Nowadays I start with a forum/reddit/discord/hn search for a list of hive approved creators and only then go to youtube with that list in hand. Starting the search in youtube (unless for a very niche/non-marketable topics) is close to worthless.

It drives me CRAZY!

How often I want to know something about a product (something less popular than smartphones, let's say IP cameras) and I find only ~3 reviews, I watch them all and they are all full of BS, because the reviewer has no experience with the product type they are given, they just follow the manual/or some given instructions by the sponsor how to make the product work. So I still know nothing about the product, its pros and cons and I can spot mistakes and BS even in those basic info that was given. In this specific case of IP cameras for example there are TONS of videos NOT showing the real video feed (recordings) from the camera, they just record the smartphone screen with another smartphone/camera and that's it.

When I discovered this practice from a well known SEO guru, I was both sad and angry.

I watch those videos to learn something new about the product (actual pros and cons, specific feature implementations, ...). But most of the time the "reviewer" basically reads the product description and goes over the list of features that I can find on literally any shop page that has that product.

It's so hard to find videos of people that have actually used the product for longer periods of time and can give an actual review.

Nowadays all review article just work off the specs without using and testing the products. And the user reviews have moved to Amazon, which are mostly very poor quality or just fakes, or possibly reviews for other products. In any case, there are no incentives to give high quality reviews of products, and google seems to have no incentive to show me the few remaining real review blogs.

I've also found user reviews on Home Depot to be more helpful than most. I'm not sure what they're doing to combat spam, but it seems to be working.

Meanwhile if you ignore all the commercial Youtubers and look for regular people using the product, you might end up with a more 'authentic' review, but also with an equally uninformative one, as most people just don't have access to all the latest tech gadgets on the market. They just have the one they are reviewing right now, so it's hard to get any meaningful comparisons.

There are a couple of good review sites left, but not nearly enough to cover all the tech stuff that gets released in the wild.

A wake-up call that a single company annihilated our ability to sort out information for ourselves. I'm still rather disturbed and shaken.

How can you sort something you know nothing about?

Downvotes, and their ratio to upvotes, were an important signal to get an idea of how good the video overall was.

It's a pointless feature at this point if you ask me.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/return-youtub...

If you only ever look at the front page of Reddit, you're going to be fed memes and outrage. If you go and subscribe to a few small, focused subreddits, you're going to see things that are relevant to you.

Same with YouTube. If you watch a lot of junk content, that's what it's going to feed you in recommendations. If you focus on some specific segment of content, it'll give you that instead.

For example I watch a bunch of creators that build stuff (e.g. Tested, ThisOldTony, AvE) and as a result I get recommendations for other relevant creators, like Alec Steele, James Bruton, Tom Stanton and Colin Furze.

When I see recommendations I don't like, I flag them with "not interested" or "don't recommend channel".

There's definitely still organic, passion-driven content out there, especially with new fan-funding mechanisms like Patreon, you just need to focus on it, because it's really easy for YouTube to shovel junk down your throat, if you give it the chance.

I've got some channels I watch that don't have production crews (I think) like "Under Dunn" and I enjoy them every bit as much as the big ones you named, if not more... But there's no doubt that even they pay at least some attention to monetization.

I also heavily curate my recommendations. It's kind of painful because there's so much crap, but I do still find channels that I enjoy once in a while. They generally aren't new channels, though, just ones I hadn't found yet.

A few of my channels got really stupid about monetization, though. One of my woodworking channels recently said that he wasn't going to do any more content like his old content because it doesn't attract new viewers. He's very much trying to make that channel be his day job, and it ruined it for me. I almost never watch his new stuff, but I guess others do, so... Oh well.

In the old days the content was only driven by passion, because it wasn't really possible to make a living or fund a production team.

These days, you get guys like Colin Furze who are able to do what they're passionate about full-time, with nice equipment and staff to support them.

Tom Scott is another good example. He has a production team behind him but his content is still "here's a genuinely interesting thing I wanted to show you", maybe with a short, very obviously marked sponsored segment.

