I actually just caved last month and bought a subscription. I hate adds with a passion and didn't want my children being exposed to all that shit on our TV while trying to watch minecraft or...
I actually just caved last month and bought a subscription. I hate adds with a passion and didn't want my children being exposed to all that shit on our TV while trying to watch minecraft or learn-to-draw videos. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would pay for YT but here we are and it's a load of my shoulders tbh.
I find the psychology of this really interesting, because I feel the same. I have zero concerns paying for Netflix or Disney+, but I’m incredibly hesitant to pay for YouTube even though I probably...
I never in my wildest dreams thought I would pay for YT
I find the psychology of this really interesting, because I feel the same. I have zero concerns paying for Netflix or Disney+, but I’m incredibly hesitant to pay for YouTube even though I probably use it more. Same with Spotify back in the day, although I caved on that years ago.
I think it comes down to frustration at ostensibly free services deliberately making their free tier worse, compared to paid services being up front about what they are.
I grew up with YouTube being the site where bored teens would post vids of themselves doing dumb stuff. YouTube had grown up a lot since then. It offers a lot of interesting and enlightening...
I grew up with YouTube being the site where bored teens would post vids of themselves doing dumb stuff.
YouTube had grown up a lot since then. It offers a lot of interesting and enlightening content by a variety of creators — and it delivers them very well.
I think YouTube is struggling to reposition itself in people’s minds given how long it has been free. But YouTube is something worth paying for now, I believe.
That’s the rub for me. Some of the content on YouTube is worth paying for, IMO, but YouTube is the platform. It’s like cable TV, but stretched out a lot thinner. I never liked the idea of paying...
That’s the rub for me. Some of the content on YouTube is worth paying for, IMO, but YouTube is the platform. It’s like cable TV, but stretched out a lot thinner. I never liked the idea of paying for all the channels I didn’t watch, and I feel bad about paying for YouTube the same way, only worse. (I stopped paying for cable after I started living on my own.) I’d rather support individual channels via direct contributions like Patreon, or buying their merch, and subscribing, thumbs upping etc. I’d much less prefer to pass payments through YouTube/Google for the channels I actually enjoy to pick up whatever meager scraps are left after its spread around. I understand that operating YouTube has its own costs, but it’s YouTube’s/Google’s choice to operate it the way they do, and they chose their pricing model. I’ll use ad-blockers or yt-dlp etc. to get around all the ads they try shovel down my pipe for as long as I can. If all else fails, I’ll probably just switch to Curiosity Stream or whatever other platforms spring up as YouTube eats itself.
I've just discovered that paid channel memberships on YouTube don't remove ads for that channel, which seems absurd. I said below "I should probably subscribe", but what you've said is closer to...
I've just discovered that paid channel memberships on YouTube don't remove ads for that channel, which seems absurd.
I said below "I should probably subscribe", but what you've said is closer to what I'd actually like, which is "I should probably support the creators who provide content to me". As with a lot of modern services, the thing YouTube is ostensibly providing (video hosting) is secondary to the thing they're actually providing (a pre-existing audience) and it makes the payment models all the murkier.
When you have a YouTube subscription, the creators you're watching will get a cut that is greater than they would get from YouTube ads that would be displayed to you otherwise.
When you have a YouTube subscription, the creators you're watching will get a cut that is greater than they would get from YouTube ads that would be displayed to you otherwise.
Yeah I think that's fair, and honestly I probably should just subscribe! I'd probably be happier about it if they pitched it in the positive way you did, actually, and it still grates that they're...
Yeah I think that's fair, and honestly I probably should just subscribe!
I'd probably be happier about it if they pitched it in the positive way you did, actually, and it still grates that they're still trying to have it both ways in terms of how they interact with creators: the scale and funding of a major broadcast operation on one hand, the black box "algorithm says no" behaviour of user generated social media content on the other, but ultimately neither of those changes the fact that it's a platform with real costs to cover that delivers me a lot of valuable and interesting content.
Honestly it's because the payments don't stop YouTube from doing all the algorithmic recommendations and ad tracking. I'd pay for stuff like Nebula because there is some actual curation going on...
Honestly it's because the payments don't stop YouTube from doing all the algorithmic recommendations and ad tracking. I'd pay for stuff like Nebula because there is some actual curation going on there, but YouTube runs more like a utility. It would make more sense to me if they charged creators who have an audience greater than some size to pay for hosting and provide those creators themselves with the tools to pursue a monetization strategy that's right for them be that patronage, pay-per-view, ad supported, or whatever.
