Susan Wojcicki has died(twitter.com) |
Susan Wojcicki has died(twitter.com) |
Perhaps not as much of a 'technical' contributor to tech world, but one of the largest companies in the world started in her garage, she was an early employee and served in senior leadership for decades.
Not even a billion $ will protect you from America's problems with cancer and fentanyl. We need to fix this. I mean, just look at this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-incidence?tab=char...
Is it pesticides like this recent HN thread alludes to?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41182121
Idk. But the US is uniquely doing something very wrong.
Looks like Xanax and Cocaine.
https://nypost.com/2024/05/30/us-news/cause-of-death-reveale...
When it comes to US that chart looks a lot like the obesity rate chart, and obesity is a partial gateway to cancer, though they may just correlate too stemming from the same reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...
Since not even having a billion will allow you to cheat death, perhaps we shouldn't allow billionaires to cheat everyone else in life.
> Accidental self inflicted injury
There is one more covid wave going on, so that could be a reason for many people coughing.
"The leading causes of death for unintentional injury include: unintentional
poisoning (e.g., drug overdoses), unintentional motor vehicle (m.v.) traffic,
unintentional drowning, and unintentional falls."
https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/animated-leading-causes.h...
That makes the average come out to less than other countries with universal healthcare.
But it also explains why wealthy people are against universal care in the US -- because they believe their level of care will go down so that everyone else's can go up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.16.24302894v...
"The United States (U.S.) is the leading country in ultra-processed food (UPF) consumption, accounting for 60% of caloric intake, compared to a range of 14 to 44% in Europe. "
In 1990, US was 18.7% obese with a cancer incidence of 1,760, UK and Australia at 780.
Most recent is 2016 showing Australia and UK at 30% obesity, yet their cancer incidence is lower than ever at 750 and 682, respectively.
Everyone but the US (and Poland) are increasing their obesity while their cancer incidence is flat or decreasing: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...
https://www.wcrf.org/cancer-trends/global-cancer-data-by-cou....
age standartized rate:
USA - 367 UK - 307 Australia - 462
Also, the industry and brand cred that would accrue from being the company that cured cancer would be immense. Think about what that would do for recruiting, influence and access. Ask yourself if Novo-Nordisk is in a worse position today for pretty much curing obesity.
Their argument is just that: 'The reason Zolgensma is so expensive is because that is the price Novartis has decided it is worth because it “dramatically transforms the lives of families affected by this devastating disease”'.
Basically it's "isn't you child's live worth 2.5 million?"
If someone found a one-shot no-side effects cure for a particular type of cancer there's no way they'd price it the same as the full course of chemo, they'd price it at "how much would you pay to be alive again". Insurance companies don't pay shit, their customers do.
Wouldn't it be better to have them cured and live longer and just spend their money on curing other illnesses we're all going to have anyway?
There is something about this cynic explanation that just doesn't sound right to me
lung cancer as well, I don't think she was a smoker so what a bad stroke of luck.
Interesting to mention about the Polgar sisters again [3].
Z''L.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-godmother-of-silicon-va...
[2] https://www.amazon.com/How-Raise-Successful-People-Lessons/d...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r
I'm not sure what to say about that anymore.
I've taken basically all vaccines ever recommended while growing up and traveling, but to say that the covid vaccine was "safe and effective" a year after coming out was a crazy stretch. Why couldn't they just say "we didn't have time to do long term studies, but we think it's fine and worth the risks"? But to say it's safe was a lie IMO and lost the vaccine side a lot of credibility.
Fuck cancer.
Edit: some people misinterpreted my comment. I'm just one anonymous voice on the Internet, but am deeply saddened by the passing of Susan Wojcicki, who meant a lot to me as one of the many people who crossed paths with her professionally. I wish her family strength in a very trying moment. She did not deserve this. I've not met another business leader demonstrate everyday kindness to the degree that she did.
Her untimely passing is also a reminder to those of us who sometimes look up to such successful businesspeople that we should all appreciate our luck to be alive and enjoy it to the fullest, as I hope that she did as well, and as I'm sure that she'd prefer we did. RIP
Personally, I wish I had any control at all over YouTube Shorts.
If you want to hate, then hate the game, not the player (especially in this case).
I certainly wouldn't mind reading some personal eulogies about what a great mentor her was etc., or about how she influenced your life with her work even if you didn't know her.
