[luch]

Yep, people seem to believe that Youtube is still a platform for crowdsourced videos, by the people for the people.

Youtube is since ~2016 primarly a platform for music clips, a sorta MTV for millenials and GenZ. They absolutely do not give a fuck anymore for content creator and hobbyists.

The faster people will understand that, the less they will be enraged about ContentID/DMCA

[nkozyra]

I agree that YouTube - like most large social networks - cares only about the large traffic generators, but I'm not sure about your characterization of the content.

I can find high quality creators for almost anything on earth that interests me - programming, ML, music creation, woodworking, and so on.

I suspect this is all about the deprioritization of the little guy.

Google also shuts the door quickly and hard. My personal adsense account was permabannned years ago and 1) I don't know why 2) there appears no avenue to address it

[mattmanser]

You are wrong, confidently incorrect. Though it shows how anyone can get ensconsed in a bubble by their own tech.

Get a parent to show you what their kids watch on YouTube and get your mind blown.

YouTube is a tailored experience. If you're a 6 year old kid you'll be getting something far, far, far from music clips.

[aquariusDue]

Here's something fun to do, exchange phones with your friends and scroll through each other's YouTube feeds. Quite the bonding experience.

[1letterunixname]

YouTube is equivalent and worse than regular TV now, completely in the tank for corporations and hostile to individual creators.

[mort96]

How so? With regular TV, 99% of the time nothing interesting is going on, and 50% of watch time is unskippable ads (despite the service being paid). With YouTube, I can always find something which I find interesting, and there are no ads (even though Premium is way cheaper than TV), only some skippable sponsor spots which some creators choose to put in.

The situation with YouTube is dire, the DMCA situation is dire (in general, but also YouTube's handling of it), there are serious issues with how YouTube treats its creators, and there are serious issues with people being fed disinformation by the algorithm. But in no way is it "equivalent and worse than regular TV".

[BlueTemplar]

Arte.tv has zero ads.

YouTube also has issues with local laws, for instance recently a video showing full female frontal nudity has been automatically flagged as adult and demonetized (and even partially shadowbanned, to make things worse YouTube flip-flopped on those, which wasn't particularly reassuring for the video maker!), even though full female frontal nudity is typically classified as forbidden to minors of 12 around here (which IIRC includes everyone outside of YouTube kids, because the general YouTube is forbidden to minors of 13 ?). Oh, and to make the matters worse, it was a criticism video, and the nipples had already been pixelated ! (Even though in theory there was no reason to do so.)

In this way it is "equivalent and worse" than regular TV : it's becoming even more sanitized, and in a huge part because of how arbitrary and random all these strikes are !

BTW, with Article 13 (now 17 ?), IIRC there's now a mandatory for big platforms like YouTube mediation system (outside of the control of YouTube) that EU citizens can ask to mediate these issues, before taking these matters to court ?

(But I guess this is all kind of moot, since YouTube, being owned by Google, a US company, is effectively illegal in EUrope since 2015's Schrems 1 ?)

[mort96]

arte.tv looks like a netflix competitor, not traditional TV, but I digress.

Your response argues in favour of the statement "YouTube has none of the issues of regular TV but introduces new issues". If you want, you can make the subjective judgement that the issues introduced are worse than the issues of regular TV, or that YouTube's issues are more harmful to society than those of regular TV. But nothing you have written here backs up the "equivalent and worse than regular TV" thing.

[BlueTemplar]

It's the website for a free French-German tv channel, which has been transmitting over the EM spectrum since 1992.

[mort96]

In any case, a website where you can stream TV series isn't what I would consider the "traditional TV model". So it doesn't seem that relevant to the discussion.

[rocket_surgeron]

Almost every video I watch on YouTube is some balding guy in his basement repairing a computer from the 1980s.

My front page is: an awkward curator giving a tour of a battleship, a candle making tutorial, a 20 minute explanation of how pencils are made, Adam savage selling some kind of sleeping bag, a documentary about how robots are being used to clean up Fukushima, a video about penrose tiles, and half a dozen space news roundup videos.

If you're seeing MTV for millennials, that's because you're clicking on the videos.

If the algorithm is showing you things you don't like, your taste in videos sucks and you don't realize it.

[SpelingBeeChamp]

>Almost every video I watch on YouTube is some balding guy in his basement repairing a computer from the 1980s.

Sounds like what I watch. Can I get some recommendations?

[rocket_surgeron]

Adrian’s digital basement

Tech tangents

Crg

Big bad biologists bigbadbench

Mac84

Epictronics

Mr lurches things

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Thank you! I particularly appreciate the recommendations for the smaller channels. Hadn't seen most of those.

[smoldesu]

It's the same problem Twitter had. Before meatheads like Elon Musk started knocking heads together, there were a lot of people actually convinced of Twitter's altruism. In reality, the situation was much the same as YouTube.