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Posted by geerlingguy 4 days ago

YouTube is a mysterious monopoly(anderegg.ca)
368 points | 477 commentspage 4
carlosjobim 3 days ago|
> 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 3 days ago|
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 3 days ago||
"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."

Bratmon 3 days ago||
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.

comonoid 3 days ago||
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 3 days ago|
Have you heard an anecdote about the cat and the mustard?
apricot13 4 days ago||
fwiw I (a YouTube premium subscriber) recently enabled restricted mode myself due to the app showing me completely unrelated and 'scary' videos in searches.

After some searching I found a few threads where others had encountered this and restricted mode was the only thing that seemed to stop these videos and honestly they're jarring and unwanted enough for me to warrant enabling restricted mode and all the features it disables - YouTube please please stop these unrelated 'jump scare' videos!

as an example I'm scrolling through videos on how to fix a leaky tap at 10pm I'll come across a thumbnail 5 videos down with a ghostly face or trypophobia type thumbnail then another 5-10 videos down. in no way are they highlighted as sponsored and I find it hard to believe that Google with it's search skills and other far more relevant videos in the results can be returning these videos as results!

dismalaf 3 days ago||
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...
jpalomaki 4 days ago||
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.
delduca 4 days ago||
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.
ChrisNorstrom 3 days ago||
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 3 days ago||
> ... 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 3 days ago|||
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 3 days ago||
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 :)

xnx 3 days ago||
YouTube is great, but most content is unwatchable at 1.0x speed. Without the Video Speed Controller extension (still better than the built-in speed controls), I doubt I'd watch at all.
benob 4 days ago|
> YouTube views seem to have fallen off a cliff recently

So they started discounting AI data collection bots?

SchemaLoad 4 days ago|
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 4 days ago||
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).
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