His formula is taking topics that have been covered by other creators, dumbing the content down a bit, adding a sponsor block and a clickbait title. There's no effort expended in contributing new topics, or adding new colour to existing topics because researching that requires too much time and expertise to repeat day after day.

Why is that a problem? People don't like it when the audio and video quality are good ? Or they don't like it when content producers focus entirely on content creating instead of moonlighting (with the necessary associations with sponsors and what not). I don't mind either, and having seen a few channels "grow" into a more professional outfit, i vastly prefer the new, more qualitative version, even if it wastes me a few seconds for monetisation.

But far too often, it feels like the person made the video just for the money, instead of because it's something their viewers would actually like to see.

Colin Furze has done remarkably little of this, but some of my other channels have entire videos that were obviously just to be a commercial, and the content is almost unlike the other channel content. Seeing one of those feels like they've wasted my time for their own profit, and that feels bad. And you often can't tell if it's going to be a whole video like that, or just an up-front sponsor message.

With all due respect, your whole post smells of "blame the victim", or "you are not doing it right" vibes. I think we can all agree that the big numbers in YT are in videos made explicitly for that, where some new stars arose due to the new media but now it's not that different from mainstream TV (yes, there is still this plus that if you dig deep enough you might find something worth that the TV didn't have due to much lower bandwidth, but I would ignore that since you can/could do that "in the Internet" anyway).

There are a bunch of niche youtube channels that don't get a ton of views that seem to support via Patreon (or there just retired).

I mean sometimes the sponsorships make sense. The video about how to change your car's heating/vent fan, came with a link to a place to buy said fan (It was in line with other prices so I used it).

In the how to do things department Youtube is King. Even very obscure things. I had a hubbard squash and needed to open it... you tube had it. Not sure some of those methods where the best, but I found one that was effective.

So it is still impossible to decide today that I want to see good reviews of some technology category, whereas I am usually interested in something completely different.

Google, and I assume Youtube as well, tries really hard to connect all my different accounts and identities on different devices, browsers. That closes the escape hatch that I could have one browser identity focused on topic A and another on topic B. All in all we have to be honest here. Youtube only interest is to serve us content that will make us watch more content. They have absolutely no incentive to show me content, that is relevant to me.

Recommendation engines like YouTube are way too confident in their own abilities, to the point that they hide first-class operations like these behind the little three-dot menu on videos. They support negative feedback reluctantly, to the detriment of society.

I bet you their reasoning is "well, not many people use it so it doesn't need to be up front", but the problem is that it must be used in order to tailor the feed correctly, and now many people don't even know it's an option because it's hidden.

When I was 17 I started learning for about 8 months but then stopped due to various reasons. I'm 35 now and picking it back up again and the most mind blowing aspect of it is how much content there is on YouTube to help learner drivers, compared to back then!

There are loads of creators (usually driving instructors) creating really good instructional videos with helpful visuals for everything you could think of for driving in the UK and how to pass the high bar of the UK practical test.

It's been an invaluable resource and new content seems to come out everyday exploring different topics. Yes some of the channels are sponsored, usually by car insurance companies, but it's not intrusive

Same here. I exercise daily at home. A few months ago, on a whim, I bought some kettlebells, which I used to see in the gym but had never used before. Once I started searching for and watching kettlebell instruction videos on YouTube, I started getting more such videos as recommendations. Some of the videos were really good, and they helped me learn how to exercise with kettlebells safely and effectively.

Among the recommendations were also some videos about maces, or macebells, which I had never even heard of. Intrigued, I ordered a couple, and now I have added them to my daily workout, too. I never would have discovered them, or learned how to use them, if it weren’t for YouTube.

Occasionally I dip into YouTube rabbit holes for subjects I was interested in when I was young (I’m sixty-five now), things like music theory or woodcraft or typography. I am always impressed at how much easier it is to learn such things on one’s own now than it was fifty years ago. Instruction books and searches of the wider web are also useful, of course, but for learning anything with a visual and/or audio component YouTube is fantastic.

When you face the facts, it's just two 45-50 minute tests and each has a 45% pass ratio, so it's nowhere near as bad as people make it sound. You can easily pass on the first or second attempt if you study enough.