What's the problem with algorithmic recommendations? There's so much content on Youtube, I can't navigate it by myself. Having it recommend stuff to me that I might actually like is invaluable. My...
What's the problem with algorithmic recommendations?
There's so much content on Youtube, I can't navigate it by myself. Having it recommend stuff to me that I might actually like is invaluable. My TV has a "trending" panel on the YT app and it's just junk. As soon as I load the app properly and I get to my algorithmically recommended page it's mostly stuff I'm actually interested in.
Also I just can't bring myself to care about ad tracking. If I must see ads - and I must, I refuse to use ad blockers because there a plenty of people who rely on the revenue they bring - then I'd much rather (a) see ads about stuff I'm vaguely interested in and (b) be able to block ads for things I really don't want to see (for me that includes alcohol).
It would make more sense to me if they charged creators who have an audience greater than some size to pay for hosting
That's Vimeo. Although the baseline audience size for uploaders paying is zero people. I don't think it's working out very well for them.
Subscriptions and cross-promotion with other channels is how people find stuff they care about. Search and general curated recommendations are also available. The YouTube ecosystem (creators and...
There's so much content on Youtube, I can't navigate it by myself.
Subscriptions and cross-promotion with other channels is how people find stuff they care about. Search and general curated recommendations are also available. The YouTube ecosystem (creators and users) has been created and trained by the algorithmic engines to behave as it does, but there's not reason that's the only way to do it. Having the primary mode of interaction be a recommendation feed is a way for YouTube to position itself as the gatekeeper and make the creators dependent on it for maintaining a relationship with their audience. I prefer not to have parasitic middlemen conditioning my interactions with the media I follow.
(a) see ads about stuff I'm vaguely interested in
If only they actually did this. Instead it's more like "optimizing ads to push my buttons." It's manipulative and unhealthy.
That's Vimeo.
Vimeo doesn't actually provide tools for monetizing the content, they're just a funnel for hosting.
It's how you might find stuff, and that's great if it works for you. I like the recommendation page because it moves with my current interests and saves me a lot of time and effort. It takes a LOT...
Subscriptions and cross-promotion with other channels is how people find stuff they care about.
It's how you might find stuff, and that's great if it works for you. I like the recommendation page because it moves with my current interests and saves me a lot of time and effort. It takes a LOT for me to actually subscribe to a channel and it's pretty rare cross-promotions are of interest to me.
Having the primary mode of interaction be a recommendation feed is a way for YouTube to position itself as the gatekeeper and make the creators dependent on it for maintaining a relationship with their audience.
Um. I'm not sure that's quite how I'd describe it. Youtube care about pretty much just one thing - trying to retain viewers on the site as long as possible. They will have hours and hours of UI testing to prove that a recommendation page is better for doing that than all the other options (same goes at FB for the non-chronological newsfeed - turns out most people just prefer it).
I'm not sure you can say creators are dependent on scoring high - although it does matter - because search and subscriptions exist. Although obviously search is ranked too. It's algorithms all the way down. Creators are dependent on youtube as a platform because.. youtube is their platform. It's the same way I am dependent on tildes for having discussions here. The non-chronological feed is designed to make it easy for me to have those discussions, to make the site sticky, to keep people here and coming back. It's precisely the same thing youtube is doing, just less complex.
Instead it's more like "optimizing ads to push my buttons." It's manipulative and unhealthy.
We're talking about the same thing. The advertising industry has never made any secret of the fact that they want you to buy the things they are selling. That's kind of their whole thing. So of course they want to manipulate you into doing something. You don't have to do the thing. I don't really agree it's unhealthy in the most part, although there are aspects which are pretty bad.
I find the product placement in YT creator content much more insidious. For example Laura Kampf (excellent channel, great makin' stuff content). When she started out she was just using whatever tools she could afford. Then when she got a little bigger, Festool got in touch and all of a sudden every tool in her workshop is green and grey. Which is lovely for her to have a few tens of thousands of Euros worth of top-quality tools - but now every time I see her videos I'm slightly more primed to buy Festool next time I need a tool (can't afford them otherwise I'd already have them). Same goes for every wood or metalworking channel once they get big enough, and I'm sure it goes on many other places too.
I prefer not to have parasitic middlemen conditioning my interactions with the media I follow.
Ooof, well, I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you about... well, pretty much the entire media industry. Even this website is conditioning you.
Again, you think this because this is the workflow that YouTube has optimized around. Content creators don’t do cross promotions because nothing works as well creating cringey thumbnails and...
It's how you might find stuff, and that's great if it works for you. I like the recommendation page because it moves with my current interests and saves me a lot of time and effort. It takes a LOT for me to actually subscribe to a channel and it's pretty rare cross-promotions are of interest to me.
