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Was shocked to hear this news. I worked for Google years ago but I was in the NYC office, so we didn't run into the YouTube folks much. Opinions about YouTube

Was shocked to hear this news. I worked for Google years ago but I was in the NYC office, so we didn't run into the YouTube folks much. Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined. It's a weird mix of a huge creator monetization network, a music channel, an education platform, a forever-store of niche content, and a utility. It's also not a business that rested on it's laurels. It's easy to forget how novel creator monetization was when YouTube adopted it. They do a lot of active work to manage their creators, and now have grown into a music and podcast platform that is challenging Apple. To top it off, YouTube TV, despite costing just as much as cable, is objectively a good product. Few products have the brand, the reach, monetization, and the endurance that YouTube has had within Google. And I know for a fact that this is in no small part due to the way it was managed. I've probably watched tens of thousands of hours of YouTube at this point. Some of it sublime, some of it absurd, some of it critical for my work or my degree. I couldn't imagine a world without it. RIP.

georgel 2y ago
Agreed, I have gotten insane amount of value from YouTube.
- deleted 2y ago
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TMWNN 2y ago
>Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN Who? Who has a negative opinion about YouTube? The occasional "My kids watch too much of it" != "mixed opinions" about the site in general.
- cheeseomlit 2y ago
  I like a lot of content hosted on YouTube but that doesn't mean I like YouTube, especially under Google.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  A lot of YouTubers have been very critical of YouTube’s approach to things and treatment of creators in the past. Also, just as an example, YouTube demonetises (and therefore effectively punishes) you for using words like ‘suicide’ so now we have to say silly things like ‘unalive’ — at least until Google/the advertisers catch on. These days YouTube is more censored than traditional TV.
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    I think the "unalive" nonsense is idiotic too, especially when it increasingly bleeds into elsewhere online (and probably offline, too). But that's not the same thing as "mixed opinions" in general on HN. That would be more accurate of, say, Twitter (where we are nearing two years and counting of the imminent collapse of the site any day now post-Musk acquisition, as opposed to seemingly every news event proving that it is more important than ever).
    - xanderlewis 2y ago
      I think perhaps what there are ‘mixed opinions’ on is the actual management and day-to-day practice of YouTube as a company, rather than the site itself. We’re all very, very grateful to have such an amazing place to learn and be entertained. And, in my opinion, the website and apps are very nicely designed and work better than anything else. I do wish the TikTokification would stop, though. But that’s never going to happen, given how effective it is at holding our eyeballs hostage.
    - ChrisNorstrom 2y ago
      Which is interesting because the news and media and movies and music videos can be as "advertiser unfriendly" as they want and still get ads to support the corporation that produces it. But indie content creators and the general public are punished for talking about the same topics. Corporations get freedom of speech, freedom of reach, no consequences. The people do not. To the HN crowd, sorry but I'm not going to hold back. Death does not turn you into a saint. Susan is the one who turned YouTube into the censored mess it is today, pushed for unliked mainstream channels over popular organic content creators (changed the algorith to push late night talk shows), ruined the algorith to always push "authoritarian" channels (CNN, CBS, MSN, NBC, PBS, etc), gave creators the option to disable the dislike button, permanently banned thousands of channels that even mentioned "pedophilia" like Mouthy Buddha's channel during the Q-anon nonsense. Creators at the time made 30 minute long videos analyzing data and proving that the recommended mainstream channels being pushed were inorganic. She helped ruin YouTube. I will not apologize. Bye Susan. Come back in your next life and help fix it. Downvote away. I do not care.
- mihular 2y ago
  My complaint is that there isn't a family subscription option in my country. Also without Music. It's either personal with Music or damn annoying commercials. Another complaint would be non transparent and sometimes wrong censorship.
- CPLX 2y ago
  The fact that it’s a linchpin component of an illegal monopoly is one good reason.
- briandear 2y ago
  Government-coordinated censorship during Covid. That’s my negative opinion. Covid vax concerns were allowed during the last months of the Trump administration, but it suddenly became censored after Biden was elected.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    The timeline of the election coincides with the development of the vaccines. Moderna reported positive phase 3 trial results in November 2020. FDA’s review was completed in December and an emergency authorization was granted. The full trial results were published in medical journals a few months later, around the same time as Biden entered office. So maybe it had nothing to do with Trump/Biden and simply was a reaction by YouTube to the proven efficacy of the new vaccines.
    - Nemrod67 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - pavlov 2y ago
        What’s your specific beef with Moderna’s three-phase clinical trials? The New England Journal of Medicine in February 2021 published Moderna’s results indicating 94% efficacy. Further studies confirmed it. If you know better than the reviewers at a leading medical journal, it would be interesting to know why you’re so qualified.
