Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
It seems like some websites think that the more the users know about the quality of the content, the worse it is for the website’s profit
It means they can shovel whatever bullshit they want without you realizing it is not an algorithm but a manual selection of videos.
Taking away information so I can’t choose how best to use my time… yeah fuck that enshittification.
The lack of upload date is the thing that already bugs me the most about YouTube Shorts. Well, maybe the second most after the entire concept.
YouTube Shorts have a description, which has the upload date at the top. Though this doesn’t show up when searching for Shorts, or having them in your feed.
I guess they really want to get rid of users huh.
I watch tech videos. If I can’t see when a video is from, I’m not going to waste my time on watching it.
Conspiracy time: Google is purposely making their video platform worse because they’re sacrificing it for a tax loss in 5 years when they shut it down. In those five years they’re going to “ramp up” development and write off all that “work” to pay for other projects.
Their UX and design choices are amateur at best and clearly they have no interest in maintaining the product(much like all of their retired line).
No way. YouTube is such a flaghship product and a lynchpin in other businesses (like music, streaming, AI development).
I invoke Hanlon’s razor.
Chromecast was a flagship product.
Stadia was a flagship product.
YT Originals was a flagship product.
Hangouts was a flagship product.
I could go on, but I think my point has been made. Google gives zero fucks about products or consumers. They only care about money.
When they enshittify a product it’s to make more money.
I’m not entirely disagreeing with Hanlon on this, but just because they’re inept doesn’t mean they aren’t actively sabotaging themselves through corrupted negligence. Like a bank robber that didn’t get an oil change in over 40k miles and goes on a high speed chase. Sure you rob the bank, but you won’t get further than three blocks before your engine blows because of your negligence against your car while you planned the bank heist.
None of those were even close to flagships, they were all short term experiments.
YouTube is the basis for much of Google’s portfolio and a steady moneymaker, not an upstart liek those.
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Chromecast 2013-2024 (12-ish years)
- Google’s only known TV streaming hardware and service.
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Stadia 2019-2022 (4-ish years)
- Google’s only known Videogame streaming service.
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YT Originals 2016-2022 (7-ish years)
- Google’s first official leap into content creation for their streaming service.
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Hangouts 2013-2022 (10-ish years)
- Google’s first text, voice, video communication service.
YouTube is the basis for much of Google’s portfolio and a steady moneymaker, not an upstart liek those.
You must be joking. Why is YouTube a steady moneymaker? Is it perhaps the advertisements? So wouldn’t that make Google ads be the “basis for much of Google’s portfolio”?
What threatens the viability of an advertising company? When viewers aren’t viewing ads.
YouTube is not an investment for Google. YouTube is a liability. Huge amounts of upkeep, required staff on hand. FUCKIN LAWYERS. At best YouTube is a vehicle they control to increase ad revenue.
The real money maker? Selling your personal data to other advertising networks.
Now that Khan is in the FCC and Harris is likely to win the White House, and it might be possible we have a Blue House & Senate. With the cherry on top, the anti-trust suit.
That’s right, the fuckin Google Mafia Monopoly!
They’re hedging their bets on the next four to five years being terrible for them and are tying to get rid of as much weight as they can. Why? Because nobody uses Google to search for content on YouTube, and if they have to split YouTube off the main company, Alphabet, will lose so much fucking money the fed couldn’t print it fast enough to bail their ass out of the overextended hole they are precariously straddled over.
Google will need to buy then what they get now for free. And you know who hates Alphabet more then their competition? YouTube.
YouTube will make Alphabet pay out the nose for any ad time, so it’s easier to quietly write it off now and kill it later before it becomes a threat.
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sacrificing it for a tax loss in 5 years when they shut it down.
Given that Tax = %rate * max(revenue-cost,0)
How can deliberately sabotaging a business make money?
They could be taking a tax write off of the development cost/efforts for increasing revenue from ad revenue.
I’m sure insurance claims are also included in that because of the efforts of ad blockers.
Overall, I doubt that they’re making a profit, but I bet they’re at least staying in the black.
When you take a look at the changes that they are making now, removing post dates and view counts, it could be concluded that it’s an effort to stop wrappers like new pipe from displaying recent content. This could be internally tracked as improvements made to increase ad revenue, which would be tax deductible.
It’s clear to me that they’re willing to sabotage the entire product in order to increase ad sales, fuck their consumers in the ass, and completely obliterate any trust users will have in their platform in the future.
This is the same standard private investment strategy that’s been running for the last 20 years unchecked.