Failing your test can cost you loads of money in extra lessons, car hire, testing. It's so useful to be able to see lessons online and get better. Financially, I think YouTube lessons and tests can save the average learner £500-1000.

It's mostly good marketing for the instructors, I think - you get to know their personality and chops before you put down the quite large amount of money required for a full suite of lessons. And it's just good PR - adding value and all that...

UK: https://www.youtube.com/c/UKDashCameras/videos

AU: https://www.youtube.com/c/DashCamOwnersAustralia/videos

both drive on the same side.

"I'll just watch one while I eat lunch" is a slippery slope.

https://www.youtube.com/c/AdvanceDrivingSchoolThurston

https://www.youtube.com/c/GetDriving

YouTube hadn't been founded when you were 17, so it isn't particularly surprising that it didn't have eLearning content back then.

Back then the best you would have got was some onerous DVD-ROM software with low resolution videos and poor presentation, or at least very awkward. Like the training videos you get given at work...

YT, or even videos in general, don't have a monopoly for that though. Eg. in my country some Sundays are shopping, some are not. Every now and then I need to google it out to find out if the shops are open next Sunday, and inevitably at the top of search results will sit a 4 screens long blog post starting with an 'immersive' story to the tune of "Imagine you wake up on Sunday morning, and your fridge is empty. That's a bummer, huh?", followed by paragraphs and paragraphs of such fluff with the only information any sane person could care about buried somewhere near the end : )

Or blog posts that explain every little thing related to a topic before the information you searched for. In your case, for the article "Shops that are open on Sunday in 2022", <h2> titles would be:

"What is Sunday?"

"What is shopping?"

"Why you should prefer to shop on Sundays?"

"Is the distance to the shop important?"

"Remember to carry money"

etc...

It bursts at seams with brilliant "do not say!" type of tutorials - one my favorites is "How to Survive a Coup". Here's some of the advice given by the expert authors (who clearly must have survived a few coups back in the day):

"The most important thing to do during a coup is to stay out of range of gunfire [...] Stay tuned into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to get regular updates on what is happening [...] If you have television, then you can also try watching your local news channel for updates [...] Leave the country or go to a safer region if the conflict continues"

So remember, try staying out of range of gunfire and don't forget to subscribe, everyone

And it's become so professional, so impersonal, that watching now feels much more like a chore

And we now have this knee-jerk reaction to aggressively cut through fluff even when there's actually no fluff.

Back in the day the list of shopping Sundays would be printed in my pocketbook calendar that I'd buy in early January. And it would be a simple list without all the "...shopping for goods is such an important part of life, you need to eat after all (sometimes too much, am I right!). But did you know that on some days..." BS. Because paper is an actual commodity, and no editor would publish a pocketbook calendar the size of a brick. Unlike paper though, kilobytes cost nothing, so there you go.

For avoiding channels that are effectively spam, 'Channel Blocker' is helpful by adding an 'x' button you can click to block videos from that channel from being displayed. Another one, 'BlockTube' is good too which lets you auto-block videos based on keywords in video titles.

There are exceptions in every type of media where some people are still putting out content for reasons other than money. The key difference to the Internet is that the cost of content creation remains low. That isn't true of TV, Movies, or radio.

So rather than just saying "It has peaked", I encourage people to take action - put out good content, stop looking at bad content, and stop making the first question when people create something online, "How are you going to monetize this?"

I feel like a decade ago discoverability of those little corners of the internet where someone is passionate about something and writes a blog about it was better. Trying to search for reviews has always been tough, but it's impossible to find anything that's not monetized to the hell and back for something like "best tent for camping" or "tent reviews 2022".

The closest I've found is millionshort.com, which does have some nice filters (e.g. "remove sites with live chat"), but that still doesn't quite get there.

https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=Best%20tent%202022&...

It's just as screwed up in the real world, the difference is that the internet at least temporarily offered an escape hatch to our screwed up economic system because at least the same logic of scarcity didn't apply. Now we've bolted the same crap on top of our digital lives.