        stufffer 2y ago
        >Moderna’s results indicating 94% efficacy Yet strangely every person I know vaccinated or not still got COVID. YouTube banned people for even simple observation like this.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        2y ago
- pavlov 2y ago
  YouTube’s algorithm feeds increasingly radicalizing content to young people. It makes celebrities of people like Andrew Tate and is a primary enabler of fringe belief bubbles. Any time someone posts a YouTube link to a political discussion, it’s guaranteed to be the worst nonsense that pries on people who “do their own research.” (No matter if they’re left or right on the political spectrum, there’s endless junk on YouTube for both.) There’s surely good stuff on YouTube, but as a parent I honestly wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared overnight.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    That is not an “algorithm” unique to YouTube. See 24/7 news channels for a much earlier example. It is simply the nature of loosening standards on broadly available media, and throughout history, even strict standards have not always prevented the “bad” stuff from getting through.
    - pavlov 2y ago
      News channels don’t show random 30-minute programs created by viewers themselves. YouTube does. Fox News and CNN may have low journalistic standards, but at least they have some. They also have liability. (Fox paid $787 million to a voting equipment manufacturer as settlement for lies they published in relation to the 2020 election.) YouTube has neither. Their algorithm will happily promote any nonsense that has traction. The lies that cost Fox $787 million continue to circulate on YouTube unabated — and an untold number of other lies too. Alphabet has no reason to prevent this.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        The greatest sin of YouTube's current recommendation algorithm is its optimization for eyeball time (aka more ad capacity). Any tweaks around the edges will never be able to compete with that. And unfortunately that central tenet incentivizes creators to make clickbait content that plays on emotions, because that's the most reliable way to deliver what YouTube wants. (YouTube could decide it was optimizing for something else, but that would put a big dent in ad revenue)
gloryjulio 2y ago
YouTube is how I got the education I needed to get into the tech industry.
zht 2y ago
I hope that when I die no one spends so much focus on the business aspects of what I built or the valuations
- katzinsky 2y ago
  HN is essentially a business development forum so it makes sense that's what people here would focus on.
  - Blot2882 2y ago
    It's also a science forum and a tech forum.
- sramam 2y ago
  Doesn't that depend on what context a person knew you at - personal or professional? The personal side typically will center on emotional aspects of being human. However what you do with your intellect is also a major part of being human. And that part is most often expressed only in our professional lives. Celebrating a job well done and an outsized impact is a good thing - and if I may, the most "human" of things to do? RIP.
- layer8 2y ago
  Luckily, you will never know, so I wouldn’t place much weight on it.
mrkramer 2y ago
>Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. I was always critical of YouTube from the sort of technical perspective than just pure UX. The core product and the core UX are great and I'm even considering getting YouTube Premium because I use YouTube so much. All in all, YouTube was and still is internet phenomena and they definitely dominate internet video, imo one of the best internet product ever created.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  YouTube has worked well. However, I did try their YT Premium, for a while, and was incredibly disappointed in their UI. I assume that the Premium UI was designed for people that use their free tier, but is very strange, to folks like me, who come from other paid services. But I am likely not their target audience. I suppose that YT Premium does well.
  - nnf 2y ago
    I’m not sure what you mean about the UI, but I pay for YouTube Premium exclusively so I don’t have to see ads, and for that purpose alone, to me it’s worth it.
    - tahoeskibum 2y ago
      Also useful to be able to download videos for offline viewing, e.g., on a plane or when internet is spotty.
      - yyyfb 2y ago
        Also for background playback on mobile
        angoragoats 2y ago
        Background playback works fine on desktop for any video site (simply put the window in the background) and the fact that YouTube gates this feature behind a paywall is a prime example of enshittification. It makes me want to never give them a dime.
deleted 2y ago
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AmericanChopper 2y ago
> It's also not a business that rested on it's laurels. I would say it’s more a business that rests on its monopolization of the market. As a product there’s plenty I like about YouTube, but it dominated the market through the use of many highly anti-competitive strategies, and has what many would consider (and what may well be proven to be) an illegal monopoly. You can’t deny its impact, but to give such high praise to the management seems rather misguided to me.
- edanm 2y ago
  In what way is YouTube an illegal monopoly?
  - AmericanChopper 2y ago
