Technology

Gemini Ai makes up a title for you.

That's as cursed as I can make it.

Removing the homepage entirely, replacing the entire UI with the shorts-style format of "view video right now, tap button to see next/previous video". If you want a specific video, you must search for it.

The title will be text to speech on mouse over.
The future is here.

Remove the user generated videos. Only title, videoads and comments allowed.

It's currently a race-to-the-bottom in big IT & tech, where they don't look how they get you to like them but how much they can get away with, without repelling most of their userbase.

I don’t like this idea for the opposite reason. I'm one of the people who are suspicious of videos with millions of views since most of them look manufactured. We all use view counts to gauge if a video is something we’re after, probably in more ways than we can come up with.

If it gives you any encouragement - I’m not discouraged by view counts. I know I like niche stuff and give small channels a try. It’s a chance at having more genuine interaction. As long as a video is not off-putting due to bad diction or very bad production then I’m not going to back out and see what it is about. This can work to your advantage too.

Is YouTube doing it with small creators actually in mind? Who knows, other than them?

I am pretty confident in guessing that they are not doing it for selfless reasons. Imo the reason is that the less information they give the user, the more you are beholden to the algorithm choosing for you.

But depending how they hide it it actually might not just be users, but also companies that e.g. buy ads from them. The less information they get, the more they need to trust whatever metric google offers them

That makes sense. Youtube has mixed more and more small channels with low views into my feed for a couple of months.

MBAs

In 20 years, "YouTube was an online video sharing platform...."

I doubt they can make it to the next 20 years, the way they are controlling everything.

"We can sell 80 percent of the screen before inducing seizures!"

In 20 years:

Users can no longer upload and YouTube becomes just a CDN for Adsense.

(and the only way to watch old videos is through the Internet Archive)

Personally I find the highest viewed videos on YT to be the absolute shittiest ones.

They removed the star system a long time ago. They removed the down votes again a few years back.

They want their algorithm to be the only thing that decides whether you watch a video or not.

They want to decide what you like and don't like. You WILL watch what THEY show you.

This is inane but damn if it didn’t give me a good laugh :D

Intern - "You could at least give me reacharound while you're doing that"

That's why you need to pay for premium so you can get the 1080p premium bitrate.

I thought I was imagining this until I put a 1080p episode on one monitor and a 1080p YT vid on another. The difference was night and day.

I guess I’d rather have it than not have it, but I don’t really understand how it would make YT unusable to me if I didn’t know how many other people viewed a video. How often are you using those numbers to make important decisions between videos about what to watch? I tend to go by the topic and subscribe to creators whose videos I like. Very occasionally I might be looking for a guide to an obscure level in an obscure game and there may be 3 similar looking videos about it, but one has 200 views and the others have single digits, and I agree in that situation it means something. But otherwise I just never pay attention to it. What do I care if 2000 or 200,000 people watched a video that looks interesting to me? Some creators I subscribe to have just a couple hundred followers. I don’t care.