushed well beyond the intimacy frontier where they really care what you think about YouTube Video #283572738.) The median number of reviews that a given friend is likely to generate in a sufficiently formal manner that Google can figure it out is zero.
If you live in some sort of bizarre homogenous bubble where all your friends are just like you and have effectively the same tastes, and a lot of your friends insist on reviewing every last Youtube video they see, and yet, have some sort of diversity of opinion that you might actually care about, this might work.
But even stereotypical college students don't live like this. Maybe frat houses, but even then, you've got family circles, other non-frat friends, etc, and I doubt your frat brothers are going to be sitting there churning out enough reviews on things that you all care about that seeing a review from someone you "know" is going to be anything other than an exceptional occurrence, and a review you care about even less so. ("Yes, my frat brothers love the latest Call of Duty. I could tell that by the way we all played it for 14 hours straight last night. I did not need Google+ to tell me that.")
(If they did sit there and review everything, it would just turn into a backchannel for chat anyhow... "This beer is awesome, just ask John about last night... here's a link to some photos that the beer company would pay good money not to have associated with their beer...")
I'm not saying that there's absolutely nobody this will be useful for, but it seems to be a very, very specialized group of people hardly worth the immense effort being put into this idea by companies. The amount of possible "things to review" just swamps the number of friends a person can have, and standard lurker/poster ratios tend to imply that "nobody" writes reviews. (And I gotta think these sites have even worse lurker/poster ratios than something like Usenet or HN, probably by an order of magnitude or two or three.)
I was going to complain about the impossibility of being intimately acquainted with hundreds of people enough to call them friend only to find out my dictionary had a new definition for friend:
> "a contact associated with a social networking website"
In which case, carry on I guess.
I've never spontaneously seen a comment on Youtube from someone I know, as far as I can recall. However, it's really, really common to have friends of mine on Facebook share the same thing. This happens even for friends of mine that don't know or interact with each other. I think to avoid a fair amount of overlap you'd have to be very careful about adding only friends with orthogonal tastes...
One of the reasons that things like politics are getting so polarized is that's it's really easy to fall into the "bizarre homogenous bubble", and that's where most people stay, online.
I share videos with my friends and family, and seeing their comments at the top of the list of comments on those videos would be great.
Also, I could probably list 1,000 videos that most of us have seen. Never Going to Give You Up. Gangnam Style. The list goes on and on.
And then there's professionally. I know hundreds of people from former and current jobs who tend to be interested in the same work-related videos. Programming languages, stuff related to our domain, technologies we could use, etc.
But if you Share with a Community, and the people comment on the video, it would work.
Insert clever emoticon which indicates shrugging.
I'm frankly stunned to see people complaining about the death of the previous YouTube comment system. Remember that one insightful, helpful, or funny YouTube comment that you saw that one time? Me, either.
Or really creepy.
a- Imagine you're going to a real world bookstore. You look at the back cover of a few books and all the reviews are by your Google+ "friends". Customized for you to increase the chances you're buying it. (If ads are going everywhere and you try to ignore them, what will be left?)
b- In your holidays you're traveling to another continent. After arriving, you're surprised that you see the faces of your Facebook stalkers everywhere. Would you like that?
c- Your government rolls out new mandatory ID smartcards for both the offline and online worlds. Soon after they require everybody to sign their TCP packets with those cards. A friendly smiling illustration of a computer asks you to swipe your card to login to your OS. Have a safe journey online!
b - I don't understand. If someone is an unwanted 'stalker' to me, they aren't likely going to be a facebook friend. Even if they were, I think I'll be OK seeing their faces 'everywhere'.. seeing as how I can distinguish fairly well between image and reality.
c - So governments will not only manage to make Mandatory World ID happen, they'll be somehow forcing people to "sign their TCP packets" with them? If that's not intended to be a wildly exaggerated parody, you really may need to loosen the tinfoil wrapped around your head up a bit.
b - That would be awesome (since I assume you mean the beter direct analogy, which would be that any of my Facebook friend's statements about being there are visible. Now I know who to chat with about restaurants, sights, etc.)
c - Can you say strawman? Making up a dystopian future and placing it alongside something you don't like doesn't make the thing you don't like any more like it.