    Alphabet has engaged in many anti-competitive business practices to promote YouTube's monopoly. To name a few, Alphabet is currently being sued by the DoJ for illegally monopolising digital advertising technology. That technology, which directly integrates with youtube (and which you or I could not integrate with our own competing youtube-like product), is one of the key reasons that youtube has become as successful as it is. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl... They have also recently lost a lawsuit regarding the legality of their search monopoly, which likely also contributed to the success of youtube. https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us... The way they leverage the OHA to ensure YouTube is shipped with every Android phone is also highly anti-competitive, and isn't too different from the IE case against Microsoft. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on... The same concern exists in the smart TV market. While it's not illegal (as far as I know), the practice of burning through billions of dollars until your competitors are gone and you have an unassailable market dominance is also certainly anti-competitive, and that really has been one of the other key ingredients in youtube's success. None of these are management practices that I would consider worthy of congratulating.
lvl155 2y ago
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sytelus 2y ago
YouTube is absolutely the business that is resting on laurels, just like Google Maps and Gmail. Sometime I wonder if these products have any real active development teams at all besides ads. YouTube massively screwed with users by forcing poorly executed botched migration to YouTube Music. Even outsiders can see that this was entirely internal Google politics which powerful people like Wojcicki should have been able to avoid but she didn't. It just makes me wonder if these billionaire leaders of Google products really care anymore about anything. There is visibly an utter lack of hunger at the top and these people clearly should have been spending more time with family leaving these products with more hungry minds. YouTube recommendations are crap and it's still amazing that in 2024 just clicking one video will fill up most of recommendations with same thing. It never got around to incentivize creators to produce concise content and to this day creators keep producing massive 30 min diatribe that could have been done in 3 mins. TikTok took full advantage of this but YouTube CEO just kept napping at the wheel. Ultimately, the original product mostly just kept going but the measure of success is not about retaining audience but what it could have been if there was an ambitious visionary leader at the helm.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  > It never got around to incentivize creators to produce concise content and to this day creators keep producing massive 30 min diatribe that could have been done in 3 mins. Why on Earth would you want shorter videos? The best thing about YouTube is that it's one of the only places you can find quality medium-to-long-form content.
  - sytelus 2y ago
    Why on earth you want 10X longer video with same information content as the shorter video?
    - polotics 2y ago
      Clearly the add-supported side, that likes to pad and pad and show more adds, is working against the premium/fee-supported side, that wants to maximise value and engagement. Premium subscribers should be able to give feedback on a video's density IMHO...
swalsh 2y ago
I think googles peering agreements are possibly the only reason YouTube is viable as a free service. Hard to compete against a company who basically doesn't have to pay for bandwidth.
- newshackr 2y ago
  Google also invests many billions of dollars to build their internet network and parts of the public Internet so it is hardly free
  - bushbaba 2y ago
    Eh close to free. This is the Google edge nodes in ISPs. But Google isn’t the only one with such an arrangement. Akamai, Netflix and a few others have same cost structure for in isp nodes.
    - bobdvb 2y ago
      There's a big stand-off between ISPs and CDNs over payments. Some ISPs insist they want payments to peer and others agree that it's mutually beneficial, but even where the ISPs stamp their feet, they rarely win the argument. Netflix started publishing rankings which showed which ISPs were good and which weren't, which drives them to improve. If content providers start saying to customers that they should change their ISP, then the ISP is going to hurt, so they might as well peer on a neutral basis. Some ISPs have been lobbying governments and the EU to ask them to tax the "significant traffic generators" based on the traffic volumes and then use that to pay for the telco infrastructure. But that's an argument I am not convinced by, I think the ISPs will take the money, just reduce their own investments and make more profit. I think the CDNs (including Google) need credit for the infrastructure they build.
ghaff 2y ago
To a fairly casual observer like myself, YouTube early on looked like mostly a platform for massive video copyright infringement--especially before home video became so relatively cheap and easy. I don't use it nearly as much as some here but it definitely transformed into something much different for the most part and managed to make it work as a business (at least as part of Google).
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Younger folks forget that YouTube launched (2005) a few years before both the iPhone launched and Netflix pivoted to streaming (2007). In that weird era, (a) average home Internet connections became fast enough to support streaming video (with a healthy adoption growth rate), (b) the most widely deployed home recording device was likely still the VCR (digitizing analog video from cable to burn to DVD was a pain), (c) there was no "on demand" anything, as most media flowed over centrally-programmed cable or broadcast subscriptions, and (d) people capturing video on mobile devices was rare (first gen iPhone couldn't) but obviously a future growth area. So early YouTube was literally unlike anything that came before -- watch a thing you want, whenever you want.