What would removing the dates accomplish except making things more confusing and harder to find? What advantage to YouTube is there?
YouTube’s goal, as was Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and TikTok and everyone else, is to get you to consume what they want you to consume, rather than what you choose to consume.
They one one goal: keep you engaged in the app.
Nothing else matters.
In their eyes, further reoving the “choice” of what to watch and shifting more of it to the algorithm optimizes that. And visible view counts/dates is a factor, as you may skip a video the algorithm thinks would keep you engaged.
For sure this has to be it. Less distractions, less info, less choice, more control for them
It is enshittification. IDK why other comments are mad about calling that out but look up the term if unfamiliar. Corey Doctorow laid out a thesis a few years ago and , the trend has continued. It seems unabated 😡😰
I just question if steering users toward old and outdated videos really keeps them engaged.
It probably does in the short term (aka next quarter or two), which is all they care about. It takes awhile to hemorrhage users when one is so entrenched.
Why the fuck would they even think of doing that? Genuinely what is the purpose? How does it benefit them?
You might (rightly) skip videos many years old that are no longer relevant. Without the date info available to you, you won’t know they contain out-of-date useless information, and might watch them (generating more views and ad revenue).
The goal is to make you click and anything that could stop you is considered a problem. I’d say it’s a short term strategy that will lead to long term failure but I’m not sure anymore. Tiktok and Instagram are feeding their users a bunch of trash too and it still works.
You can’t remember watching a video, so you watch it again and give them more ad revenue.
Same reason people choose not to show votes here? Bias? I never really look at beyond title and thumbnail anyway.
Return YouTube dislikes will change to
Return YouTube dislikes + view count + upload date
Until they shut down / lock down the APIs that allow querying this information.
The optimist in me hopes this will be used to give smaller channels a push in views and attention, even years later, when they may have been skipped over or ignored previously.
The realist in me knows this will be used to push garbage that would otherwise be self-filtered by users due to the red flags of dates/views.
If the video is about an ongoing event, say the Titan submarine disaster, I’d rather watch videos posted last week them videos posted a year ago, because the new info makes the old content irrelevant.
If a search for videos about how to perform carbon fiber layups shows one with 1.2m views in the last year and another with 5k views from the past 6 years, I will probably watch the better performing video first.
But if I want to see a video about some esoteric subject like how the bathyscaphe triste worked, that isn’t really changing much, I don’t care about post date or view count.
Date is relevant information. I need it as part of my decision-making. Same as choosing between videos with 12 views and those with 10k views. It’s not everything, but it’s part of the equation. Let me fucking choose.
Date is how I go by whether or not someone I’m interested in has put up a new video or if YouTube is just showing me an old one I forgot about.
So I’m finally going to have to start fucking subscribing?
Ugh.
I got on a YouTube kick a while back and subscribed to anybody whose videos entertained me. They haven’t all been winners, and I’ve unsubscribed from some of them, but for the most part it gives me a good way to see the sort of content I want. It’s actually halfway decent.
Until you start using the apps, that is. They are the most cancerous, dark pattern bullshit hellscapes and I can’t believe how far they’ve come. Every movement and click on those things is intended to get you to engage and watch just one more video, it’s terrible.
I don’t know if I can explain it well, but I’m just opposed to the concept of having to subscribe when there is a front page that shows me all the new videos of people I watch regularly. It’s an unnecessary step. I realize it helps creators (I was one once), but I still don’t like having to constantly subscribe and unsubscribe based on who I’ve gained and lost interest in when it just tells me that person has a new video and if I stop watching them for a while, it stops telling me about them. I can also instantly tell it to not recommend the channel anymore.
It’s just so much easier.
This is a really strange concept to me. I’m constantly fighting against the algorithm! I subscribe to anyone I’m remotely interested in and occasionally do mass-unsubscribes to clear out the ones I’m not interested in.
I also find myself regularly checking the pages of people I subscribe to because YouTube will frequently stop putting their videos on the front page. I’ve also tried turning on notifications for certain people but that just gives me notification fatigue.
I think my biggest annoyance is that YouTube seems to take my decision not to watch a particular video right now as a signal that I’m not interested in the creator anymore, when actually I’m just prioritizing what I watch based on how long the video is and how much time I have. I’m not going to watch an hour long video when I only have 15 minutes! So YouTube is just constantly overfitting on my preferences! Really stupid and frustrating to deal with.