Youtube comments are universally derided as trash. This might make it better. It might also simply stop a lot of comments. And in fact, probably both.
This change, like it or don't like it, should not be conflated with, "Now Google will only show my comments from my friends." For better or worse, it means Google will know more about connections between people and the things they like. There are plusses (beyond seeing my friends' comments) and minuses to that.
(As it happens, I booked it via Hotwire where you theoretically don't know the exactly hotel you're getting until you pay. With a little searching you can normally work out which hotel it is, based on the area and facilities of the hotel.)
And I'm not sure I'm the only one thinking that way. If I want to talk about a video, I can, you know, share it (I can even share it on Google+, that way Google loses nothing). If it turns out to be a really cool video, I'll even maybe get to impress my friends that way.
"This is a cool display technology." -John Carmack
"Here's a great link to send to skeptics about global climate change." -Al Gore
"This article is pseudo-science at best, and lies at worst." -Bill Nye
"I'm sorry, Pluto." -Neil deGrasse Tyson
Without attribution, none of those comments are remotely interesting. (They're all made up, but you get the idea.)
When I Search for things now, I see top results from previous co-workers, who have Shared things. Those results LEAP out at me.
That of course means we've moved from "abysmal" to "shitty" but hey, progress is progress.
IMO Google could have avoided most of the backlash by making every youtube account a G+ account too, then if you want to link the two, have a simple merge account functionality between G+ and YouTube. The Charlie Foxtrot of forcing real names and linked accounts has obvious motivations for Google, but the backlash was predictable and isn't going away.
The criticism is a bit thick, but the prompts to join G+ are increasingly manipulative and gimmicky, designed almost entirely to _trick_ the user to into signing up + spamming their gmail contacts.
A requirement to have G+ account to make youtube comments is just one part of a greater trend that includes:
1. Requiring a G+ account to review Android apps in the Play store 2. Cunningly worded join prompts for first-time Android users when they start up their new Android device(s)
You know G+ is an abysmal failure when the Page & Co has to force it on users of google's other services. C'mon bro, what gives?
The moral superiority narrative that the valley likes to perpetuate vis-a-vis more traditional industries like banking, etc. is increasingly laughable and absurd.
Let's be real tech bros and broesses. Bidness is bidness.
They literally have been explaining this for nearly a year. There's no such thing as a G+ account and a 'Google Account'. They are the same things.
I think if anything what this has proven is that you cannot rely on your customers to read the slightest thing from you, but if you change how they expect things to work, they will get incredibly angry even if the service is totally free. Even if you are IMPROVING the service you will get anger.
Moral of the story: Don't have many customers.
I like my YouTube account. I don't like Google+. Stop forcing it on me. I'd be happy with a YouTube that doesn't let me comment but let's me upload videos and everything else I'm doing now. Instead, I'm packing up and leaving.
The irony is your moral might just work. Google will end up with less and less customers if they keep behaving in this way. Only people willing to tolerate Google+ will be left. Maybe that's what they want.
Literally nobody cares.
> The irony is your moral might just work. Google will end up with less and less customers if they keep behaving in this way. Only people willing to tolerate Google+ will be left. Maybe that's what they want.
I hope so! I can only imagine if Youtube was as full of interesting content as G+, and not so filled with people whining that a terrible terrible system isn't being kept soley for their own preferences.
Ultimately, if integration with Google ruins Youtube, then a competitor will eviscerate them. If it ultimately improves it, the criticisms will fade away.
Did it occur to you that perhaps some of these "conservatives" learned a painful lesson the type of which you have not yet encountered?
You aren't the customer. You are the product being sold.
Thats not the case if you registered for a google service (i.e. gmail) pre G+, which I imagine includes a TON of users. If you fall into this category (like me) and don't have a G+ account (i.e. a "Public Profile), you get spammed like crazy and constantly asked to join up.
And the service isn't free. I'm paying for it with my user information. Let's be real, Google isn't some savior upon high blessing us with "free" services from the goodness of their hearts. Be honest.
btw I'm a huge fan of Google, I just find their hyprocracy of "we're not a cunning business trying to maximize profits, we're a social enterprise saving humanity, that just happens to make money" annoying and insulting.