  - treyd 2y ago
    The slogan "Broadcast Yourself" was really inspiring at the time, because it actually was kinda hard to do that at scale in video.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    And Cisco didn't acquire Flip until 2009. Really most of the content that YouTube had available was material recorded off of broadcast/cable which was mostly not available otherwise unless you had recorded it or gotten it off a torrent.
    - hnburnsy 2y ago
      Flip has a special place in my heart, right next to my memories of my Diamond Rio MP3 player.
  - 2y ago
yzydserd 2y ago
> I've probably watched tens of thousands of hours of YouTube at this point. More than 20,000 hours over at most 18 years is at least 3 hours per day on average. That’s a lot of watching.
- loloquwowndueo 2y ago
  The average person spends 5 hours/day on their phone and it’s likely most of it is passive watching (YouTube, TikTok, etc). So 3 hours/day doesn’t sound like too much.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lasc4r 2y ago
My dad uses it to get fascist/right-wing propaganda for about 4 hours every night. All nicely monetized for any grifter willing to debase themselves for a potential fortune. Truly novel, but not well thought through or done with any care at all besides profits which is par for the course in silicon valley.
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  Your idea of fascism must be rather tame, considering YouTube’s active censorship of anything even slightly right-of-center.
  - lasc4r 2y ago
    It hardly needs to be violently racist or whatever conception you have in your mind to be fascist propaganda. Rather the opposite if you take a minute to consider what makes for effective propaganda.
    - cityofdelusion 2y ago
      The word fascism needs to stop being tossed around so carelessly. Words ought to be precise and meaningful.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - itsoktocry 2y ago
      You sound radicalized. What do you watch? Sounds like we need to ban it.
- vsuperpower2021 2y ago
  Tech companies should spend more time banning people from talking about things I would personally prefer they didn't.
dotnet00 2y ago
YouTube has very much been resting on its laurels, they were innovative 20 years ago when they started. For the past decade or so they have mostly just rested on their laurels allowing the auto-moderation to rampage and destroy people's livelihoods. They've been way behind on adding standard features that their competitors see lots of benefit from. For example, YouTube was years late to the 'channel memberships' game despite the popularity of Twitch and Patreon. YouTube still lacks many of the popular streaming features from Twitch, and only relatively recently got around to adding stuff like polls. I can't think of any feature in the past decade that was a YouTube innovation rather than an innovation from competitors that was copied over years later.
- dylan604 2y ago
  I've often wondered why YT hasn't released a subscription fee or donate type button where they could easily take a small nominal processing fee while removing the friction of forcing use of 3rd party services. Is liability from that kind of money movement too much for them to care with all of the much less risky money they are making?
  - sulam 2y ago
    They have Memberships now and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have a donate button hidden away somewhere.
  - trogdor 2y ago
    They have both. Subscription fee is channel memberships, and donation is the “Thanks” button.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    As others said they have both now. Main issue is the same with any other kind of charity: most people won't do it so it's a neglible factor without incentive (which makes it cease to be a donation in my eyes). But youtube's main services are free, so that's harder to pull off compared to stuff like Patreon. Offering exclusive videos probably doesn't outpace the ad revenue from "free" videos either (and if we're being frank, you're still bound to YT's rules. So you can't offer truly "extra" content free from censorship or copyright or whatnot.)
xnx 2y ago
The way YouTube was caught offguard by TikTok is even more significant than than the way Google was caught offguard by ChatGPT.
yas_hmaheshwari 2y ago
Well said! Having used almost all video learning platforms (Oreilly, skillshare, pluralsight, Coursera etc.), I now believe that YouTube is the superset of all platforms. > Whatever is here, is found elsewhere. But what is not here, is nowhere
johnnyanmac 2y ago
I'll preface this with the most important part that cancer sucks and I wish it not even on my worst enemies. I hope Susan's family can find some peace. >but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined. it's very weird because "successful" doesn't mean "makes the most profit" here. It's undoubedtly a huge and challenging infrastructure to manage, but it apparently took Google over a decade to start being profitable. I don't know if that's some hollywood accounting or commodification to ads, but in many ways I feel like YT outspent the rest of the competition and in some ways stifled more efficient ways to deliver video content. I feel a bit bad because it's clear YT has been turning the script for some time, and while Susan took a lot of that blame these wheels were turning long before she became CEO (and turn long after she stepped down). But that just shows why monopolies are bad. I do hope something better for creators takes over eventually.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
latexr 2y ago
> objectively “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” What makes a business successful and what makes a good product are both highly subjective.