When r/gonewild (NSFW!) is about the only source of genuinely non-monetized content on the Internet remaining... sigh

Looking at the sorts of channels represented by Standard, they're at the top of their game and doing better than ever. - https://standard.tv/

Yes there's a ton of crap too, but I think this is just a symptom of YouTube being truly mainstream now. There are areas that do better and worse on this. I'd agree that programming tutorials aren't good, but I've never found YouTube to be good for programming tutorials. Conference talks tend to be much better.

Probably it's my forties talking here, but I am under the impression that the content and the format (including the length) is being leaned towards the 15-25 years old range.

For (our) work stuff, it's all 30 minutes "learning tutorials", for a kid getting hands on a programming language or tool, or the couch-video-watcher-curious.

I honestly don't have the time to look for tutorials of work stuff on YouTube (I don't even have audio on my work PC). If I must, I prefer to watch a lecture from a professor in some university. Text-format tutorials are always welcome.

What it leads me to my next point: everything in YT is entertaiment. No matter what, the main scope of all those video is to entertain people first, and teach later.

And for the entertainment PoV: for example last night I watched "What Makes This Song Great?" from a "Rick Beato". It's a musician that does an analysis about a song. Other than leaving me with a sense of "emptiness" the guy never REALLY explained "What Makes This Song Great". Perhaps a 25 yo sees this guy as an authority, or doesn't care wasting time, but I personally felt scammed.

I'll keep using YouTube to occasionally watch a trailer or an old music video clip or a live performance.

Check out Pat Finnerty, he does a series called “Why does this songs stink” and he really has an axe to grind with Beato: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWfMI4CVFI

Just a few years ago, you could search for anything, even current-political, and find a bunch of videos from a bunch of people, from "best trump insults" to "why xyz is bad?" .... but now, all the top search results about anything remotely current (be it politics, covid, russia/ukraine, crime, heatwaves,...), all you get is mainstream media (cnn, msnbc,....). If I wanted to watch CNN, I'd watch CNN, not youtube.

Add to this all the blatant demonetization of anything remotely non-politically-correct, discussing anything current, or even using a bad word.

For me, youtube has become in 90% just one more "cable tv" channel... mainstream media, and a few large media houses pushing their shitty videos. There are only a few channels left that I actually enjoy, and even those are producing less and less content every year.

I think this has nothing to do with monetization per se, it was an explicit decision taken by YT and hard-coded into the search and recommendations algorithms in light of the craze about "fake news".

It's very funny to notice when looking at videos from new media creators - even though I am subscribed, Like most videos I watch, watch them till the end etc, I will almost always get "redirected" to a mainstream news video if Auto-play is on, at least after 2-3 videos.

Same principle as reddit really - if content is being pushed into your face, it's probably worth avoiding. Seek out the high quality, less marketed content, subscribe to that and ignore what the algorithms send your way.

That brings me on to my second point - video is a HORRIBLE format for most forms of instruction (for me). Practically every time I decide to try watching one to learn something, it could easily have been communicated in text form. Coding is a great example - I really hate having to skip through a 10-minute video that boils down to a single screen's worth of basic code.

Saying that, I've saved myself a bunch of money watching youtubers who very generously give away their time and experience for free to show me how to disassemble and re-assemble electronics and cars.

As someone who uploads music (videos) of my own creation, youtube (still) works fine to connect with an audience that I would have no chance of reaching otherwise.

I'm far from being flagged to monetize, so I don't have any incentive to put out something that I do for the money and not because I want to put it up.

As a niche musician (didgeridoo), I'm glad that I have access to a global community and a non-zero chance of someone searching for e.g. 'didgeridoo music' finding me.

Shorts may annoy people but I see it as an interesting challenge to make great 60s didgeridoo solos. Maybe my view will change if I'm ever sniffing the chance of being monetarily successful on this platform but until then, I'm doing whatever the hell I want and it's great.

I signed up for Nebula and I barely use it. It's poorly curated, there's seemingly no recommendations so I'm just in a wash of content with no direction.