But I also don't mind reading critical posts about the role she played, I think that's part of the picture for someone who's famous as a business leader. If people weren't willing to speak freely about the dead, we wouldn't have had the Nobel prizes.
YouTube has videos on the dangers of GMO crops, despite the scientific consensus for their safety and utility.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8959534/#cit000...
YouTube has plenty of videos about electromagnetic sensitivity about which the WHO says: “EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure.”
https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-hea...
And more stupidity: “Eating these foods kills cancer”
https://youtu.be/WGbFnp56csg?si=t54Pcr3uqjrXRx9f
“12 foods that can fight and cure cancer”
https://youtu.be/FdlKCpEzSAE?si=J6rtKs6valWnamBP
Interview with Robert DeNiro 8 years about his concerns about vaccines and autism and his doubts about the vaccine effectiveness statistics.
https://youtu.be/FJ7iPn39i08?si=mRYD3a3y9HdMPMQ8
Covid censorship was political and not from some altruistic “goodness.”
And YouTube experienced very significant growth during the pandemic. So that “lovely” soul was profiting because of the lockdowns. Lockdowns that were possible due to fear and a lack of any permissible public debate — partially thanks to YouTube. Would lockdowns have ended sooner if there was more debate on the topic allowed? Definitely. What about school closures? Absolutely. But videos debating these things weren’t allowed.
So no, the game and the player in this case are one and the same. I’m not going to respect anyone that supported lockdowns or supported suppressing scientific debate. Curating opinion (and facts) while pretending to not to isn’t worthy of respect.
And, YouTube still allows those addictive kid videos where the narrator says “If you love your parents, like and subscribe. If you don’t love your parents, don’t like and subscribe.”
People live and die. It is inevitable. To the grieving family, I can understand why refraining from insulting the dearly departed is necessary. They are grieving and can be irrational. No need to make things worse for them.
But between unrelated people? Why can't I discuss the legacy of the dead? We are defined by our deeds in life. It is only natural that in death, people will talk and opine about what we have done. Nothing wrong with it.
A better phrase may be "Don't say things that will hurt the feelings of those who are grieving," but that doesn't roll off the tongue so easily.
We are but most folks here basically know nothing of her deeds, or really anything about her. They see one piece of a thing she was a face of for some time period, and that they also knew mostly nothing about, but appear to love to have strong opinions on!
If you want to speak of her deeds then go and learn about them. Otherwise, people aren't speaking of anything other than some small myopic view of a human being they knew nothing about. Folks don't get to say that she is defined by the small piece of stuff they saw, just because they want to have an opinion on it.
Besides being disrespectful, it's not even interesting, and it says more about the people doing it than the person they are talking about.
It's like saying you are defined by the small and short interactions you had with grocery store cashiers who happen to like to post about their experiences with you on the internet and nothing else.
unless you have a magical way to make your comment here invisible to her family and friends, posting it to the internet is not keeping the comment exclusively "between unrelated people." Many of those replies to Pichai are vile.
We've had many such incidents over the recent years and at least in my anecdotal observations, people do not consistently apply this.
With a dead person, I think this logic holds to an even higher degree. Personally I'm not really sure whether I agree or disagree with it, but it seems pretty reasonable, especially if we don't hyperbolically immediately leap to absurdly extreme examples like Hitler or whatever.
If they're rich and powerful who cares... here's John Oliver's reaction to Kissinger dying [0]... tl;dr "not soon enough"
I use YouTube, even though I don't particularly like it, much like every other Google product. Not sure how much of what I dislike on YouTube is her fault or not,and it doesn't really matter anyway. It is not like I hold any hopes of YouTube becoming any better now.
But I find this kind of comment curious. Someone noteworthy and controversial dies, critical comments are sure to follow.
Happened when people such as Kissinger or Chomsky died. No one was saying "show some respect to the person who died, save your opinions for another day". It would be fairly ridiculous to say so.
https://med.stanford.edu/survivingcancer/cancer-and-stress/s....
Jake died yesterday. I don’t even think he was 40 years old.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41201555
Susan was only 56.
Let’s at least give everyone a chance at a full life.
Big endian
Yes, both rich and poor die of cancer.
But being rich or even just comfortable gives you a completely different experience during the end of life.
You can afford to quit your job and be with your friends and family.
You can afford to see that best doctors that will ensure you have as comfortable as possible end of life.
Your kids can afford to take a sabbatical to come spend time with you.