Again, you think this because this is the workflow that YouTube has optimized around. Content creators don’t do cross promotions because nothing works as well creating cringey thumbnails and mugging for likes to goose their rating on the algorithm. They never bothered building in ways to make cross linking and network based discovery work. YouTube has trained everyone to use it this way because that’s the way that benefits YouTube the most.
Creators are dependent on youtube as a platform because.. youtube is their platform.
And they can never leave once they get big, because the platform is designed to make switching basically impossible for all but the largest creators, and even they pay hefty costs for it.
I don't really agree it's unhealthy in the most part, although there are aspects which are pretty bad.
It’s literally unraveling American democracy and has been shown to exacerbate mental health issues so I’d say it’s pretty bad. It also drives platforms to design around maximizing engagement and time spent rather than maximizing utility and time saved. These are things of interest to advertisers but are actually contrary to the interests of viewers.
Ooof, well, I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you about... well, pretty much the entire media industry. Even this website is conditioning you.
The difference is that this website is run by one guy who barely has time to keep up with it. There is no willful conditioning going on and, even if there was, he has all of $0.00 worth of my labor to skim off of it. YouTube owns the relationship between viewers and creators and intentionally designs its UX to keep it that way. The ecosystem is rigged to soak up as much of the value of other peoples creative output as it can, far in excess of the value it provides as a utility to connect viewers to creators. It’s a racket.
You must watch very different people to me, because I don't really see that. Business operating in way that benefits business shocker! Film at eleven. As for Youtube "training" users.. it goes...
nothing works as well creating cringey thumbnails and mugging for likes
You must watch very different people to me, because I don't really see that.
YouTube has trained everyone to use it this way because that’s the way that benefits YouTube the most.
Business operating in way that benefits business shocker! Film at eleven.
As for Youtube "training" users.. it goes both ways. They try things, users like them, or not. Users mostly drive UX, not the other way around. It's very, very hard to get people to use things they don't like or find difficult to use (which is basically the same thing)
And they can never leave once they get big, because the platform is designed to make switching basically impossible for all but the largest creators
I'm really curious how you think Youtube designed to stop people leaving?
Other than the obvious that Youtube is where a Youtube creator's audience is. Also I refer you to my previous comment about them being a business and doing the best thing for their business. They don't want to make it a few clicks to transfer everything to vimeo, that would be a terrible idea.
All the professional youtubers I watch regularly have plenty of other income streams than Youtube. People write books, sell merch, run Patreons, are present on other platforms like Twitch or Nebula or whatever. Because you'd have to be pretty daft to rely on a single website these days!
There is no willful conditioning going on
Ah, so all the features that grab your attention here appeared entirely by accident.. Deimos isn't stupid. He's not a bad dude either. But none of the stickiness of tildes was accidental, it's all by design.
Making websites more useful so people use them more isn't a bad thing.
Yes you do, you probably just don't define it as cringey. This is just allowing low expectations to allow bad behavior on the part of platform monopolists to persist. This is a very naive...
You must watch very different people to me, because I don't really see that.
Yes you do, you probably just don't define it as cringey.
Business operating in way that benefits business shocker! Film at eleven.
This is just allowing low expectations to allow bad behavior on the part of platform monopolists to persist.
They try things, users like them, or not. Users mostly drive UX, not the other way around.
This is a very naive understanding of how this design process works. They're not testing for whether users like or find something useful, they're testing for whether users click through or persists in watching stuff. It's tailored to steal time and attention rather than helping people quickly access the content they want. It also homogenizes the offerings on the platform to optimize for whatever YouTube's strategic initiatives happen to be at the moment rather than allowing creator to control their own fates. It's ad revenue today, then subscription counts tomorrow, then daily active users the day after that. It's all run in a fairly opaque process that leaves content creators guessing, which makes them prone to burnout having to keep up.
I'm really curious how you think Youtube designed to stop people leaving?
I've said it, like three times already. YouTube owns the creator's relationship with their audience. They make it difficult for those creators to migrate anywhere else without losing that audience. Compare this with something open, like a blog, where you can simply shift your hosting provider and redirect with no trouble at all. I'm honestly a little depressed to hear that you are accustomed to closed platforms and non-interoperability that the idea the world could be any different didn't even occur to you even though it very much was as recently as a decade ago.
People write books, sell merch, run Patreons, are present on other platforms like Twitch or Nebula or whatever. Because you'd have to be pretty daft to rely on a single website these days!