I think that it's probably worse the more you use it. The more I subscribe the more garbage I get recommended I think. I watched the raw footage of some of the Heard v Depp trial (as in - uncut, direct footage) and I don't know if my algorithmic output will ever recover - the shit I get recommended now is of zero interest to me. Similarly, I looked up a few 'how tos' for some games, and now I get tons of 'gamer' content. The other day Youtube recommended Ben Shapiro to me lol

But that's just the main page. If I'm already on a good video the sidebar recommendations are decent.

If there's something better please let me know, I hate Youtube as a construct and I think that the monetization of horribly low content is damaging in ways I can't even predict, but also I gotsta have my "expert on topic talks to me about interesting thing" content.

>but also I gotta have my "expert on topic talks to me about interesting thing" content.

You should absolutely be listening to podcasts. This is literally the main strength of the format. What do you mean you "never know how to play them" ?

Whichever phone you have there will be abundant free podcast players in the app store, you can look up and subscribe to their feeds and listen through that. Longform interviews or conversations on every topic imaginable.

If the goal is to listen on your computer instead of your phone you could probably use spotify or apple podcasts or whatever.

Personally one of the strengths of podcasts is that its audio-only, so I can listen while on the go/doing non-cognitive work. Perfect use-case for a phone, but to each their own.

Add in the algorithm preferring new content and channels that publish new videos frequently (weekly or more), making it essentially a full time job staying relevant.

Youtube money is not enough to pay for living in high cost of living countries any more. Almost every popular channel I follow is mostly funded by Patreon etc these days.

The people who made a living on YouTube started in the early 2010s or so. And I have understood that most of them aren't primarily funded by tube moneys any more.

There is some interesting stuff coming from low cost of living countries like India, Bangladesh and in particular Vietnam. Not enough to offset the loss of creators from western countries.

I have not seen a new and interesting channel by anyone living in America or Europe in many years.

Do you have a source for that? As far as I know, the YT revenue share has been stable (at 55% to the creator) for like 15 years.

The revenue split may have stayed the same but the revenue total has gone down, despite the huge increase in the number of ads.

E.g. Mathias Wandel has discussed the financial side of running YouTube if you want to dig deeper.

But a lot of creators just quit.

There is no platform that is sucking creators out of youtube, there just isn't enough money from ad funded free content to keep it up.

Edit: I now realise this post sounds like an advertisement, but I assure you that was not the intention. It really is a breath of fresh air among video platforms. It feels like the content creators would rather starve than promote the latest VPN software mid-lesson.

The trend I dislike is 'shorts' which are encouraged by YouTube. An obvious nod to TikTok, which ironically now allows longer videos - a maximum of 10 minutes.

So to sum up: yes, there is lots of rubbish on YouTube (as to be expected), but there is also plenty of watchable content - whether it's silly, informative, education, music or a myriad of other types. Is it unhealthy to consume too much? I guess that's a question for a different discussion.

There's little better than watching someone walk you through something new, especially when there's a good bit of exact configuration to get right.

As for other content, who knows. There's SO much stuff on youtube, stuff I wouldn't begin to know how to find. I'm sure most of it is of low value to most people, but I think some people just use it as a creative outlet, or a place to talk (with no viewers).

I primarily use YouTube for three particular tasks:

1. Watch lecture videos from Stanford, MIT, NYU classes.

2. Watch or listen to music videos.

3. Watch some channels like Vox, Veritasium, 3b1b, Lex Fridman Podcast, etc. That is, stuff from sources that I already know pretty well.

For me, YouTube is more than fine. I will not change anything.

Even ten years before, this much educational content weren’t available. And it is increasing every year. And more and more people from the US and the rest of the world are getting connected.

This aspect is far from being plateaued.

I watch a lot of videos related to two of my hobbies fly fishing/tying and ham radio. There is very little in the way of sponsorship or paid reviews and nearly all videos on these subjects feel rewarding to watch.

