Was shocked to hear this news. I worked for Google years ago but I was in the NYC office, so we didn't run into the YouTube folks much.
Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined. It's a weird mix of a huge creator monetization network, a music channel, an education platform, a forever-store of niche content, and a utility.
It's also not a business that rested on it's laurels. It's easy to forget how novel creator monetization was when YouTube adopted it. They do a lot of active work to manage their creators, and now have grown into a music and podcast platform that is challenging Apple. To top it off, YouTube TV, despite costing just as much as cable, is objectively a good product.
Few products have the brand, the reach, monetization, and the endurance that YouTube has had within Google. And I know for a fact that this is in no small part due to the way it was managed.
I've probably watched tens of thousands of hours of YouTube at this point. Some of it sublime, some of it absurd, some of it critical for my work or my degree. I couldn't imagine a world without it.
RIP.
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Who? Who has a negative opinion about YouTube? The occasional "My kids watch too much of it" != "mixed opinions" about the site in general.
A lot of YouTubers have been very critical of YouTube’s approach to things and treatment of creators in the past.
Also, just as an example, YouTube demonetises (and therefore effectively punishes) you for using words like ‘suicide’ so now we have to say silly things like ‘unalive’ — at least until Google/the advertisers catch on. These days YouTube is more censored than traditional TV.
I think the "unalive" nonsense is idiotic too, especially when it increasingly bleeds into elsewhere online (and probably offline, too). But that's not the same thing as "mixed opinions" in general on HN. That would be more accurate of, say, Twitter (where we are nearing two years and counting of the imminent collapse of the site any day now post-Musk acquisition, as opposed to seemingly every news event proving that it is more important than ever).
I think perhaps what there are ‘mixed opinions’ on is the actual management and day-to-day practice of YouTube as a company, rather than the site itself. We’re all very, very grateful to have such an amazing place to learn and be entertained. And, in my opinion, the website and apps are very nicely designed and work better than anything else.
I do wish the TikTokification would stop, though. But that’s never going to happen, given how effective it is at holding our eyeballs hostage.
How are you still digging in here? There are very clearly mixed opinions in these threads about youtube.
Which is interesting because the news and media and movies and music videos can be as "advertiser unfriendly" as they want and still get ads to support the corporation that produces it. But indie content creators and the general public are punished for talking about the same topics.
Corporations get freedom of speech, freedom of reach, no consequences. The people do not.
To the HN crowd, sorry but I'm not going to hold back. Death does not turn you into a saint. Susan is the one who turned YouTube into the censored mess it is today, pushed for unliked mainstream channels over popular organic content creators (changed the algorith to push late night talk shows), ruined the algorith to always push "authoritarian" channels (CNN, CBS, MSN, NBC, PBS, etc), gave creators the option to disable the dislike button, permanently banned thousands of channels that even mentioned "pedophilia" like Mouthy Buddha's channel during the Q-anon nonsense. Creators at the time made 30 minute long videos analyzing data and proving that the recommended mainstream channels being pushed were inorganic.
She helped ruin YouTube. I will not apologize. Bye Susan. Come back in your next life and help fix it. Downvote away. I do not care.
YouTube doesn't print money out of thin air. They make money by making advertisers happy, and advertisers will only buy ads if their customers are happy. This isn't anything new either. Creatives have always been beholden to censorship boards in traditional media too, which are typically much stricter. The fact that you so many YouTubers make money from criticizing YouTube is evidence of how much YouTubers don't understand their own privilege.
Are their advertisers happy?
They continue to pay for ads, so yeah for now. That is the kind of "happiness" companies care about.
Demonetisation is not the same as censoring though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
This is evident in (e.g.) WW2 documentaries where an old 4:3 television broadcast is simply put online, and the original footage had perhaps footage of corpses but on Youtube it is blurred.
YouTube’s algorithm feeds increasingly radicalizing content to young people. It makes celebrities of people like Andrew Tate and is a primary enabler of fringe belief bubbles.