All this tells me is that YouTube does a bad job of letting creators monetize their work by skimming too much off the top, leading them to have to set up parallel income streams.
Deimos isn't stupid. He's not a bad dude either. But none of the stickiness of tildes was accidental, it's all by design.
It's designed to be a place you check in on a couple of times a day rather than a place that sucks all of your time and attention by maximizing your engagement all day. There's not even much point to that being as how it's run on donations instead of ad impressions.
It's a business.
So was Al Capone's operation, that doesn't make it not a racket. This part is the part that does: "The ecosystem is rigged to soak up as much of the value of other peoples creative output as it can, far in excess of the value it provides as a utility to connect viewers to creators."
I've seen this many many times: I suspect a lot of people have been conditioned to think "THE ALGORITHM!" is bad because of Facebook (among others), and are now getting triggered whenever they...
I've seen this many many times: I suspect a lot of people have been conditioned to think "THE ALGORITHM!" is bad because of Facebook (among others), and are now getting triggered whenever they hear something is algorithmic. Forgetting that even things such as Google Search are personalized algorithmically.
Reminds me a lot of those who apply the "Javascript is automatically bad" logic everywhere.
YouTube's algorithmic recommendations are pretty fucking good; they might have the best recommendation engines of all the major media companies.
The algorithms are bad because they create a point of control for gatekeepers to intercede in your relationship with the media you follow. It’s a point of control that doesn’t need to be there....
The algorithms are bad because they create a point of control for gatekeepers to intercede in your relationship with the media you follow. It’s a point of control that doesn’t need to be there. They could have a recommendation feed that the user has to get to, but they make it the central point of the UX. They could also do intentionally curated recommendations for different user personas.
They’re also bad for the same reasons any system that is optimized for encouraging compulsive behavior is bad. It’s counter to the interests of the user. It’s like if I am trying to lose weight and the system knows I have a weakness for donuts, it will never stop trying to shove donuts in my face to break my willpower.
It also stops being that good after a while frankly. Once it has a certain idea of who you are and what you’re into it ends up being rather difficult to break out of the pigeonhole it carves for you.
lol, it's one page on a website, not a big conspiracy to control what you're watching. You don't even have to look at the homepage. You can set your bookmark to your subscription page or whatever....
gatekeepers to intercede in your relationship with the media you follow
lol, it's one page on a website, not a big conspiracy to control what you're watching. You don't even have to look at the homepage. You can set your bookmark to your subscription page or whatever. I have a search shortcut in Firefox which bypasses the home page entirely. It's all very easy to avoid. At no point do you have to click on anything you don't want to.
It’s like if I am trying to lose weight and the system knows I have a weakness for donuts, it will never stop trying to shove donuts in my face to break my willpower.
If by "the system", you mean Google's AdSense, no. It doesn't do that. AdSense allows advertisers to target their adverts by having a profile of things you're into and matching advertisers to you. That's all. If advertisers are stupid enough to pay money to target you with ads for doughnuts when you're trying to lose weight, that isn't really anything to do with Google. I suspect in your hypothetical you'd actually see ads for weight loss stuff because advertising didn't become a multi-trillion dollar global industry by being run by imbeciles. You might not like that industry, and that's fine. But it makes much more sense to try sell you something you actually want.
Once it has a certain idea of who you are and what you’re into it ends up being rather difficult to break out of the pigeonhole it carves for you.
I find it very good. Once I've watched a few videos on a topic, I get a load more stuff on that topic. I usually stick with a topic for a couple of weeks, then move on and that topic drops off the recommended page fairly quickly (currently: heat pumps and battle rap). There are some topics which are consistently of interest and they are usually channels I'm subscribed to and are always on my feed.
If you've carved a pigeonhole of just watching a few kinds of content.... well, that's kinda on you. Branch out a bit and the algorithm will go with you. It is, as has been mentioned, extremely well designed.
This is all work people will not do and, therefore, content creators cannot bank on it. So it's moot. This is like saying "Nobody is forcing anyone to drive dangerously so safety features are...
lol, it's one page on a website, not a big conspiracy to control what you're watching. You don't even have to look at the homepage. You can set your bookmark to your subscription page or whatever. I have a search shortcut in Firefox which bypasses the home page entirely. It's all very easy to avoid. At no point do you have to click on anything you don't want to.
This is all work people will not do and, therefore, content creators cannot bank on it. So it's moot. This is like saying "Nobody is forcing anyone to drive dangerously so safety features are superfluous."
If advertisers are stupid enough to pay money to target you with ads for doughnuts when you're trying to lose weight, that isn't really anything to do with Google.