Technical content on the other hand is a whole different ball game. If I have to learn a new framework or library I used to head to YouTube first to view a few tutorials before diving in to the docs. The quality of these has declined because a lot of channels are just churning out tutorials without really understanding the subject matter. In some cases they are just video versions of the getting started tutorials on the libraries website. There are loads of channels where they churn out new low quality tutorials every day on a wide range of subjects - jack of all trades, master of none - but they are doing something right because YouTube places them high in the search results.

And as for the bigger channels on popular subjects such a gadgets, computers, food and gaming - yes I do feel like they are often feel like the content support the advertising as oppose the adverts supporting the content.

I think to get value from YouTube you just need to be a bit more choosy. There is still good organic content being made, but it sits behind all the stuff that is primarily designed to get high up in the search results and make money. Remember, the way YouTube ranks search results and places suggestions is designed to benefit them more than you.

Since as you said most of the stuff has become marketing garbage, I am not willing to pay for an ad free experience because YouTube anyways can't guarantee that content creators are not doing secretly paid content in favor of their sponsors regardless of ehat they say.

If you just click around YouTube you will get the content equivalent of Mountain Dew and Cheetos - unhealthy garbage that will make you worse off but will enrich the vendor. If you want to find the good stuff you have to know what you're looking for and seek it out.

At this point, TikTok is going to capture YouTube's entire demographic and then the US tech industry will wonder why on earth the youth are so corruptible! Its definitely the consumer's fault after all. Mmmm hmmm.

Yes. There is a griftopia or mania around these platforms which early adopters, geeks, etc have used it for fun for a long time and the tech bros go and successfully hijack it for monetisation and this has been happening since the 2000s up until this point.

I think there is no going back from this and this form of grifting is here to stay and it will continue on another platform which will take YouTube's place because the content creators, shills, marketers will go where the money is.

Now the money is in TikTok and you will watch that get destroyed very soon and the so-called early users will get upset because the platform has changed to favour big business or much larger creators manipulating the algorithm to favour them.

So I'm afraid you will be very disappointed as nothing has changed.

My main issue with monetisation isn't so much the content itself, but the content recommendations. It seems that a lot of the content recommendations today have a corporate bias which they didn't used to. If a tech review channel just wants to make market videos and post them to YouTube that's fine with me personally so long as the algorithms don't push me to that type of content (which it currently does). The authentic low-budget tech reviewer doesn't have a chance on YouTube today, and that's real the problem.

If you want authentic, low-budget user curated content YouTube isn't the place anymore. There was something special about those early years of YouTube when it was mostly just low-budget videos made by real people on 420p webcams or video cameras. Back then no one made YouTube videos to be rich or famous, they made videos simply because they enjoyed making them and wanted to share their content with the world.

I don't think YouTube has peaked as a business, but I think it peaked in terms of an web 2.0 platform about a decade ago. That's a common trend though. All web 2.0 sites have been trending towards corporatisation for years now. The dream of the internet being a place where individuals could make cool stuff that other people around the world could find and enjoy is dead imo. Search and recommendation algorithms across the web are increasingly pushing users towards the approved corporate content because that's where the money is. Unless you know where to look today authentic content is extremely hard to find.

The majority of videos have about ~3 minutes of the actual content that you’re interested in and 7 minutes of just pure fluff and fillers.

What else did you want on a video site? You just think they should not include their faces in the videos?

>It used to be index of useful organic information,

To be honest - no. It became an index of useful information not so long ago. It used to be just a site for funny videos, homevideo often and things like that.

[^1]: To name a few:

https://www.youtube.com/c/athleanx

https://www.youtube.com/c/Strengthside

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA

https://www.youtube.com/c/LetThemTalkTV/

https://www.youtube.com/c/GreenredProductions

https://www.youtube.com/c/inanutshell

For some topics, it's the best medium to stay on top of things, e.g. downhill mountain biking, you have the racers' own channels/vlogs, plus the smallish outlets putting out a ton of content during the racing season, plus the official RedBull stuff... There's just no other way to enjoy the sport to this extent.

And, of course, it's an endless library of howtos and tutorials, BUT it's also full of crap. So you have to somewhat know what you're doing in the first place, then find a howto for that very specific thing you need to do, e.g. I know my way around a car, mechanically, but I'd still search for a howto video on changing the accessory drive belt in my particular car, because there's probably an easier way that somebody already documented, and I don't want to spend 1h on what could be a 10m job.