Any time someone posts a YouTube link to a political discussion, it’s guaranteed to be the worst nonsense that pries on people who “do their own research.” (No matter if they’re left or right on the political spectrum, there’s endless junk on YouTube for both.)
There’s surely good stuff on YouTube, but as a parent I honestly wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared overnight.
That is not an “algorithm” unique to YouTube. See 24/7 news channels for a much earlier example. It is simply the nature of loosening standards on broadly available media, and throughout history, even strict standards have not always prevented the “bad” stuff from getting through.
News channels don’t show random 30-minute programs created by viewers themselves. YouTube does.
Fox News and CNN may have low journalistic standards, but at least they have some. They also have liability. (Fox paid $787 million to a voting equipment manufacturer as settlement for lies they published in relation to the 2020 election.)
YouTube has neither. Their algorithm will happily promote any nonsense that has traction. The lies that cost Fox $787 million continue to circulate on YouTube unabated — and an untold number of other lies too. Alphabet has no reason to prevent this.
The greatest sin of YouTube's current recommendation algorithm is its optimization for eyeball time (aka more ad capacity).
Any tweaks around the edges will never be able to compete with that.
And unfortunately that central tenet incentivizes creators to make clickbait content that plays on emotions, because that's the most reliable way to deliver what YouTube wants.
(YouTube could decide it was optimizing for something else, but that would put a big dent in ad revenue)
How do you fix this without doing something even worse?
By banning Indian school children and sucking the oxygen out of competing influences like Pewdiepie.
Who's banning Indian school children?
As targeted towards young people, YouTube's algorithm serves up a lot more Mr. Beast than Andrew Tate.
Government-coordinated censorship during Covid. That’s my negative opinion.
Covid vax concerns were allowed during the last months of the Trump administration, but it suddenly became censored after Biden was elected.
The timeline of the election coincides with the development of the vaccines.
Moderna reported positive phase 3 trial results in November 2020. FDA’s review was completed in December and an emergency authorization was granted. The full trial results were published in medical journals a few months later, around the same time as Biden entered office.
So maybe it had nothing to do with Trump/Biden and simply was a reaction by YouTube to the proven efficacy of the new vaccines.
That’s not a coincidence—they deliberately delayed reporting the trial results until after the election because they were worried that good news would help Trump.
Haven’t heard this conspiracy theory before.
So which is it: 1) The mRNA vaccine was rushed out without sufficient clinical trials; 2) The results from the clinical trials were delayed to hurt Trump.
You can’t have both you know. So far the far-right argument has been entirely based on scenario 1, but it’s certainly interesting to know that scenario 2 also exists for some people.
Here’s reporting from MIT Technology Review, a bastion of far-right conspiracy theories: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign...
Operation Warp Speed was a signature effort of the Trump administration. As a result, the claim that the vaccine was being “rushed out without sufficient clinical trials” was made by just about all of Trump’s critics.
Nine months from formulating the vaccine to a successful Phase 3 trial is record speed. There’s no way the vaccine was held up to somehow politically hurt the president.
I’m a Trump critic and I was happy with the priority given to Operation Warp Speed. It’s the only thing he did right during the pandemic. But a lot of the MAGA crowd are anti-vaxxers, so he’s been trying to distance himself from the successful vaccine operation.
My complaint is that there isn't a family subscription option in my country. Also without Music. It's either personal with Music or damn annoying commercials. Another complaint would be non transparent and sometimes wrong censorship.
I like a lot of content hosted on YouTube but that doesn't mean I like YouTube, especially under Google.
The fact that it’s a linchpin component of an illegal monopoly is one good reason.
I was always critical of YouTube from the sort of technical perspective than just pure UX. The core product and the core UX are great and I'm even considering getting YouTube Premium because I use YouTube so much. All in all, YouTube was and still is internet phenomena and they definitely dominate internet video, imo one of the best internet product ever created.
YouTube has worked well.
However, I did try their YT Premium, for a while, and was incredibly disappointed in their UI.
I assume that the Premium UI was designed for people that use their free tier, but is very strange, to folks like me, who come from other paid services.