If Google makes the crux of its business around creating tools for advertisers that let them take advantage of peoples' weaknesses, then how does it not have anything to do with Google? They're not being stupid by doing that any more than Altria is being stupid by selling ads for Juul and cigarettes to people trying to quit smoking. They make a lot of money by keeping people from quitting and shunting them to alternative revenue streams when they do. None of that is healthy for the people being targeted though, and most people have no idea that this is being done to them.
Once I've watched a few videos on a topic, I get a load more stuff on that topic.
Yes. This is called pigeonholing you.
If you've carved a pigeonhole of just watching a few kinds of content.... well, that's kinda on you. Branch out a bit and the algorithm will go with you.
How is it "on me" for the algorithm to have guided me into this niche? Normal people do not do this kind of work to game out the algorithm to curate things for themselves. It also doesn't just lean towards topics of interest to you. It also privileges whatever strategic initiatives YouTube wants to pursue at the time. For a while the sweet spot was videos around ~20 minutes. Then they decided they wanted more long form content so suddenly you were getting hit with stuff in the 1 to 2 hour range. Then they got in trouble for running a political radicalization pipeline so they started deprioritizing political content based on some set of metrics they decided constituted being "low effort." There's plenty of nonsense involved in the recommendations that has little to do with linking people with content they might enjoy.
This is why I hate the Silicon Valley mentality of burning warehouses full of money today in the name of building a huge user base and worrying about profitability later. It sets up an unrealistic...
This is why I hate the Silicon Valley mentality of burning warehouses full of money today in the name of building a huge user base and worrying about profitability later. It sets up an unrealistic consumer expectations. It makes it impossible for competition flourish. And it makes people OK with mass corporate surveillance in the name of getting free or unrealistically inexpensive crap. This is why I never hopped on the MoviePass bandwagon, because they had no realistic path towards viability that did not involve making their product considerably worse or considerably more expensive.
YouTube is a tremendous free resource, and they should always have a free tier. Despite all the shit on their platform, they also host a wealth of incredibly high quality educational and cultural content. But just as Linus pointed out, that shit is insanely expensive to run. I have no issue with advanced features like 4K video being locked behind a pay tier.
The one nice thing about paying for YT is I get YT music as well, which has been a decent substitute for Spotify. Also the fact I can lock my phone and listen to videos playing in the background...
The one nice thing about paying for YT is I get YT music as well, which has been a decent substitute for Spotify. Also the fact I can lock my phone and listen to videos playing in the background is great for podcast/talk-centered videos.
Kinda stinks that the family plan I got into at $15 years ago is up to $22. But it is my most used streaming service, times 5 other people using it just as much.
Kinda stinks that the family plan I got into at $15 years ago is up to $22. But it is my most used streaming service, times 5 other people using it just as much.
I actually just caved last month and bought a subscription. I hate adds with a passion and didn't want my children being exposed to all that shit on our TV while trying to watch minecraft or learn-to-draw videos. I never in my wildest dreams thought I would pay for YT but here we are and it's a load of my shoulders tbh.
I find the psychology of this really interesting, because I feel the same. I have zero concerns paying for Netflix or Disney+, but I’m incredibly hesitant to pay for YouTube even though I probably use it more. Same with Spotify back in the day, although I caved on that years ago.
I think it comes down to frustration at ostensibly free services deliberately making their free tier worse, compared to paid services being up front about what they are.
I grew up with YouTube being the site where bored teens would post vids of themselves doing dumb stuff.
YouTube had grown up a lot since then. It offers a lot of interesting and enlightening content by a variety of creators — and it delivers them very well.
I think YouTube is struggling to reposition itself in people’s minds given how long it has been free. But YouTube is something worth paying for now, I believe.
That’s the rub for me. Some of the content on YouTube is worth paying for, IMO, but YouTube is the platform. It’s like cable TV, but stretched out a lot thinner. I never liked the idea of paying for all the channels I didn’t watch, and I feel bad about paying for YouTube the same way, only worse. (I stopped paying for cable after I started living on my own.) I’d rather support individual channels via direct contributions like Patreon, or buying their merch, and subscribing, thumbs upping etc. I’d much less prefer to pass payments through YouTube/Google for the channels I actually enjoy to pick up whatever meager scraps are left after its spread around. I understand that operating YouTube has its own costs, but it’s YouTube’s/Google’s choice to operate it the way they do, and they chose their pricing model. I’ll use ad-blockers or
yt-dlpetc. to get around all the ads they try shovel down my pipe for as long as I can. If all else fails, I’ll probably just switch to Curiosity Stream or whatever other platforms spring up as YouTube eats itself.I've just discovered that paid channel memberships on YouTube don't remove ads for that channel, which seems absurd.