We need to get rid of this narrative that creators = god and users = proles that don't have the "right" to complain.
Right, because they're amalgamating the accounts. They've been telling people this forever.
> And the service isn't free. I'm paying for it with my user information
No you're not. It's free.
> We need to get rid of this narrative that creators = god and users = proles that don't have the "right" to complain.
Who said anything about creators. They /OWN/ Youtube. They have made it /VERY/ clear what is happening. If you want to ignore that that's up to you, but you can't turn around and act as if it's some inexplicable weird move that makes no sense when they have detailed every step of it.
Nothing is free bro. Business 101.
>Who said anything about creators. They /OWN/ Youtube. They have made it /VERY/ clear what is happening. If you want to ignore that that's up to you, but you can't turn around and act as if it's some inexplicable weird move that makes no sense when they have detailed every step of it.
No one is saying its a weird move. I'm just arguing that the WAY they are doing it is extremely annoying and not very user-friendly.
You shouldn't have to have a public profile or be forced to share your comment on youtube. It's obviously advantageous from a google perspective, but not very user-friendly.
The value of G+ should incentive the user to want to share their comment. Google shouldn't FORCE you to do it. That's not very friendly/flexible.
That's not a fact, that's just a saying. Youtube is free to you, it's not free to advertisers. There can be products that come free to some and not free to others.
> You shouldn't have to have a public profile or be forced to share your comment on youtube
You aren't, choose the option to create a page and your account name is kept, your identity is kept and the public page contains the same info as your Youtube profile. You can then switch between your two identities as you see fit. I fail to see how this is such an objectionable solution.
No one is saying that Google doesn't have the _right_ to do this, just that its obnoxious and goes against the very user-friendly/oriented image that Google itself tries to perpetuate. You've yet to address this very point.
>That's not a fact, that's just a saying. Youtube is free to you, it's not free to advertisers. There can be products that come free to some and not free to others.
You're just splitting hairs about what constitutes an expense. Youtube is not 100% free to use. There are costs... like the time it takes to watch an ad before your video plays... that's a bit myopic on my part as well, but if you want to get technical...
Now, yes, and some people don't like that. Of course it's 'free' for whatever that's worth - and you can do whatever you want. Just don't expect that people are going to be thrilled. Free doesn't buy you free approval.
In my experience they get especially angry if the service is free. :)
I think what they're effectively trying to do boils down into unifying the Google account: instead of every Google product maintaining its own divorced account/sharing infrastructure they're effectively retconning all of their products so they're now all based off one source, the Google+ Profile. This allows any change they make to the underlying G+ architecture to instantly propagate across all their products, as well as much more effective user data collection.
The problem is while the setup has plenty of benefit to Google, they've barely explained the benefit to the user.
That's a little naive. Of course there's an "API", it's what your browser uses to post something. Just because it's not designed for automated programs it doesn't mean it can't and won't be used.
That died long ago. In 2008 or even earlier, Google was capturing data from your WiFi router with their street view cars.
Google plus is the "Google account" you need to use any of their social services.
I am frankly surprised that they allowed the login of their acquisitions to stay fragmented for such a long time.
Now they seem to force you to always have the Google+ enabled even if you never use it. Including for older accounts. I guess this is what makes people angry. It's like being prompted to create Picasa albums every time you try to read your Gmail.
Google's trying to switch over to a new system there's just one generalized Google identity (hosted by G+), and all of the products/services tap into that. If you want that identity to be your real identity, you use a Google+ Profile. If you want to remain anonymous or represent a business entity/organisation, you use a G+ Page.
The problem is there's two Google+' sharing the same name: "Google+, the identity system" and "Google+, the social network" and they've done a hamfisted job of explaining what the value of any of it is to the user.
Some social services like Youtube and Google+ require it, but you could still use Gmail without having Google+ enabled.
Unfortunately the mistake they are making is in defining every service as a 'social' service.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/bringing-google-comme...
