YouTube is a mysterious monopoly

Posted by geerlingguy 9/9/2025

YouTube is a mysterious monopoly(anderegg.ca)

370 points | 478 commentspage 4

jpalomaki 9/9/2025|

I first thought it would be easy for content creators to start selling their content on other platforms as well. But the algorithms come to play. It is likely valuable that the hardcore fans are watching and liking the videos on YouTube, since that increases the probability of the algorithms to push the videos to new viewers as well.

carlosjobim 9/10/2025||

> I also think that YouTube is a monopoly. There are some alternatives — I also pay for Nebula, for example — but they’re tiny in comparison. YouTube is effectively the place to watch video on the internet.

I've heard about an online video website called Netflix. Don't know if anybody is using it though.

boriskourt 9/10/2025|

Let me find some Blender and Unreal Engine tutorials on this Netflix site, thanks for directing me to this indieweb marvel! :)

(maybe a tear-down of my washer is there too!)

carlosjobim 9/10/2025||

"McDonalds is a monopoly in fast food"

"But there's more Subway restaurants than McDonalds restaurants"

"I can't get a burger at Subway, therefore McDonalds is a monopoly."

cheerioty 9/10/2025||

Love YouTube, but between the price hikes and being fed nothing but shorts and doom-scroll bait, they’re pushing me to the edge. For the former, it feels like every streaming service (audio or video) is starting pave the way for a new golden age of piracy and personal content collections.

comonoid 9/10/2025||

Russia tries to push its population to "alternatives" like Rutube(sic!) and VK Video by interfering into network connectivity (they call it "slowing down", they just drop fraction of packets that goes from YouTube servers), but it seems the success is quite limited.

eimrine 9/10/2025|

Have you heard an anecdote about the cat and the mustard?

delduca 9/9/2025||

My bet is that some of these channels actually do real and honest reviews. So what’s the point of companies spending millions on YouTube ads if those same channels they criticized get more views—precisely because they’re better and more honest? I feel like this is a kind of selective nerf.

Bratmon 9/10/2025||

As someone under the age of 30, it took me a while to realize that this wasn't a parody post.

Making a post with this title without mentioning TikTok or Instagram is like making a post titled "Pepsi is a mysterious monopoly" without once mentioning Coke.

ChrisNorstrom 9/10/2025||

Hot Take: Youtube is terrible. It's a time sink that's filled with billions of videos that take 15-20 minutes to talk about a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time. Text is skimmable and easily absorbable, Video is not.

Agraillo 9/10/2025||

> ... a topic that's worth only 1-3 minutes of your time

It's even worse sometimes, googling some "how to" queries returns links to yt-videos. Even if the video is 5 minutes, it's a waste of time, because I'm usually in the middle of an ongoing process when dozens variants are evaluated and an average dedicated time for a single one is much shorter.

Transcripts sometimes help. But not the native (no diarization as long as I remember). An example, Lex Fridman podcast is a good source of anecdata from famous science/tech/non-tech people and provides good transcripts on the site (but only starting some point in the past). For transcripts before this point v1.transcript.lol covered many, but amongst other glitches no names for diarization (Speaker 1/ Speaker 2).

RankingMember 9/10/2025|||

Out of the box, I agree. I've got my feed well-curated at this point such that I get very little of that type of garbage pushed my way. I recently viewed the YouTube main page in an incognito window and, good lord, the default experience is an absolute cesspool of AI-generated nonsense, ragebait, and straight-up spam.

Insanity 9/10/2025||

I'm not sure it's a hot take. I don't learn as easily from video as I do from text, but I seem to have curated my video recommendations to videos that I do like to watch as 'infotainment'.

e.g, Veritasium is a channel I quite like for their longer 'mini-documentary' like videos. And then there are just entertainment channels like Linus Tech Tips.

Not _everything_ has to be micro-optimized in my life, so I don't mind occasionally just sitting in the sofa watching a video that could have been a 3 minute blog :)

benob 9/9/2025||

> YouTube views seem to have fallen off a cliff recently

So they started discounting AI data collection bots?

SchemaLoad 9/9/2025|

Youtube pretty aggressively blocks automated usage now. If you connect via a VPN it won't show any videos until you log in. Considering that ad income and real engagement seems unchanged, it possibly is just that they started blocking bots better. Something you wouldn't strictly expect a public announcement over.

chii 9/9/2025||

I also find that they block incognito mode a lot too - esp. on android when you use a hacked client like revanced (less so in the browser, but i use firefox and have seen incognito mode causing youtube to block you from viewing without logging in).

dismalaf 9/10/2025||

No one will disrupt YouTube unless they offer better compensation to creators. YouTube is probably the single best place to monetize content online right now, nowhere else comes close; not TikTok, Instagram, even Twitch...

brador 9/9/2025|

Views are down reasons: AI bot catchers now live and new ip blocks on vpns and cloud servers.

goku12 9/9/2025|

Likes and comments are steady, apparently. How do you reconcile the reduced views with that? Anyway, nearly one-third to one-half of my video suggestions are bot videos. Honestly quite distasteful. They should just ask the users to flag them, instead of employing even more bots who're ever so enthusiastic to kick out those who do not belong to their race.

3RTB297 9/9/2025|||

I didn't make the comment you're replying to, but views can exist independent of comments and likes, and bots can just as easily like and comment.

Likes and comments by real humans can remain steady and bot views can vary dramatically. Likes and comments aren't metrics that produce revenue for creators.

brador 9/9/2025|||

There’s also black hats bulk producing AI videos and pushing those with bot farms, which reduces slots available to non AI/farm creators.

Survival of the clickbaitiest.

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