Its entirely based in what you are watching. If you watch very little on the site then yes, obviously they will just throw random stuff at you that is popular. The recommendation algorithm has nothing to go on.

["Popular" in this case usually means trash since the videos that get the biggest on the platform ARE clickbait shallow garbage because the vast majority of watch time is from kids and teens.]

If you seek out creators and channels that you enjoy/find useful, actually engage with the algorithm by subscribing to quality channels, hitting "not interested" when the recommendations miss, suddenly you'll get better results.

One very recent (1 month maybe?) change that ive noticed is that Youtube tosses in WAY more tiny channels into the recommendations. I get recommended videos with ~1k or less views all the time. I've found some awesome stuff through that.

My main page has steadily become more infected with popular content like this. On the other hand, the subscription page is too focused (doing exactly what it says on the tin with no unsubbed channels). I want some middle ground where I can see the stuff I've opted into and some budding creators in the same space.

I also realize this is negative feedback loop. If many people too are looking for "unpopular" videos, they become popular.

I'm now watching YouTube more than any of my other streaming content. It's more interesting content than Big Entertainment is producing and I get a chance to learn something to boot!

What I don't do - I rarely watch IT-related videos. The videos I watch are related to my interests and hobbies. If I need anything IT-specific I first start with my company's training provider who provides self-paced content specific to whatever it is I need to learn.

Without adblocker YouTube would be unsable.

Anyways, I think YouTube has peaked, or at least plateaued. One simple reason is that it has saturated its market. It can no longer expand without targeting other markets, like it did recently with "Shorts", which is an obvious attempt by Google to get into TikTok market. Previously, it tried attacking Netflix with YouTube Originals, without much success.

BTW, TikTok seem to still be in the organic / passion driven phase. It may not be what you are looking for, or you may not like "the algorithm" or the fact it is Chinese, but it is much closer in spirit to the early YouTube, with small time creators and regular people who just want to put videos on the internet.

On a side note, I find it interesting that TikTok today feels quite a lot like early Youtube, back when Youtube had much more personal content, video replies and a <10min limit for video. Seems like the market for that content is there, it just moved to another platform.

The feel is definitely different, though. You can clearly see the effects of monetization, both in the amount of YouTubers who are "just working a job" and in the production values. Everything has gotten more consistent, more streamlined. Videos are longer and have more of a coherent throughline. But about the content itself I cannot say much, other than that me and my peer group are still managing to find enough interesting stuff to satisfy our appetite.

Installing sponsorblock and clickbait remover makes youtube a lot better experience. Sponsorblock skips all the annoying sponsors, subscribe reminders, intros and gives you option to skip straight to the meat of the content, it's highly customizable. It will also show a badge on video if it's obviously a shill video for company X's product. Clickbait remover, forces thumbnails to be from the actual video itself, it also has option to remove allcaps titles etc..

I don't like the shorts, I hate the UX and how it forces you to interact with these shorts and always found tiktok annoying anyways.

For example, YouTube recently crippled their search function severely - it displays batches of results completely irrelevant to your specific search term in-between actual results. Absolutely fucking retarded. And that's just one example.

I recently found a channel with hundreds of videos about a interest I had and I watch all of them. The highest view count a video had was 1k views. Very insightful and the guy didn't care about min/maxing views for money like 99% of the content YouTube.

I still think YouTube is by far the best resource for learning new things.

I won't name and and shame but theres a YouTuber who obviously put in big effort in their editting...but it quickly went south when the person started teaching JavaScript. I've never been dissappointed.

I'm also getting sick and tired of the YouTube how to guides and the constant pressure to "smash the like button" and subscribe.

And removing the dislike button is complete and utter garbage. I cannot even understand it at all.

I see people raving about science or historian Youtubers etc, I see there's an audience and money to be made, but I'm not sure who has the time to watch all that?

For coding or tech in general I vastly prefer reading anyway.

