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Man, I miss old YouTube.

Gopherbassist

Gopherbassist

Jan 19, 2008
2,957
4,466
AMERICA! 🇺🇸🦅
#1
I came across this girl's channel today:



This is what brought me to YouTube. People in their own spaces sharing their own lives doing their own thing.

Now everything is overproduced, corporate approved and sponsor driven. Web media was supposed to be an escape from old media, but it slowly became the thing we used it to get away from.

Content like the above is becoming harder and harder to find online. How long do we have until we lose what made the internet great? Can we reverse course?
 
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#10
Spectrum said:
You could always start your own video upload site. If it catches on, it'll be cool. Until you get bored and take that offer from Giant Tech Inc. and it becomes just like youtube.
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There are fediverse-based video sharing platforms. Basically buy some server space, spin up a copy of PeerTube (or whatever's come along since) and start federating.

Upside: Easy access to videos that anybody else is sharing on the fediverse, as long as your sites are mutuals.

Downside: You have to be quick on the blocklists to prevent malicious people from using your site to distribute stuff you really don't want being distributed. There are tools to help you with that, but this is definitely one of those "the simple thing suddenly became complicated" problems.
 
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#12
HolmeBass said:
It was indeed unfortunate that the only way corps could figure out to monetize the internet was basically an adaptation of the same advertising model used by older media.

The tragedy of the commons, in a way.
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The enshittification will continue until morale improves
 
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#15
Finding anything I want to watch has become increasingly difficult. Also the way they run adds is becoming more and more intrusive. More ads, longer ads, less options to opt out.

Also there seems to be increasing problems with bandwidth and whatever BS programs YouTube allows to run in the background, which are most likely used to harvest and monetize your personal data. I frequently have to close and reopen the browser or YouTube will not display anything. When it does load, videos frequently hang due to buffering. Seems to get stuck buffering frequently when switching between ads and content. Sometimes reloading the page works, and sometimes I have to close the browser and reload the video from history. Sometimes that doesn't work. More and more the juice is not worth the squeeze.

The algorithm that makes content recommendations is getting worse and worse as well. I find it necessary to actively manage my viewing history or I get recommendations for random crap that is not necessarily related to my watch history by content. Rather suggestions are frequently based on meta data: I.E. the content others who watched the same video are interested in. It's not unusual for recommendations to go to places that you really don't want to go to. My understanding is the recommendation algorithm basically tries to use social engineering to get you riled up, so that you watch more content. I.E. it's not trying to give you what you want. It's trying to manipulate you into watching more content.

In addition to the watch history, I think tracking cookies on your computer are considered. So searching a certain term on internet or viewing a certain webpage may influence what YouTube recommends for you.

Another think I should mention. I previously watched YouTube largely for national news content, but this is become increasingly a waste of time. Content providers are getting progressively worse and worse because they are trying to survive by doing whatever is necessary to get views and likes, rather than providing useful and accurate information. Content seems to be getting increasingly polarized and opinion based, rather than actually reporting events as they occur. Seems more and more content is just recycled, stale garbage that is not worth watching. More often than not something describe as breaking news seems to be something you learned a couple of years ago.

I find I watch less and less, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
 
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#20
iammr2 said:
Are you sharing YOUR profits with those who are less fortunate?
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Sometimes.

But under a capitalist system, like it or hate it, nothing is ever safe from being turned into a revenue generating stream first-and-foremost without sacrificing the "original cool vibes of the cool thing", whatever it might have been. And to some extent, if something doesn't eventually lead to overproduced, corporate approved, and sponsor driven ways to generate capital, it'll probably never survive. Hey ho. That's the system we got, though. So it goes.
 
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