You can be sure that no matter what your kids will be financially secure.
You know that you got the absolute best care that you could.
The list goes on.
Cancer is horrible and everyone who loses someone hurts the same. But you absolutely cannot keep saying that being poor and rich doesn’t make a difference during the progress of this awful disease.
Only someone who has never been poor would ever say that.
Money does buy comfort and care. Also, it does not make one immortal.
We can choose what we take away from events. I could choose to feel unlucky that I haven't made as much money as someone else, and I would be justified in it, because being rich absolutely makes a difference. I just choose to feel lucky to be alive instead, and I'm just as justified. You are free to choose your own perspective.
The entitled classes have no reason to change rules that are clearly stacked in their favour. But it sounds way better to say the rules cannot be changed. But it is hard to see why this should be self-evidently true.
Most of these proverbs are just selling bs.
E.g. compared to being able to live more than 1,000 years or forever and with body in its prime condition recovery etc wise. E.g. having a 25 year old body for 1,000+ years.
We’d likely need trillions of dollars of investment, and a lot more people working on it, to increase our lifespan/healthspan.
But hey, we can hope together, for what that’s worth.
So maybe work but not in excessively high stress loads is your point?
Though i think your implied underlying assumption that because she was a leader in tech and under a high workload somehow caused this is unfounded and unnecessary.
One is the stress of essentially playing a game or working on a challenge and the other is existential.
The custom about “not speaking ill of the dead” makes sense in a small IRL community, not for internationally famous people.
I for one would prefer "don't get attached to evil people"
The point still stands
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40720876 - We Remember Noam Chomsky, the Intellectual and Moral Giant
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40721208 - Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky dies at age 95
You can remove the name and still have a point left there. Just pretend the comment only said Kissinger, it’s really not that hard.
When my mother died of cancer (also in her 50s, still working as a public teacher in NYC so should have had great insurance for this) the hospital went after the estate with a million dollar bill. I couldn't even afford a lawyer to contest it at the time and ended up not inheriting anything except what I could take out of the house.
The only people with good outcomes are the rich who can afford it, and the poor who couldn't afford anything yet are still being treated because other tax payers are paying into this system.
an impoverished single-parent 4 member family will not have time to exploit whatever medical care options are made available to them. this time deficit is one of the more common characteristics that impoverished families have in common.
in a way it's similar to the healthcare problems that startup people see early in the business; 'no time for the doctor, I have meetings -- i'll live with the ulcer' , just from a different angle.
lack of opportunity for time management.
The US healthcare system is broken beyond belief, and I do think there is some degree of managerial sociopathy around profit (particularly in the pharmaceutical and insurance wings), but by and large there still remain options for people even if they may be arduous, and I do think that hospitals and doctors are still significantly motivated just to provide good care.
2. Imagine two planets, people on one of them believe that expanding is the moral imperative, and the other want stay where they are. Eventually the people from the first planet will be technologically as far away from the people on first planet, as we are from people on Sentinel island. And therefore will be completely reliant on goodwill first people.
3. The only way to preserve life on earth is to develop space technology, once we have sufficient industry in space, controlling whether on earth will be a simple task, trivially solving climate change issue.
Also those two items aren't mutually exclusive. Both can and should happen in tandem. Anyone arguing otherwise is just a mentally lazy person.
Of course preservation of life on our planet should be paramount. We can also pursue space travel. Space travel research isn't whats killing our planet.
Those were your exact words. But nice backpedal.
Edit: I don’t want to get into an argument but just beware that your original post rubs a lot of people the wrong way. I respect that’s the pain and sorrow of a loss are the same but please don’t dismiss the power and need of money. It makes a world of a difference in the process of dying. You don’t want to sound like someone living on an ivory tower.
Stupidity is entirely your implication, but people generally like to see things in binary. It’s far easier than acknowledging that most things live on a spectrum.
https://press.farm/susan-wojcickis-daily-routine-youtubes-ce...
Sleep about 6hr, which isnt ideal. Not much chance to get sunlight which significantly reduces cancer incidence. Not much relaxing time.
The question becomes, is the work worth it?
Besides 10:00pm to 5:30am is 7.5 hours, which is either optimal or (arguably) too much.
Lastly, there's no clear evidence tying sleep duration to cancer incidence. See, e.g.: https://bmccancer.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12885-...
We shouldn’t have people making such claims on HN without providing references.