I am not too sure how much the blogger business is. It will not surprise me if it is folded into Google plus entirely
This annoyed me enough that a couple of weeks ago I gave up and tried to integrate it into their social network so I could just have 1 profile. Now it appears I no longer have the option to merge my original profile into Google plus, it just isn't there on the account settings. Because I made one decision to opt-out of their social network it seems I will permanently have 2 profiles from this time forward, the Google plus one has none of my history, subscriptions, likes etc it is a completely useless account.
"We're migrating to google accounts. Your YouTube account is disabled until you connect it to a google accounts and then we're going to migrate over and destroy your YouTube account. You can have more than one google account if you really want to keep your YouTube stuff disconnected from your main Google Account. Here's how to make that second Google Account and how to manage it".
Boom, done. Bolt a way to have a "casual social-networking alias" for public stuff you don't want publicly linked to your Google account so you can pseudonymously comment on YouTube and Play Store and whatever.
- Google wants more users in Google+
- People don't care about Google+
- This doesn't change the fact that Google is still afraid of Facebook and wants more people to use G+
- Google will try to do everything it can to drag you into this service which you won't use anyway
What's so strange about this?
-100% true
-100% false for people using Google+ (absolute percentage unknown)
-50% false
-80% true
As you said, why is it so strange? It makes a lot of sense from a marketing point of view (the business strategy dictates so) and an engineering point of view (they already have a commenting system for users).
In all serious though, I think this just further opens up the door for competing services like Netflix, Instagram and Vine to dig in. With Netflix for my serious video watching, and Vine / Instagram for cat videos, I find myself visiting YouTube much less. Requiring a G+ account for comments is the little extra effort that makes me not engage.
IMO YouTube on its way to be the MySpace of video.
Highly doubt it. Youtube is one of the hardest thing to compete with, even Google search is much easier to go after. Did you read that article about Youtube where Google pays local ISPs to act as a CDN? That is the best CDN money can buy. A competitor without matching performance is going to be largely ignore by both consumers and publishers.
Users should maybe be more pissed at him for selling, than Google for tying Youtube to their overall Google strategy.
(Not that anybody should be pissed over such an issue. Just saying.)
the screenshot, just in case.
Is it just that the costs of serving video require an enormous company or is it that the term youtube is basically synonymous with "internet video".
Before Flash video, before html5 video, video was very difficult on the web to make work, the small yet pretty good codecs that the flash player video had were revolutionary at the time (Back in Macromedia days). Flash compression was always one of the best even though it was mostly software, still swf files are compressed/streamed in a very compact way.
Those specifically timed events won't happen again the same way, Youtube was born at the cusp of social media and the technology that made video economical enough. Youtube wouldn't be known as it is without that Flash video moment in history.
There are other alternatives though, dailymotion.com is fairly popular and will accept anything.
The front page of vimeo isn't as good though. It tells you about vimeo itself rather than giving you a large search bar and a bunch of content like youtube does.
I think it doesn't get used as much though because they will pull content if you're just posting videos of your friend doing cartwheels or something. There is a higher barrier to entry but they also only want very high quality HD or serious commercial or educational content.
I wonder whether they aren't more forward about discovery to save on bandwidth money.
Vimeo really needs to step up their mobile game.
If they couldn't do it, it's unlikely anyone else can.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo&lc=XBr2JHTM1EEDT3...
This belief has been thoroughly debunked by Facebook comments. There's absolutely no reason to believe that Google+ will be any better, particularly since the ghost-town nature of G+ means people will rightly assume they can flame away and nobody they know will ever see it.
For example: typical bad Facebook comment = angry rant at Sean Parker from person who seems genuinely angry
vs
typical bad Youtube comment = some nonsense troll/needlessly racist comment.
People might slag it in public, but I think a lot of people secretly enjoy leaving abusive and trollish anonymous comments. It's not like all those comments were the work of a few bad apples. The sheer volume would suggest otherwise.
The downside is that the people who put in the effort to nurture high quality comments on their channels, and the people who have been high quality commenters on youtube are the most negatively impacted by these changes. And the negative impact on the highest quality of comments might end up reducing the average quality much more than any moderate impact on the volume of the lower quality comments.