I said below "I should probably subscribe", but what you've said is closer to what I'd actually like, which is "I should probably support the creators who provide content to me". As with a lot of modern services, the thing YouTube is ostensibly providing (video hosting) is secondary to the thing they're actually providing (a pre-existing audience) and it makes the payment models all the murkier.
When you have a YouTube subscription, the creators you're watching will get a cut that is greater than they would get from YouTube ads that would be displayed to you otherwise.
Yeah I think that's fair, and honestly I probably should just subscribe!
I'd probably be happier about it if they pitched it in the positive way you did, actually, and it still grates that they're still trying to have it both ways in terms of how they interact with creators: the scale and funding of a major broadcast operation on one hand, the black box "algorithm says no" behaviour of user generated social media content on the other, but ultimately neither of those changes the fact that it's a platform with real costs to cover that delivers me a lot of valuable and interesting content.
Honestly it's because the payments don't stop YouTube from doing all the algorithmic recommendations and ad tracking. I'd pay for stuff like Nebula because there is some actual curation going on there, but YouTube runs more like a utility. It would make more sense to me if they charged creators who have an audience greater than some size to pay for hosting and provide those creators themselves with the tools to pursue a monetization strategy that's right for them be that patronage, pay-per-view, ad supported, or whatever.
What's the problem with algorithmic recommendations?
There's so much content on Youtube, I can't navigate it by myself. Having it recommend stuff to me that I might actually like is invaluable. My TV has a "trending" panel on the YT app and it's just junk. As soon as I load the app properly and I get to my algorithmically recommended page it's mostly stuff I'm actually interested in.
Also I just can't bring myself to care about ad tracking. If I must see ads - and I must, I refuse to use ad blockers because there a plenty of people who rely on the revenue they bring - then I'd much rather (a) see ads about stuff I'm vaguely interested in and (b) be able to block ads for things I really don't want to see (for me that includes alcohol).
That's Vimeo. Although the baseline audience size for uploaders paying is zero people. I don't think it's working out very well for them.
Subscriptions and cross-promotion with other channels is how people find stuff they care about. Search and general curated recommendations are also available. The YouTube ecosystem (creators and users) has been created and trained by the algorithmic engines to behave as it does, but there's not reason that's the only way to do it. Having the primary mode of interaction be a recommendation feed is a way for YouTube to position itself as the gatekeeper and make the creators dependent on it for maintaining a relationship with their audience. I prefer not to have parasitic middlemen conditioning my interactions with the media I follow.
If only they actually did this. Instead it's more like "optimizing ads to push my buttons." It's manipulative and unhealthy.
Vimeo doesn't actually provide tools for monetizing the content, they're just a funnel for hosting.
It's how you might find stuff, and that's great if it works for you. I like the recommendation page because it moves with my current interests and saves me a lot of time and effort. It takes a LOT for me to actually subscribe to a channel and it's pretty rare cross-promotions are of interest to me.
Um. I'm not sure that's quite how I'd describe it. Youtube care about pretty much just one thing - trying to retain viewers on the site as long as possible. They will have hours and hours of UI testing to prove that a recommendation page is better for doing that than all the other options (same goes at FB for the non-chronological newsfeed - turns out most people just prefer it).
I'm not sure you can say creators are dependent on scoring high - although it does matter - because search and subscriptions exist. Although obviously search is ranked too. It's algorithms all the way down. Creators are dependent on youtube as a platform because.. youtube is their platform. It's the same way I am dependent on tildes for having discussions here. The non-chronological feed is designed to make it easy for me to have those discussions, to make the site sticky, to keep people here and coming back. It's precisely the same thing youtube is doing, just less complex.
We're talking about the same thing. The advertising industry has never made any secret of the fact that they want you to buy the things they are selling. That's kind of their whole thing. So of course they want to manipulate you into doing something. You don't have to do the thing. I don't really agree it's unhealthy in the most part, although there are aspects which are pretty bad.
I find the product placement in YT creator content much more insidious. For example Laura Kampf (excellent channel, great makin' stuff content). When she started out she was just using whatever tools she could afford. Then when she got a little bigger, Festool got in touch and all of a sudden every tool in her workshop is green and grey. Which is lovely for her to have a few tens of thousands of Euros worth of top-quality tools - but now every time I see her videos I'm slightly more primed to buy Festool next time I need a tool (can't afford them otherwise I'd already have them). Same goes for every wood or metalworking channel once they get big enough, and I'm sure it goes on many other places too.