Sometimes, a tech keynote at 1.5x in the background...

I'm having immense difficulty discovering new and interesting content, because the top 20-30 videos are always clickbaity shorts or irrelevant (but several million views)

Don't care about the downvotes too much. I can usually tell within 3-4 seconds if the video is what I'm looking for or not.

Purposeful searching and watching habits make youtube much more enjoyable for me.

Of course `Dead Internet Theory` might be true, or at least feel that way, if you let the algorithms drive.

And there's something tragic about people making content in their homes and reading out a marketing script about some crap for a minute.

* uBlock Origin (kills the ads)

* SponsorBlock (uses crowdsourcing to skip the sponsored, intros, self promotion, credits, etc. This cuts 10% to 20% from most videos, saving a lot of time)

* Channel Blocker (gives you a button to permanently block all videos from a channel)

* BlockTube (lets you block videos based on keywords in video titles)

* Unhook (removes recommended and suggested videos)

* Better Subscriptions for YouTube (lets you hide videos you've already watched from your subscriptions page and other pages)

Another popular YouTube plugin is 'Enhancer for YouTube', but personally I don't find this one very useful.

Because in the end, the search for maximization of profits may not be the best way to achieve creativity.

For a time, and I still think that somehow it's the case right now, a lot of creativity can be found on: TikTok, some Discord servers, etc. etc.

But clearly, Youtube feels like TV in a way: a bunch of "professional" people rehashing the same concepts over and over: over-produced fiction, gaming stuff, react-stuff, beauty stuff, etc.

The only thing that I currently value Youtube for is the access to science stuff: 3 blue 1 brown, Veritasium, etc. etc.

Oh also Youtube has become the home for the cancer of tutorial: the video tutorials. Why cancer? Because reading is faster, searchable, indexable, etc.

Reading may be faster for a lot of things, but there are instances where nothing beats a video - one of them is any sort of tutorial for a GUI program like Photoshop, Premiere, IntelliJ or whatever. A written tutorial either assumes the user knows exactly what the "lasso tool" is and how to select it (and so is useless for novices) or it assumes "know nothing" and so is excessively verbose for people above the "barely novice" level.

With a well made video tutorial, both a complete novice and an expert can find value, simply because all the verbose description can be seen in action on the screen.

The issue I feel is more to do with the algorithms that push content to you via homepage, related sidebar, and search, and the incentives this naturally pushes upon creators. Sometime recently Linus mentioned in a WAN Show that the goal of YouTube now seems to be entirely on having the algorithm figure out what you want to watch, rather than using straightforward signals such as the channel you’re currently watching, your subscriptions list, or the most relevant search results. You constantly hear creators complaining about videos being buried by the algorithm, which is why “click the bell” is part of everyone’s outros now. Loyalty from their follower base has become more important than ever so YouTube has all the positive signals to decide the video is worthy of being pushed outside of that small sphere - that is, it decides whether you’ll be allowed or denied growth on a video-by-video basis by pure luck you can’t control. This is an absolute shame, because creators who deserve views aren’t getting them even from their own subscribers, and those of us who really don’t give a care for the type of content that feeds the algorithm what it wants can’t escape it because the algorithm is begging us to please click on those videos. I noticed if you play any video in an incognito window, it will always display completely unrelated clickbait in every position of the related videos sidebar, probably because it hasn’t figured out your interests yet.

Plus, when VPNs and oddball mobile games see your success, they’re not going to snooze capitalising on it, and let’s be real, it’s hard for many people to say no to easy money for mindlessly reading a 30 second script. In some cases I’ve seen creators post about the business proposals they turn down and they can be absolute junk such as factories trying to move some random Amazon sludge. Luckily it seems these ones are being consistently turned down as just too far below any creator’s morals. I don’t enjoy it but I’ll sit through being introduced to Squarespace for the millionth time or a highly misleading VPN ad read that ticks me off if it means a creator of integrity can quit their job and work full-time on producing top quality content. But YouTube sure could help not make it so high-stakes to find where that sweet spot of quality vs profitability is, and should work out why so many SEO spam videos keep making it past the filters.