georgel 2y ago

Agreed, I have gotten insane amount of value from YouTube.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

TMWNN 2y ago

>Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN Who? Who has a negative opinion about YouTube? The occasional "My kids watch too much of it" != "mixed opinions" about the site in general.

cheeseomlit 2y ago
I like a lot of content hosted on YouTube but that doesn't mean I like YouTube, especially under Google.
xanderlewis 2y ago
A lot of YouTubers have been very critical of YouTube’s approach to things and treatment of creators in the past. Also, just as an example, YouTube demonetises (and therefore effectively punishes) you for using words like ‘suicide’ so now we have to say silly things like ‘unalive’ — at least until Google/the advertisers catch on. These days YouTube is more censored than traditional TV.
- TMWNN 2y ago
  I think the "unalive" nonsense is idiotic too, especially when it increasingly bleeds into elsewhere online (and probably offline, too). But that's not the same thing as "mixed opinions" in general on HN. That would be more accurate of, say, Twitter (where we are nearing two years and counting of the imminent collapse of the site any day now post-Musk acquisition, as opposed to seemingly every news event proving that it is more important than ever).
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    I think perhaps what there are ‘mixed opinions’ on is the actual management and day-to-day practice of YouTube as a company, rather than the site itself. We’re all very, very grateful to have such an amazing place to learn and be entertained. And, in my opinion, the website and apps are very nicely designed and work better than anything else. I do wish the TikTokification would stop, though. But that’s never going to happen, given how effective it is at holding our eyeballs hostage.
  - ChrisNorstrom 2y ago
    Which is interesting because the news and media and movies and music videos can be as "advertiser unfriendly" as they want and still get ads to support the corporation that produces it. But indie content creators and the general public are punished for talking about the same topics. Corporations get freedom of speech, freedom of reach, no consequences. The people do not. To the HN crowd, sorry but I'm not going to hold back. Death does not turn you into a saint. Susan is the one who turned YouTube into the censored mess it is today, pushed for unliked mainstream channels over popular organic content creators (changed the algorith to push late night talk shows), ruined the algorith to always push "authoritarian" channels (CNN, CBS, MSN, NBC, PBS, etc), gave creators the option to disable the dislike button, permanently banned thousands of channels that even mentioned "pedophilia" like Mouthy Buddha's channel during the Q-anon nonsense. Creators at the time made 30 minute long videos analyzing data and proving that the recommended mainstream channels being pushed were inorganic. She helped ruin YouTube. I will not apologize. Bye Susan. Come back in your next life and help fix it. Downvote away. I do not care.
mihular 2y ago
My complaint is that there isn't a family subscription option in my country. Also without Music. It's either personal with Music or damn annoying commercials. Another complaint would be non transparent and sometimes wrong censorship.
CPLX 2y ago
The fact that it’s a linchpin component of an illegal monopoly is one good reason.
briandear 2y ago
Government-coordinated censorship during Covid. That’s my negative opinion. Covid vax concerns were allowed during the last months of the Trump administration, but it suddenly became censored after Biden was elected.
- pavlov 2y ago
  The timeline of the election coincides with the development of the vaccines. Moderna reported positive phase 3 trial results in November 2020. FDA’s review was completed in December and an emergency authorization was granted. The full trial results were published in medical journals a few months later, around the same time as Biden entered office. So maybe it had nothing to do with Trump/Biden and simply was a reaction by YouTube to the proven efficacy of the new vaccines.
  - Nemrod67 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - pavlov 2y ago
      What’s your specific beef with Moderna’s three-phase clinical trials? The New England Journal of Medicine in February 2021 published Moderna’s results indicating 94% efficacy. Further studies confirmed it. If you know better than the reviewers at a leading medical journal, it would be interesting to know why you’re so qualified.
      - stufffer 2y ago
        >Moderna’s results indicating 94% efficacy Yet strangely every person I know vaccinated or not still got COVID. YouTube banned people for even simple observation like this.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        2y ago
pavlov 2y ago
YouTube’s algorithm feeds increasingly radicalizing content to young people. It makes celebrities of people like Andrew Tate and is a primary enabler of fringe belief bubbles. Any time someone posts a YouTube link to a political discussion, it’s guaranteed to be the worst nonsense that pries on people who “do their own research.” (No matter if they’re left or right on the political spectrum, there’s endless junk on YouTube for both.) There’s surely good stuff on YouTube, but as a parent I honestly wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared overnight.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  That is not an “algorithm” unique to YouTube. See 24/7 news channels for a much earlier example. It is simply the nature of loosening standards on broadly available media, and throughout history, even strict standards have not always prevented the “bad” stuff from getting through.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    News channels don’t show random 30-minute programs created by viewers themselves. YouTube does. Fox News and CNN may have low journalistic standards, but at least they have some. They also have liability. (Fox paid $787 million to a voting equipment manufacturer as settlement for lies they published in relation to the 2020 election.) YouTube has neither. Their algorithm will happily promote any nonsense that has traction. The lies that cost Fox $787 million continue to circulate on YouTube unabated — and an untold number of other lies too. Alphabet has no reason to prevent this.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      The greatest sin of YouTube's current recommendation algorithm is its optimization for eyeball time (aka more ad capacity). Any tweaks around the edges will never be able to compete with that. And unfortunately that central tenet incentivizes creators to make clickbait content that plays on emotions, because that's the most reliable way to deliver what YouTube wants. (YouTube could decide it was optimizing for something else, but that would put a big dent in ad revenue)