But I am likely not their target audience. I suppose that YT Premium does well.
I’m not sure what you mean about the UI, but I pay for YouTube Premium exclusively so I don’t have to see ads, and for that purpose alone, to me it’s worth it.
Why not just use an ad blocker?
Why not pay for a product you use instead of being a leech? It is perfectly fine if you wanna leech, but understand not everyone wanna do that.
Not looking at an advertisement is not “being a leech.”
I glance away from billboards, I refill my drink during commercial breaks, I show up when the movie starts instead of when the preview starts. These are normal behaviors, not leech behaviors. The ads are not very sophisticated, so I don’t need sophisticated measures to avoid them. On the web, the ads have ratcheted up the intensity (tracking, targeting) with technology and in response I have augmented my ability to ignore with technology. That’s fair.
You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers. It is perfectly fine if you want to guzzle Kiwi Black, but understand not everyone wants to do that.
Reminder, or new thing for those not already aware: there was already a lawsuit about automatically skipping commercials, and the broadcaster in that lawsuit lost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Broadcasting_Co._v._Dish_N...
I'd rather move towards a web (largely) without ads than continue to be the product sold to advertisers rather than the consumer served by the platform. The constant escalation of the ad blocker-ad server war has also contributed greatly to ballooning complexity in all sorts of technologies.
I hope YT Premium is a step in that direction, but only time will tell.
Well you are both the customer and the product with YT Premium. Yeah you don't see ads, but they are still tracking everything you watch and using that to deliver targeted ads to you on other platforms.
don’t know any for YT ioS, i used to live with ads on mobile but after getting premium, even though i use an ad blocker + firefox on desktop, i never canceled it for a reason
also YT on a tv is difficult to set up an ad blocker for
I, for one, will pay for good things.. but also, it’s worth it if you watch a lot of YouTube on things like AppleTV or Fire Cube. Ad blockers won’t work there.
Well, YouTube premium will work on every device you can sign in to YouTube on. Adblock is available for the most part, but isn't easily available everywhere.
Also useful to be able to download videos for offline viewing, e.g., on a plane or when internet is spotty.
Also for background playback on mobile
There is no "Premium UI". Premium is simply regular YouTube without ads.
I think maybe the above poster is referencing the music product, but that's just a guess.
No, it was the movie channel. I tried it out, because YT Premium had a particular show I wanted to see.
The biggest issue that I had, was that I couldn't find shows that I wanted to see. YT kept shoving a bunch of stuff into the UI that I wasn't interested in. All my searches were littered with results that were not relevant to me. I suspect they were paid.
The Apple App Store has the same problem. It's infuriating.
Listen, I apologize for diverting from the real issue, that a tech luminary died young. I did not know her, but it sounds like she was popular, and did well.
Do you mean YouTube tv?
Why?
Serious question, too. You can sideload clients that give you every single feature of YouTube Premium for free. Unless you're expressly lazy, like being taken advantage of or enjoy watching advertisements, there's really no excuse. YouTube Premium is the "I'm trapped in this place and you people have finally gotten me" fee - you can circument it all together by just, not using YouTube's software. Newpipe is must-have on Android, I'm certain something similar exists for iOS. I run SmartTube on my dirt-cheap Amazon FireTV and don't get a single ad when browsing. Subtotal is $0.00 for the installation and usage of Open Source software.
I use YouTube a lot, but between uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (which I set-and-forget like 4 years ago) I don't have a single gripe with the experience. I hear people contemplate paying YouTube for a worse experience and it gives me hives. The content is on a server; you are making yourself miserable by acquiescing to a harmful client. Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.
Why do I pick up trash off the floor that I didn’t put there? Why do I tip for good service? Why do I bother responding to posts like this?
The answer is the same to all these questions: because I’d rather not live in a world where everyone is a taker.
You're not picking up trash. You're paying for trash and encouraging the ad-littering business by even acknowledging it exists. If you consider advertising bad enough to pay money to get rid of it, why would you pay that money to the business putting up ads? Because you refuse to leave their client? Because you don't want to acknowledge the scary world of choosing something better?