Perhaps I’m atypical though. Seems like a lot of people just go to YouTube and let it force feed them whatever is going viral at the time.
Youtube is getting shittier by the minute. Come to think of it, many things are.
view counts, I’m okay with. I do want to see how old a video is and how long a video is.
I watch niche stuff on Youtube. I watched a guy copy an old ISA adapter card for the very first CD-ROM drive. That’s not gonna do BeasTiePie numbers, and I don’t care. It isn’t information I use to select a video. I think it’s useful information to have generally available, but I don’t necessarily need it on the home screen. It should maybe be displayed on a channel’s Videos page, where there’s more screen real estate per video, and in the video’s description header.
Date uploaded is pertinent information. Is this a recent entry in a series I enjoy? Is this breaking or old news? Has ANOTHER 10,000 people died in a hurricane or is this just a month old? Is this from before ThE iNcIdEnT, or after?
Why do you think they are getting rid of the date of upload? UX reasons? No, they want to be able to serve you the same video, especially for news. Generates more clicks when you need to check if something is a year old or not.
Engagement, people are probably less likely to click on an old video, especially if they are looking for relevant and up to date information.
Well, or the opposite. Why click on a new video pointing out the errors / fallacies in the old one, when you only see the old one and don’t know it’s outdated
I figure less text on the screen = more room for the thumbnail. If they invented Youtube today they wouldn’t think to show you titles, channel names or other metadata, just the video thumbnail.
Yeah thats what they do with shorts mostly. Huge thumbnail, title, no of views. No date until you click. Which for shorts - not many people give 2 f’s if the cat video they are watching is from last month or 15 years ago. Not for regular videos. But then again, youtube / google are too big to fail. They could remake youtube in an absolutely abysmal direction and people would still come on the site.
You know what I wish they would do? I wish they would invent the concept of “shows.”
Like you know how on old fashioned tube television you could tune the primitive analog radio receiver to pre-selected narrow frequency bands referred to by the ancient ones as “channels” and on these “channels” one might find a collection of different, though sometimes related “shows.” Like on the Discovery “Channel” might produce wildlife documentaries and space documentaries?
There hasn’t been a robust way to do that on Youtube since at least the Johnson administration. I’ll give the example of Linus Media Group, who operate 14.04*10^666 different channels which are generally related, made mostly by the same creative staff, on broadly the same topics, but Youtube treats them as 100% unrelated. According to Youtube’s UI, TechQuickie is as related to Linus Tech Tips as RedLetterMedia is.
You can kind of get this done with playlists. But…when a stupid penis is pushed into an idiot vagina, a moron baby shall soon be born. Youtube doesn’t provide a robust playlist controls, and youtubers want people to be able to access the latest episodes, so now Youtube is full of playlists that are backwards with their oldest entries at the bottom.
One account can’t silo their own content by topic in a way that’s meaningful to the UI. Like, if you like RedLetterMedia for Best of the Worst and Re:View but don’t care for Half In the Bag…Go find the nearest anvil, hammer your dick flat and take a 2D piss up a rope for all the good it’ll do you.
With a “show” system, you could subscribe to the specific shows you like. This would count as a subscriber for the creator’s metrics because a viewer is engaging with them, and they could see which shows are most popular with their viewers to prioritize that content, which should boost engagement. Or, if you like the creator’s personality, you could generally subscribe and get notifications on everything they publish. Interested viewers would get notified of the latest shows directly without having to navigate a playlist, and newcoming viewers who discover a creator later on could watch a show from the beginning too. If engagement is what Youtube wants, surely someone stumbling upon a long running series and then lapping up the entire back catalog is a way to achieve this. If they wanted to boost engagement surely they’d want to create a way to more easily attach “second channels” to their main ones. How many people would watch the lower production effort asides/live stream dumps that they’re hosting if they lowered the UI pain in the neck?
</tantacrul>
Wow, your algorithm shows the exact same videos that mine does. I’ve never seen that before. Every time I check out someone else’s YouTube, their homepage is completely different from mine.
Now kith?
The removal of view counts could empower fringe content. Even the most gullible are far less likely to take a video of an extremist nut job seriously when they have 100 views. Part of how radicalisation works is by convincing people that the radical ideology is far more mainstream than it actually is. It’s already easy to inflate view counts but removing them entirely makes it much much simpler for crazies to sell the idea that their ideas are popular.
The English language long has started failing me to accurately describe just how trash the entire YouTube situation as a whole to this date really is
This is just one monopoly, all but a glimpse into the dystopia company’s want to become