Ooof, well, I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you about... well, pretty much the entire media industry. Even this website is conditioning you.
Again, you think this because this is the workflow that YouTube has optimized around. Content creators don’t do cross promotions because nothing works as well creating cringey thumbnails and mugging for likes to goose their rating on the algorithm. They never bothered building in ways to make cross linking and network based discovery work. YouTube has trained everyone to use it this way because that’s the way that benefits YouTube the most.
And they can never leave once they get big, because the platform is designed to make switching basically impossible for all but the largest creators, and even they pay hefty costs for it.
It’s literally unraveling American democracy and has been shown to exacerbate mental health issues so I’d say it’s pretty bad. It also drives platforms to design around maximizing engagement and time spent rather than maximizing utility and time saved. These are things of interest to advertisers but are actually contrary to the interests of viewers.
The difference is that this website is run by one guy who barely has time to keep up with it. There is no willful conditioning going on and, even if there was, he has all of $0.00 worth of my labor to skim off of it. YouTube owns the relationship between viewers and creators and intentionally designs its UX to keep it that way. The ecosystem is rigged to soak up as much of the value of other peoples creative output as it can, far in excess of the value it provides as a utility to connect viewers to creators. It’s a racket.
You must watch very different people to me, because I don't really see that.
Business operating in way that benefits business shocker! Film at eleven.
As for Youtube "training" users.. it goes both ways. They try things, users like them, or not. Users mostly drive UX, not the other way around. It's very, very hard to get people to use things they don't like or find difficult to use (which is basically the same thing)
I'm really curious how you think Youtube designed to stop people leaving?
Other than the obvious that Youtube is where a Youtube creator's audience is. Also I refer you to my previous comment about them being a business and doing the best thing for their business. They don't want to make it a few clicks to transfer everything to vimeo, that would be a terrible idea.
All the professional youtubers I watch regularly have plenty of other income streams than Youtube. People write books, sell merch, run Patreons, are present on other platforms like Twitch or Nebula or whatever. Because you'd have to be pretty daft to rely on a single website these days!
Ah, so all the features that grab your attention here appeared entirely by accident.. Deimos isn't stupid. He's not a bad dude either. But none of the stickiness of tildes was accidental, it's all by design.
Making websites more useful so people use them more isn't a bad thing.
It's a business.
Yes you do, you probably just don't define it as cringey.
This is just allowing low expectations to allow bad behavior on the part of platform monopolists to persist.
This is a very naive understanding of how this design process works. They're not testing for whether users like or find something useful, they're testing for whether users click through or persists in watching stuff. It's tailored to steal time and attention rather than helping people quickly access the content they want. It also homogenizes the offerings on the platform to optimize for whatever YouTube's strategic initiatives happen to be at the moment rather than allowing creator to control their own fates. It's ad revenue today, then subscription counts tomorrow, then daily active users the day after that. It's all run in a fairly opaque process that leaves content creators guessing, which makes them prone to burnout having to keep up.
I've said it, like three times already. YouTube owns the creator's relationship with their audience. They make it difficult for those creators to migrate anywhere else without losing that audience. Compare this with something open, like a blog, where you can simply shift your hosting provider and redirect with no trouble at all. I'm honestly a little depressed to hear that you are accustomed to closed platforms and non-interoperability that the idea the world could be any different didn't even occur to you even though it very much was as recently as a decade ago.
All this tells me is that YouTube does a bad job of letting creators monetize their work by skimming too much off the top, leading them to have to set up parallel income streams.
It's designed to be a place you check in on a couple of times a day rather than a place that sucks all of your time and attention by maximizing your engagement all day. There's not even much point to that being as how it's run on donations instead of ad impressions.
So was Al Capone's operation, that doesn't make it not a racket. This part is the part that does: "The ecosystem is rigged to soak up as much of the value of other peoples creative output as it can, far in excess of the value it provides as a utility to connect viewers to creators."
I've seen this many many times: I suspect a lot of people have been conditioned to think "THE ALGORITHM!" is bad because of Facebook (among others), and are now getting triggered whenever they hear something is algorithmic. Forgetting that even things such as Google Search are personalized algorithmically.
Reminds me a lot of those who apply the "Javascript is automatically bad" logic everywhere.
YouTube's algorithmic recommendations are pretty fucking good; they might have the best recommendation engines of all the major media companies.
The algorithms are bad because they create a point of control for gatekeepers to intercede in your relationship with the media you follow. It’s a point of control that doesn’t need to be there. They could have a recommendation feed that the user has to get to, but they make it the central point of the UX. They could also do intentionally curated recommendations for different user personas.