I see a lot of people say this, where they despise YouTube and it's advertisement scheme but somehow mentally justify it to themselves that Google deserves their $10/month. Before any of you ask "What's wrong with the world these days!?" again, reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it. The free market can pound sand, Google has you right where they want you.
Yes, that’s me. I sometimes even pay other people to prepare meals and manufacture clothing for me!
YouTube is absolutely the business that is resting on laurels, just like Google Maps and Gmail. Sometime I wonder if these products have any real active development teams at all besides ads. YouTube massively screwed with users by forcing poorly executed botched migration to YouTube Music. Even outsiders can see that this was entirely internal Google politics which powerful people like Wojcicki should have been able to avoid but she didn't. It just makes me wonder if these billionaire leaders of Google products really care anymore about anything. There is visibly an utter lack of hunger at the top and these people clearly should have been spending more time with family leaving these products with more hungry minds. YouTube recommendations are crap and it's still amazing that in 2024 just clicking one video will fill up most of recommendations with same thing. It never got around to incentivize creators to produce concise content and to this day creators keep producing massive 30 min diatribe that could have been done in 3 mins. TikTok took full advantage of this but YouTube CEO just kept napping at the wheel. Ultimately, the original product mostly just kept going but the measure of success is not about retaining audience but what it could have been if there was an ambitious visionary leader at the helm.
Why on Earth would you want shorter videos? The best thing about YouTube is that it's one of the only places you can find quality medium-to-long-form content.
Why on earth you want 10X longer video with same information content as the shorter video?
Why on earth would you watch a 1.5 hour movie when you can watch a 2 min TikTok that explains the entire story?
In a world full of distractions I for one love the more slow-paced videos than “shorts” churned out by content mills designed to feed the modern day digital ADHD…
Few years ago “long burn” story telling was hot and we are still feeling the effects. Take any show on Netflix and it will be 8 45min episodes from which first 3 are absolutely garbage filler.
Youtube learned the wrong lesson and started to optimize the algorithm for retention and length. It is annoying to click for a review of some product that looks like a lengthy one with probably tests and what not only to see painfully slow unboxing and a wikipedia read of the history of the product and company and then sponsor read and then they turn on the device for a minute and give arbitrary score.
Exact same info could have been communicated in 30seconds, but then they wouldn’t get sponsor money and mid video ad roll
10 minutes of a shitty movie is too long, but one great movie might be not enough and I want a TV series out of it!
Clearly the add-supported side, that likes to pad and pad and show more adds, is working against the premium/fee-supported side, that wants to maximise value and engagement. Premium subscribers should be able to give feedback on a video's density IMHO...
Length is shown in the thumbnail. Too long, no click, less views. I also wouldn't be surprised if the recommendation algo uses premium status as an input
I find it a small price to pay if a few videos are too long (you can usually tell within three minutes anyway), to have a platform that generally encourages 30 minute videos and even 3 hour videos that do have content.
There's almost no meaningful 3 minute content possible, so a platform like TikTok that only works for short videos is basically condemned to be meaning-less, to be pure entertainment.
YouTube videos were originally limited to 5 or 10 minutes I think. And probably 480p or so. You have to remember when it started, video on mobile didn't exist and there was absolutely no bandwidth for it. So people watching YouTube were watching it on their PC, probably with a 1024x768 CRT screen, and that's assuming they had something faster than dial-up internet.
Oh, I do remember, I was around in the early days. I think (but maybe that came later?) longer form videos did exist, but only paying accounts could post them.
Maybe not what the commenter was saying, but there is a difference between great multi-hour essays and pointless rants stretching out their length to meet a minimum ad requirement. I like watching a lot of multi hour videos, but you can tell the difference between one with substance and one repeating the same thing over and over so they can "clock out."
That's all due to changes by YouTube to reward length and frequency, which of course makes sense for maximizing their ad revenue. But the result is creators are incentivized to pump out 20-minute fluff videos, not well edited/written videos.