gloryjulio 2y ago

YouTube is how I got the education I needed to get into the tech industry.

zht 2y ago

I hope that when I die no one spends so much focus on the business aspects of what I built or the valuations

katzinsky 2y ago
HN is essentially a business development forum so it makes sense that's what people here would focus on.
- Blot2882 2y ago
  It's also a science forum and a tech forum.
sramam 2y ago
Doesn't that depend on what context a person knew you at - personal or professional? The personal side typically will center on emotional aspects of being human. However what you do with your intellect is also a major part of being human. And that part is most often expressed only in our professional lives. Celebrating a job well done and an outsized impact is a good thing - and if I may, the most "human" of things to do? RIP.
layer8 2y ago
Luckily, you will never know, so I wouldn’t place much weight on it.

mrkramer 2y ago

>Opinions about YouTube may be mixed here on HN, but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. I was always critical of YouTube from the sort of technical perspective than just pure UX. The core product and the core UX are great and I'm even considering getting YouTube Premium because I use YouTube so much. All in all, YouTube was and still is internet phenomena and they definitely dominate internet video, imo one of the best internet product ever created.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
YouTube has worked well. However, I did try their YT Premium, for a while, and was incredibly disappointed in their UI. I assume that the Premium UI was designed for people that use their free tier, but is very strange, to folks like me, who come from other paid services. But I am likely not their target audience. I suppose that YT Premium does well.
- nnf 2y ago
  I’m not sure what you mean about the UI, but I pay for YouTube Premium exclusively so I don’t have to see ads, and for that purpose alone, to me it’s worth it.
  - tahoeskibum 2y ago
    Also useful to be able to download videos for offline viewing, e.g., on a plane or when internet is spotty.
    - yyyfb 2y ago
      Also for background playback on mobile
      - angoragoats 2y ago
        Background playback works fine on desktop for any video site (simply put the window in the background) and the fact that YouTube gates this feature behind a paywall is a prime example of enshittification. It makes me want to never give them a dime.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

AmericanChopper 2y ago

> It's also not a business that rested on it's laurels. I would say it’s more a business that rests on its monopolization of the market. As a product there’s plenty I like about YouTube, but it dominated the market through the use of many highly anti-competitive strategies, and has what many would consider (and what may well be proven to be) an illegal monopoly. You can’t deny its impact, but to give such high praise to the management seems rather misguided to me.

edanm 2y ago
In what way is YouTube an illegal monopoly?
- AmericanChopper 2y ago
  Alphabet has engaged in many anti-competitive business practices to promote YouTube's monopoly. To name a few, Alphabet is currently being sued by the DoJ for illegally monopolising digital advertising technology. That technology, which directly integrates with youtube (and which you or I could not integrate with our own competing youtube-like product), is one of the key reasons that youtube has become as successful as it is. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-google-monopolizing-digital-advertising-technologies https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-sues-googl... They have also recently lost a lawsuit regarding the legality of their search monopoly, which likely also contributed to the success of youtube. https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us-doj-v-google-antitrust-search-suit https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24155520/judge-rules-on-us... The way they leverage the OHA to ensure YouTube is shipped with every Android phone is also highly anti-competitive, and isn't too different from the IE case against Microsoft. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/googles-iron-grip-on... The same concern exists in the smart TV market. While it's not illegal (as far as I know), the practice of burning through billions of dollars until your competitors are gone and you have an unassailable market dominance is also certainly anti-competitive, and that really has been one of the other key ingredients in youtube's success. None of these are management practices that I would consider worthy of congratulating.

