[doe_eyes]

There are surprisingly few venues for video content outside YT, at least not on a scale that would matter on YT! For example, if you want to get to the top of HN, non-video content has much better odds. Many tech- or science-centric subreddits discourage or ban videos too.

YT is a fairly closed ecosystem that's both insanely resource-intensive to participate in, and that doesn't give creators too many second chances. My specific claim is that it's more of a crapshoot than running a blog. There are so many great science visualizations with 50 views.

[NavinF]

HN is relatively tiny and HN's allergy to video is not representative of the internet.

Just create clips from your video and post them on insta, tiktok, twitter, FB, etc. That's the internet at large. If people are interested, they'll watch the full video.

[doe_eyes]

HN is small as a discussion community, but it is huge in terms of the traffic it generates to top-ranked URLs. There are fairly mainstream publications that optimize for HN, and I have spoken to marketers and PR people who described HN as by far the most significant source of traffic to their sites.

It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.

[DoreenMichele]

It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.

Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.

There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.

Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.

[NavinF]

- Individual subs like /r/programming are larger.

- HN is ~100x smaller than twitter which is itself not even in the top 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...

[doe_eyes]

I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.

[DoreenMichele]

Yes, it's extremely hard to get an apples to apples comparison of data across different platforms.

I do my best to account for that.

I remain mystified by people who compare HN size as a community to Reddit or Facebook or Twitter (aka X) which are platforms, not communities.

[DoreenMichele]

Funny I just looked and Reddit says r/programming is 4.1m which last I checked is less than the 5 million unique visitors HN was getting a few years ago when I last saw stats by the moderator and I don't know what it's at now.

Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.

[NavinF]

Where is that 4.1m number from?

[DoreenMichele]

I tried to edit my comment and missed the edit window. I was looking at the wrong sub.

R/programming is currently 6.5m, which doesn't matter because it doesn't invalidate my statement about the last time I checked.

If you want to claim r/programming is actually larger now, you need a current citation for HN traffic which you may not be able to find.

And keep in mind it's going to be tough to compare because Reddit members isn't actually a comparable figure to MAU, as noted elsewhere.

[sbarre]

I've discovered so much content on YouTube that I would never have found if it was on someone's blog.

And on top of that I also find YT content through social media, blogs, forums, etc..

So I hear you, but I guess based on my own experience, I disagree! But that's cool, we can do that. :-)

[BlueTemplar]

Why do you think that you would never have found it ?

The best blogposts do get shared around, and for worse ones, is it that much of a loss that only few people find them ?

[sbarre]

I'm not super active on social media, and I find that all the big/main aggregator sites (like HN and Reddit and others) have become victims of their own success and good stories just fall off the front page very quickly, and so you miss a ton of stuff unless you're checking all the time, and I don't have that kind of time.

Link aggregators aren't good at "long tail"... So your good stories are only really discoverable when they're hot, and get progressively harder to discover over time.

Google search just sucks now, it's all shopping links and SEO trash, even if you search for fairly specific subjects.. You can still find what you want but you have to wade through so much garbage...

Plus there's no discovery. Like pretty much all search engines you can typically only find what you're searching for as opposed to finding new unknown things that are within your topics of interest.

For better or worse I find that YouTube is one of my best resources for surfacing new and interesting things pretty often, and quite regularly from channels big and small that I've never watched before. YT is great at long tail..

So it has become a major source of discovery for me, in many of my areas of interest (which aren't all tech).

Of course some content I don't like consuming as video, so I do sometimes find videos that cover interesting subject matter, which I'll then go search for articles or text-based content on instead.

[BlueTemplar]

I see, though I do consider that part of YouTube to be a net negative for everyone but Google considering how it's keeping people on the platform, and therefore less likely to look for more varied sources.

But what I meant is that people share links around, whether in public like here, or in one-on-one discussions (and blogs do have their own recommended lists), so it's quite possible that you would still have found out about them without any kind of algorithmic prodding.

For instance, to put this in practice, here's a science education focused personal website that I like a lot :

http://av8n.com/

[sbarre]

Thank you for sharing that link!

We all find content in ways that suit our time/resources/network etc.. I do get lots of links and recommendations from friends and co-workers (and on places like here), but I also get a lot of it from platforms, and I think that's a good thing.

I'm not anti-algorithm (not saying you are) and I believe it's one of many great ways to discover content, in this case in video form. And I think having it all in one place is a huge benefit.

Considering all the resources required to host video, I don't think it would be realistic for everyone to host their own stuff in that medium..

Not to mention how much of a creator economy exists thanks to the centralized platform that is YT. Tons of creators probably wouldn't even bother making their content if they didn't have somewhere with a built-in audience to post it to.

So I disagree with the idea that it's a negative for everyone but Google. Tons of people make a living thanks to that platform, with content they'd likely never be able to make a living from otherwise.

[BlueTemplar]

I'm not sure that resources were an issue even in 2006, much less today : P2P is older than that. Ease of use was an issue, but that's almost over thanks to the likes of PeerTube (even for streaming !), though of course it would be better if ISPs also jumped on board (like they did for e-mail and personal websites).

People were making videos even before YouTube started to become commercial, and they will keep making them after YouTube is gone (hopefully soon, considering how enshittified it became, but I'm afraid that with Google's money it will take a while). I disagree that th That you're calling it 'content' is a symptom of that corporatization.

Platforms are evil (and discovery algorithms are a big part of the problem), and especially the people not just using them, but particularly making a living from them are bad people (especially today, they had more than a decade to be aware of the issues). (This is on top of other qualities or faults they might have, of course.) And if there were no platforms, there would still be people making a living from the Internet (and the video format included), the possibilities are just too gigantic.