People on here complain about SEO sites being filled with meaningless garbage. That's what YouTube is starting to be. The difference is their search bar still works whereas Google's will only give you the garbage. Though I still get "such and such breaks down their career" even though I've never clicked on that.
I agree that there are a lot of inflated videos to hit some ad target. But the solution is not to encourage people to create short videos, or at the very least, not the way TikTok did, making it almost impossible to popularize anything longer than 3 minutes.
And despite all the dredge, there is a lot of good content on YouTube, at least in certain niches. Video essays on media and politics, lots of video-game analysis and other fan communities, history content, lots of e-sports to name just a handful that I personally enjoy.
To a fairly casual observer like myself, YouTube early on looked like mostly a platform for massive video copyright infringement--especially before home video became so relatively cheap and easy. I don't use it nearly as much as some here but it definitely transformed into something much different for the most part and managed to make it work as a business (at least as part of Google).
Younger folks forget that YouTube launched (2005) a few years before both the iPhone launched and Netflix pivoted to streaming (2007).
In that weird era, (a) average home Internet connections became fast enough to support streaming video (with a healthy adoption growth rate), (b) the most widely deployed home recording device was likely still the VCR (digitizing analog video from cable to burn to DVD was a pain), (c) there was no "on demand" anything, as most media flowed over centrally-programmed cable or broadcast subscriptions, and (d) people capturing video on mobile devices was rare (first gen iPhone couldn't) but obviously a future growth area.
So early YouTube was literally unlike anything that came before -- watch a thing you want, whenever you want.
That was also an era where bandwidth to serve content was extremely expensive, I still don't know how 2005 YouTube was able to find a way to make serving user-uploaded videos for free financially viable, but that was a HUGE component of their success.
I think the secret was being acquired by Google. Without the deep financial pockets and strategic patience of Google, I doubt they would have been able to become what they are today.
Also, the DMCA had just passed, which basically eliminated liability for hosting copyrighted video content as long as the infringement was laundered through a service provider.
I honestly don’t think YouTube would exist without that particular piece of regulatory capture.
Contrast the video and podcast ecosystems.
Podcasts are arguably much healthier (the publishers maintain creative control), and are certainly decentralized.
Self-hosting video at scale is still pretty expensive although using CDN can reduce it.
The slogan "Broadcast Yourself" was really inspiring at the time, because it actually was kinda hard to do that at scale in video.
Wow I just realized how old YouTube is. My video on YouTube was uploaded on 2006 and it is still there.
I remember uploading it from my Sony handcam, then editing it in Sony Vegas and exporting it to make sure it hits the required YT file upload limit.
And Cisco didn't acquire Flip until 2009.
Really most of the content that YouTube had available was material recorded off of broadcast/cable which was mostly not available otherwise unless you had recorded it or gotten it off a torrent.
To a less casual observer like myself, early YouTube looked like a bastion of protection for fair use of copyrighted material.
Sadly, the copyright cartel swiftly attacked and all the regular people lost their rights. It seems like the lesson learned is that the copyright-owning corporations can't be trusted to play fairly or meet in the middle on fair use. We really need to just abolish copyright laws entirely.
Yeah I remember watching Seinfeld and full seasons of cartoons on early YouTube. People basically just uploaded their whole pirated video collections there
I would say it’s more a business that rests on its monopolization of the market. As a product there’s plenty I like about YouTube, but it dominated the market through the use of many highly anti-competitive strategies, and has what many would consider (and what may well be proven to be) an illegal monopoly.
You can’t deny its impact, but to give such high praise to the management seems rather misguided to me.
In what way is YouTube an illegal monopoly?
Alphabet has engaged in many anti-competitive business practices to promote YouTube's monopoly.
To name a few, Alphabet is currently being sued by the DoJ for illegally monopolising digital advertising technology. That technology, which directly integrates with youtube (and which you or I could not integrate with our own competing youtube-like product), is one of the key reasons that youtube has become as successful as it is.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl...
They have also recently lost a lawsuit regarding the legality of their search monopoly, which likely also contributed to the success of youtube.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us...