This also assumes that Google+ comments will kill off these high quality comment channels. I am sure it is true for some, but it is hardly the absolute death knell for quality conversation to require a Google+ account.
Google actually has something like 7+ different comment systems. And yet for some reason they felt compelled to cram youtube's square peg into google+'s round hole because that was the only reasonable technological solution? Because that was the only possible way to improve the situation?
Bullshit. It's because they want to prop up google+ and they want to make targeted ads easier.
No, but beware of falling into the politician's syllogism.
Google, how does this add to the experience? How does it make youtube a better product?
I won't even get started on the asinine recommendation system. Backed by one of the largest companies in the world and the brightest employees in the world. And yet youtube gets crappier every year. Scratching my head on this one.
[1] I noticed this since using the Self-destructing cookies addon for Firefox, which deletes all cookies for a site when the last tab on that site is closed (unless whitelisted). I'm whitelisting only a select few sites, and Google/YouTube are not among them.
I have never once, as far as I can remember, read a YouTube comment that was in any way, insightful or provided meaningful information that wasn't better obtained elsewhere. It is a cesspool, and the people who are complaining about needing to login to G+ to leave a comment frankly largely intersect with the set of people who are the problem.
Honestly, if logging into G+ bothers you, you probably are the kind of person who "shoots from the hip" and doesn't put a lot of thought into your comments anyway.
I don't believe the G+ comments on YouTube are about the idea of real identity being a check against racists, assholes, douchebags, and other comment archetypes. That has failed for Facebook comments and so has up/downvoting on YT. Instead, I think it's about filtering based on social network sharing.
Simply put, if someone shares a link to your video somewhere with their circle of followers, the external thread that develops outside of YT, within that community is likely to be more coherent and cogent, and that will be surfaced in the YT comments especially if you have social affinity with that person.
Think about it as a kind of comment federation. What if every YT video that has been linked from HackerNews stories surfaced the HN comments directly under the video on YT if you were in fact, a HackerNews user (had a login). Don't you think the HN comment thread would be higher quality than the general YT audience comments? That kind of federation is technically not possible today, because we don't have a standard spec for comment upstreaming, but because Google owns G+ and YT, they can do this kind of integration.
The reality is, comments from video reshares from people you know, who have small circles of followers, will be higher quality. Someone with 10,000 or 100,000 followers however probably will exhibit the same problems because the probability of bad actors rises with quantity. However, at least you can control this by filtering who you follow.
There's a general purpose derangement going on with respect to G+ that I just don't get. I don't like Facebook, never have, I barely ever log into it. I don't like social networks in general, I like _interest networks_. But I don't throw a hissy fit when most of the sites on the web force me to either create an account, or login with Facebook. I just login with Facebook and go about my business, denying most of the permissions it wants from me. It's really not that big of a deal. I don't use FB, but it is not a burden on me personally to use it as a single sign on service.
The reason why I use G+ is similar to the reason why I use HN or Reddit -- the communities. Simply put, there are more interesting, tightly knit, communities with less annoying, disruptive people on G+ than there is on FB. Maybe that's elitist, but that's the way it is. Perhaps it's the advantage of having less users, less adoption than Facebook. There's merit in being a so-called "Ghost Town", in that anyone willing to live there is more dedicated to the town, and less willing to take a shit on it.
But there are plenty of videos where that's not the case. There are many excellent scientific and educational videos on youtube, and the comments sections for many of them are excellent. Or were anyway. Periodic videos. Minute physics. Veritasium. EEVblog. Vihart. And so many others. In such places the comments can be civil, interesting, enlightening, sometimes just as good as an average comment on HN. But now those comments are a bit less valuable in general because so many of them are of the form "X just shared this on google+".
Instead of being a response to the creator, some comments are now a shout out into the crowd. And all of this is just jumbled together. It's an incredibly stupid and broken way to handle commenting that is only just slightly stupider than the old incredibly stupid and broken way they were doing commenting.
The idea of freighting around my one and only social circle as some sort of background peanut gallery everywhere I go is, frankly, not interesting to me. The reason I go seek out different channels and different sites is to have different experiences, often with different people. HN isn't my friend-group, and I wouldn't want HN to be replaced by my friend group either, and I value my friends greatly.