They’re also bad for the same reasons any system that is optimized for encouraging compulsive behavior is bad. It’s counter to the interests of the user. It’s like if I am trying to lose weight and the system knows I have a weakness for donuts, it will never stop trying to shove donuts in my face to break my willpower.
It also stops being that good after a while frankly. Once it has a certain idea of who you are and what you’re into it ends up being rather difficult to break out of the pigeonhole it carves for you.
lol, it's one page on a website, not a big conspiracy to control what you're watching. You don't even have to look at the homepage. You can set your bookmark to your subscription page or whatever. I have a search shortcut in Firefox which bypasses the home page entirely. It's all very easy to avoid. At no point do you have to click on anything you don't want to.
If by "the system", you mean Google's AdSense, no. It doesn't do that. AdSense allows advertisers to target their adverts by having a profile of things you're into and matching advertisers to you. That's all. If advertisers are stupid enough to pay money to target you with ads for doughnuts when you're trying to lose weight, that isn't really anything to do with Google. I suspect in your hypothetical you'd actually see ads for weight loss stuff because advertising didn't become a multi-trillion dollar global industry by being run by imbeciles. You might not like that industry, and that's fine. But it makes much more sense to try sell you something you actually want.
I find it very good. Once I've watched a few videos on a topic, I get a load more stuff on that topic. I usually stick with a topic for a couple of weeks, then move on and that topic drops off the recommended page fairly quickly (currently: heat pumps and battle rap). There are some topics which are consistently of interest and they are usually channels I'm subscribed to and are always on my feed.
If you've carved a pigeonhole of just watching a few kinds of content.... well, that's kinda on you. Branch out a bit and the algorithm will go with you. It is, as has been mentioned, extremely well designed.
This is all work people will not do and, therefore, content creators cannot bank on it. So it's moot. This is like saying "Nobody is forcing anyone to drive dangerously so safety features are superfluous."
If Google makes the crux of its business around creating tools for advertisers that let them take advantage of peoples' weaknesses, then how does it not have anything to do with Google? They're not being stupid by doing that any more than Altria is being stupid by selling ads for Juul and cigarettes to people trying to quit smoking. They make a lot of money by keeping people from quitting and shunting them to alternative revenue streams when they do. None of that is healthy for the people being targeted though, and most people have no idea that this is being done to them.
Yes. This is called pigeonholing you.
How is it "on me" for the algorithm to have guided me into this niche? Normal people do not do this kind of work to game out the algorithm to curate things for themselves. It also doesn't just lean towards topics of interest to you. It also privileges whatever strategic initiatives YouTube wants to pursue at the time. For a while the sweet spot was videos around ~20 minutes. Then they decided they wanted more long form content so suddenly you were getting hit with stuff in the 1 to 2 hour range. Then they got in trouble for running a political radicalization pipeline so they started deprioritizing political content based on some set of metrics they decided constituted being "low effort." There's plenty of nonsense involved in the recommendations that has little to do with linking people with content they might enjoy.
Personally, I'm just tired of being catered to. My taste isn't where the borders of the world sit, and it isn't good to be stuck in an echo chamber.
This is why I hate the Silicon Valley mentality of burning warehouses full of money today in the name of building a huge user base and worrying about profitability later. It sets up an unrealistic consumer expectations. It makes it impossible for competition flourish. And it makes people OK with mass corporate surveillance in the name of getting free or unrealistically inexpensive crap. This is why I never hopped on the MoviePass bandwagon, because they had no realistic path towards viability that did not involve making their product considerably worse or considerably more expensive.
YouTube is a tremendous free resource, and they should always have a free tier. Despite all the shit on their platform, they also host a wealth of incredibly high quality educational and cultural content. But just as Linus pointed out, that shit is insanely expensive to run. I have no issue with advanced features like 4K video being locked behind a pay tier.
The one nice thing about paying for YT is I get YT music as well, which has been a decent substitute for Spotify. Also the fact I can lock my phone and listen to videos playing in the background is great for podcast/talk-centered videos.
Today I got an email that my premium subscription is going up. YouTube seems to be doing a lot of monetization work lately.
Kinda stinks that the family plan I got into at $15 years ago is up to $22. But it is my most used streaming service, times 5 other people using it just as much.
Yeah, same here. I watch a ton of YouTube, and then my wife and I get the music stuff too. I get so annoyed if I'm not logged in and see ads now.
They do have an individual student plan for $7 a month. That eases the pain a little.
Good stuff. We need more paid services, not less. This is a great compromise.