lvl155 2y ago

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sytelus 2y ago

YouTube is absolutely the business that is resting on laurels, just like Google Maps and Gmail. Sometime I wonder if these products have any real active development teams at all besides ads. YouTube massively screwed with users by forcing poorly executed botched migration to YouTube Music. Even outsiders can see that this was entirely internal Google politics which powerful people like Wojcicki should have been able to avoid but she didn't. It just makes me wonder if these billionaire leaders of Google products really care anymore about anything. There is visibly an utter lack of hunger at the top and these people clearly should have been spending more time with family leaving these products with more hungry minds. YouTube recommendations are crap and it's still amazing that in 2024 just clicking one video will fill up most of recommendations with same thing. It never got around to incentivize creators to produce concise content and to this day creators keep producing massive 30 min diatribe that could have been done in 3 mins. TikTok took full advantage of this but YouTube CEO just kept napping at the wheel. Ultimately, the original product mostly just kept going but the measure of success is not about retaining audience but what it could have been if there was an ambitious visionary leader at the helm.

tsimionescu 2y ago
> It never got around to incentivize creators to produce concise content and to this day creators keep producing massive 30 min diatribe that could have been done in 3 mins. Why on Earth would you want shorter videos? The best thing about YouTube is that it's one of the only places you can find quality medium-to-long-form content.
- sytelus 2y ago
  Why on earth you want 10X longer video with same information content as the shorter video?
  - polotics 2y ago
    Clearly the add-supported side, that likes to pad and pad and show more adds, is working against the premium/fee-supported side, that wants to maximise value and engagement. Premium subscribers should be able to give feedback on a video's density IMHO...

swalsh 2y ago

I think googles peering agreements are possibly the only reason YouTube is viable as a free service. Hard to compete against a company who basically doesn't have to pay for bandwidth.

newshackr 2y ago
Google also invests many billions of dollars to build their internet network and parts of the public Internet so it is hardly free
- bushbaba 2y ago
  Eh close to free. This is the Google edge nodes in ISPs. But Google isn’t the only one with such an arrangement. Akamai, Netflix and a few others have same cost structure for in isp nodes.
  - bobdvb 2y ago
    There's a big stand-off between ISPs and CDNs over payments. Some ISPs insist they want payments to peer and others agree that it's mutually beneficial, but even where the ISPs stamp their feet, they rarely win the argument. Netflix started publishing rankings which showed which ISPs were good and which weren't, which drives them to improve. If content providers start saying to customers that they should change their ISP, then the ISP is going to hurt, so they might as well peer on a neutral basis. Some ISPs have been lobbying governments and the EU to ask them to tax the "significant traffic generators" based on the traffic volumes and then use that to pay for the telco infrastructure. But that's an argument I am not convinced by, I think the ISPs will take the money, just reduce their own investments and make more profit. I think the CDNs (including Google) need credit for the infrastructure they build.

ghaff 2y ago

To a fairly casual observer like myself, YouTube early on looked like mostly a platform for massive video copyright infringement--especially before home video became so relatively cheap and easy. I don't use it nearly as much as some here but it definitely transformed into something much different for the most part and managed to make it work as a business (at least as part of Google).

ethbr1 2y ago
Younger folks forget that YouTube launched (2005) a few years before both the iPhone launched and Netflix pivoted to streaming (2007). In that weird era, (a) average home Internet connections became fast enough to support streaming video (with a healthy adoption growth rate), (b) the most widely deployed home recording device was likely still the VCR (digitizing analog video from cable to burn to DVD was a pain), (c) there was no "on demand" anything, as most media flowed over centrally-programmed cable or broadcast subscriptions, and (d) people capturing video on mobile devices was rare (first gen iPhone couldn't) but obviously a future growth area. So early YouTube was literally unlike anything that came before -- watch a thing you want, whenever you want.
- treyd 2y ago
  The slogan "Broadcast Yourself" was really inspiring at the time, because it actually was kinda hard to do that at scale in video.
- ghaff 2y ago
  And Cisco didn't acquire Flip until 2009. Really most of the content that YouTube had available was material recorded off of broadcast/cable which was mostly not available otherwise unless you had recorded it or gotten it off a torrent.
  - hnburnsy 2y ago
    Flip has a special place in my heart, right next to my memories of my Diamond Rio MP3 player.
- 2y ago

yzydserd 2y ago

> I've probably watched tens of thousands of hours of YouTube at this point. More than 20,000 hours over at most 18 years is at least 3 hours per day on average. That’s a lot of watching.