"Ever wonder why fractals are called "fractals"? It's because they have "fractional dimension". This idea comes from noticing that when you scale a 2-dimensional object up by a factor of 2, its area increases by a factor of 4, but when you scale a 2-dimensional Sierpinski triangle up by 2, its area increases by a factor of 3. With a normal 2D object, if you scale it up by a factor of 3, you'd increase the area by a factor of 9, but when you scale a 2-dimensional Koch snowflake up by 3, its area increases by a factor of 4. So fractals don't behave like normal objects. They behave as if they have fractional dimension"
First non-G+ comment? "Can I marry your mind, please?" Or this one: "hey, no knock on community colleges, studied at a couple myself I just feel like everyone's giving this girl way more credit than is due, but like I said, that's just me, and it has been made clear by everyone and their mother watching this vid that it is ONLY me. lol"
Or this one: "Yeah, you're totally a dick."
General consensus is, YouTube comments are, by and large, shit. I don't think you're going to convince many people that they're worth it because you can find a few videos that might have slightly higher signal.
Frankly, I would like to see "unification" of comments so when I'm looking at a video, I can see what people are saying about it from around the Web, rather than the same video linked to from 15 different blogs. For example, if some new tech video comes out, and is covered by HN, TheVerge, Engadget, Reddit, etc, I end up having to visit 4 or more sites to see what people's reaction to the video is, rather than having them collated in one place.
At least with the previous implementation, you'd get a top comment that made you laugh once in awhile.
It may be groupthink that G+ comments are better, but for my social stream, the people I follow, G+ is not a ghost town, it is a highly interesting place full of lots of thoughtful commentators. If I can filter comments by those whom I respect, and transitively, maybe one degree extended, it would be a vast improvement.
I say let people turn off the filters and leave the old comments as an option. Personally, first think I'd do is turn them off.
I'm sure Google knew this was going to cause a stir. Every major interfact change that FB does causes mass outrage and even groups like "get 100,000 likes to petition for mark zuckerberg to switch back to the old FB" and such.
a lot of the pissed off ppl (not all) are the anonymous cowards that liked to hide behind throwaway identities, spammers, and people that generally like to read meaningless comments.
I am also an active G+ user and really enjoy several communities and groups that are of interest to me. What's really missing is the mainstream market: pics from last night, pet photos, moms, teens, etc. right now it is mainly super interweb savvy people who are active because they know how serious google is about G+
as a channel owner I am stoked about the change. i dont like getting used to new interfaces any more than the next person but I can definitely see how this will add a ton of value to my channel and YT in general.
I don't mind.
This is the purpose of one of my favorite browser add-ons: http://www.tannr.com/herp-derp-youtube-comments/
Available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
the entire push to "use my real name" vis a vis my gmail account instead of my historical youtube account name, of which this new comments action is a part, bothers me.
also, it smells of an attempt out of desperation to beef up content on g+.
http://www.virante.org/blog/2013/04/23/is-google-still-the-f...
There is a lot of hate for G+ and/or the service unification stuff... I personally dislike it - but I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
I'm not "always available all the time" - I just want to get mundane things done sometimes.
We all had a good thing going until around 2010 or so. That's the point when companies stopped making good changes, and went on fanatical change-sprees that made things harder, less efficient, and worse.
Change for the sake of change is not always progress, you know. Windows 8 -- sucked. Windows 8.1 -- much better.
At least Microsoft had the balls to backtrack a little bit, and it paid off big time for them. Somehow I don't see Google doing that.
I don't have Google+ but I have a Youtube account.
The wording leads one to conclude that it must be some alternative to YouTube, but I don't see anything else on that site.
Google runs a business which users are a part of and if you think they are providing their services as a charity and have no right to complain about the business because you don't give them money, you really haven't thought about this very deeply. Since there is no charity here, the idea that we should be grateful is absurd.
Additionally, Google's huge control makes is difficult to participate in parts of the Internet (e.g. watching videos) without using their services. I think between their business model exploiting their users and their market stranglehold people absolutely have a right to complain when they make unwanted service changes.