The way they leverage the OHA to ensure YouTube is shipped with every Android phone is also highly anti-competitive, and isn't too different from the IE case against Microsoft.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on...
The same concern exists in the smart TV market.
While it's not illegal (as far as I know), the practice of burning through billions of dollars until your competitors are gone and you have an unassailable market dominance is also certainly anti-competitive, and that really has been one of the other key ingredients in youtube's success.
None of these are management practices that I would consider worthy of congratulating.
The irony is that despite all of this monopolization and lying to advertisers about the reach of their ads YouTube is still not profitable.
Alphabet don’t publish YouTube’s profit margins, so I don’t think you know that to be a fact. I’d personally be rather surprised if it wasn’t profitable though.
Leveraging YouTube's market share to hobble Windows Phone. https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-orders-microsoft-to-remove...
Carriage dispute with Roku. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/roku-reaches-agreement-with-...
I hope that when I die no one spends so much focus on the business aspects of what I built or the valuations
HN is essentially a business development forum so it makes sense that's what people here would focus on.
It's also a science forum and a tech forum.
Doesn't that depend on what context a person knew you at - personal or professional?
The personal side typically will center on emotional aspects of being human. However what you do with your intellect is also a major part of being human. And that part is most often expressed only in our professional lives.
Celebrating a job well done and an outsized impact is a good thing - and if I may, the most "human" of things to do?
RIP.
Luckily, you will never know, so I wouldn’t place much weight on it.
My dad uses it to get fascist/right-wing propaganda for about 4 hours every night. All nicely monetized for any grifter willing to debase themselves for a potential fortune. Truly novel, but not well thought through or done with any care at all besides profits which is par for the course in silicon valley.
Your idea of fascism must be rather tame, considering YouTube’s active censorship of anything even slightly right-of-center.
It hardly needs to be violently racist or whatever conception you have in your mind to be fascist propaganda. Rather the opposite if you take a minute to consider what makes for effective propaganda.
The word fascism needs to stop being tossed around so carelessly. Words ought to be precise and meaningful.
YouTube has very much been resting on its laurels, they were innovative 20 years ago when they started. For the past decade or so they have mostly just rested on their laurels allowing the auto-moderation to rampage and destroy people's livelihoods.
They've been way behind on adding standard features that their competitors see lots of benefit from. For example, YouTube was years late to the 'channel memberships' game despite the popularity of Twitch and Patreon. YouTube still lacks many of the popular streaming features from Twitch, and only relatively recently got around to adding stuff like polls. I can't think of any feature in the past decade that was a YouTube innovation rather than an innovation from competitors that was copied over years later.
I've often wondered why YT hasn't released a subscription fee or donate type button where they could easily take a small nominal processing fee while removing the friction of forcing use of 3rd party services. Is liability from that kind of money movement too much for them to care with all of the much less risky money they are making?
They have both. Subscription fee is channel memberships, and donation is the “Thanks” button.
They have Memberships now and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have a donate button hidden away somewhere.
I think googles peering agreements are possibly the only reason YouTube is viable as a free service. Hard to compete against a company who basically doesn't have to pay for bandwidth.
Google also invests many billions of dollars to build their internet network and parts of the public Internet so it is hardly free
Eh close to free. This is the Google edge nodes in ISPs. But Google isn’t the only one with such an arrangement. Akamai, Netflix and a few others have same cost structure for in isp nodes.
More than 20,000 hours over at most 18 years is at least 3 hours per day on average. That’s a lot of watching.
The average person spends 5 hours/day on their phone and it’s likely most of it is passive watching (YouTube, TikTok, etc). So 3 hours/day doesn’t sound like too much.
Well said! Having used almost all video learning platforms (Oreilly, skillshare, pluralsight, Coursera etc.), I now believe that YouTube is the superset of all platforms.
The way YouTube was caught offguard by TikTok is even more significant than than the way Google was caught offguard by ChatGPT.
YouTube is how I got the education I needed to get into the tech industry.
Agreed, I have gotten insane amount of value from YouTube.