loloquwowndueo 2y ago
The average person spends 5 hours/day on their phone and it’s likely most of it is passive watching (YouTube, TikTok, etc). So 3 hours/day doesn’t sound like too much.

deleted 2y ago

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lasc4r 2y ago

My dad uses it to get fascist/right-wing propaganda for about 4 hours every night. All nicely monetized for any grifter willing to debase themselves for a potential fortune. Truly novel, but not well thought through or done with any care at all besides profits which is par for the course in silicon valley.

tourmalinetaco 2y ago
Your idea of fascism must be rather tame, considering YouTube’s active censorship of anything even slightly right-of-center.
- lasc4r 2y ago
  It hardly needs to be violently racist or whatever conception you have in your mind to be fascist propaganda. Rather the opposite if you take a minute to consider what makes for effective propaganda.
  - cityofdelusion 2y ago
    The word fascism needs to stop being tossed around so carelessly. Words ought to be precise and meaningful.
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - itsoktocry 2y ago
    You sound radicalized. What do you watch? Sounds like we need to ban it.
vsuperpower2021 2y ago
Tech companies should spend more time banning people from talking about things I would personally prefer they didn't.

dotnet00 2y ago

YouTube has very much been resting on its laurels, they were innovative 20 years ago when they started. For the past decade or so they have mostly just rested on their laurels allowing the auto-moderation to rampage and destroy people's livelihoods. They've been way behind on adding standard features that their competitors see lots of benefit from. For example, YouTube was years late to the 'channel memberships' game despite the popularity of Twitch and Patreon. YouTube still lacks many of the popular streaming features from Twitch, and only relatively recently got around to adding stuff like polls. I can't think of any feature in the past decade that was a YouTube innovation rather than an innovation from competitors that was copied over years later.

dylan604 2y ago
I've often wondered why YT hasn't released a subscription fee or donate type button where they could easily take a small nominal processing fee while removing the friction of forcing use of 3rd party services. Is liability from that kind of money movement too much for them to care with all of the much less risky money they are making?
- sulam 2y ago
  They have Memberships now and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t have a donate button hidden away somewhere.
- trogdor 2y ago
  They have both. Subscription fee is channel memberships, and donation is the “Thanks” button.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  As others said they have both now. Main issue is the same with any other kind of charity: most people won't do it so it's a neglible factor without incentive (which makes it cease to be a donation in my eyes). But youtube's main services are free, so that's harder to pull off compared to stuff like Patreon. Offering exclusive videos probably doesn't outpace the ad revenue from "free" videos either (and if we're being frank, you're still bound to YT's rules. So you can't offer truly "extra" content free from censorship or copyright or whatnot.)

xnx 2y ago

The way YouTube was caught offguard by TikTok is even more significant than than the way Google was caught offguard by ChatGPT.

yas_hmaheshwari 2y ago

Well said! Having used almost all video learning platforms (Oreilly, skillshare, pluralsight, Coursera etc.), I now believe that YouTube is the superset of all platforms. > Whatever is here, is found elsewhere. But what is not here, is nowhere

johnnyanmac 2y ago

I'll preface this with the most important part that cancer sucks and I wish it not even on my worst enemies. I hope Susan's family can find some peace. >but it is objectively one of the most successful businesses in tech or media to emerge in the past 15 years. If it weren't buried inside Alphabet, Youtube would be worth on the order of $400 billion, more than Disney and Comcast combined. it's very weird because "successful" doesn't mean "makes the most profit" here. It's undoubedtly a huge and challenging infrastructure to manage, but it apparently took Google over a decade to start being profitable. I don't know if that's some hollywood accounting or commodification to ads, but in many ways I feel like YT outspent the rest of the competition and in some ways stifled more efficient ways to deliver video content. I feel a bit bad because it's clear YT has been turning the script for some time, and while Susan took a lot of that blame these wheels were turning long before she became CEO (and turn long after she stepped down). But that just shows why monopolies are bad. I do hope something better for creators takes over eventually.

deleted 2y ago

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latexr 2y ago

> objectively “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” What makes a business successful and what makes a good product are both highly subjective.