She was also home having dinner with her family by 6:30pm.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why?
Serious question, too. You can sideload clients that give you every single feature of YouTube Premium for free. Unless you're expressly lazy, like being taken advantage of or enjoy watching advertisements, there's really no excuse. YouTube Premium is the "I'm trapped in this place and you people have finally gotten me" fee - you can circument it all together by just, not using YouTube's software. Newpipe is must-have on Android, I'm certain something similar exists for iOS. I run SmartTube on my dirt-cheap Amazon FireTV and don't get a single ad when browsing. Subtotal is $0.00 for the installation and usage of Open Source software.
I use YouTube a lot, but between uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock (which I set-and-forget like 4 years ago) I don't have a single gripe with the experience. I hear people contemplate paying YouTube for a worse experience and it gives me hives. The content is on a server; you are making yourself miserable by acquiescing to a harmful client. Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.
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.
Sadly, the copyright cartel swiftly attacked and all the regular people lost their rights. It seems like the lesson learned is that the copyright-owning corporations can't be trusted to play fairly or meet in the middle on fair use. We really need to just abolish copyright laws entirely.
>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.
> Whatever is here, is found elsewhere. But what is not here, is nowhere
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
Who? Who has a negative opinion about YouTube? The occasional "My kids watch too much of it" != "mixed opinions" about the site in general.
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.
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.
Covid vax concerns were allowed during the last months of the Trump administration, but it suddenly became censored after Biden was elected.
Page and Brin started Google in her garage. She was employee #16 at the company. She was behind the Google logo, Google Doodles, Image Search, AdSense, then all of advertising, and ultimately YouTube.
Safe to say Google would not be where it is today without her role. RIP.
So she made some of the most user-hostile, internet-ruining products and created one of the most evil companies currently active? Great obituary going on there. With apologies to the people grieving her, she is basically 2024 Thomas Midgley Jr.
> Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.
I'll say personally it's tragic to see someone like this pass in their 50s. Given Susan's impact on both Google as a whole and more specifically YouTube it's no understatement to say that she changed the world profoundly.
I don't think that YouTube, in its current form, or the creator economy that it produced, would exist in anywhere near the same shape had Google not acquired and then spent years funding the company at a financial loss.
Posted by Sundar Pichai.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/05/31/marco-t...
What a strange mix.
Xanax as a party drug is just strange in general.
Daily adderal RX for ADHD or studying. Coke at night to party. Xanax at end of night to come down from the uppers and try to sleep. That mix is pretty common.
Not really religious, but always liked the short line
'For dust you are, and to dust you shall return'
> Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend @SusanWojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her. She was an incredible person, leader and friend who had a tremendous impact on the world and I’m one of countless Googlers who is better for knowing her. We will miss her dearly. Our thoughts with her family. RIP Susan.
My mom was one of her teachers and just told me “this is so sad, she was such a beautiful kid. She went on to do amazing things.”
Yes, she did.
One wonders if his mom having terminal cancer was a factor in his overdoing it.
And I cannot imagine how news like that would hit a mother with cancer, when the only thing left for her is legacy.
Truly tragic.
definitely miss that now after the switch back to the faceless leadership, and saddened by the loss. condolences to the family.
The follow-on conclusion from that is that the times are highly suspect.
“ Following sun exposure advice that is very restrictive in countries with low solar intensity might in fact be harmful to women's health.”
Thanks for the link. Now we know with certainty that lack of sunlight wasn’t a cause.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01695...
Susan lived in Northern California. How’s the solar intensity where she lived?
“ sun exposure advice that is very restrictive in countries with low solar intensity might in fact be harmful to women's health
Mixer is one of the best examples of this. MSFT paid hundreds of millions for exclusivity for some of the most popular streamers and people complimented how it felt much smoother than Twitch. But that wasn't enough to get off the ground for MS. Youtube is an even bigger behemoth to tackle.
I’m not familiar with Susan’s work directly, but for example, it’s widely accepted that YT has the best revenue share and payout for its creators compared to competitors like twitch or TikTok.
Someone has to really sit down and figure out how getting paid for making internet videos works. It didn’t exist before.
Also great product leaders give team members principles and tools to work with (like metrics), so they don’t need to micromanage every decision, and the product can still be cohesive.
https://seer.cancer.gov/statistics-network/explorer/applicat...
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.
What do you watch? Sounds like we need to ban it.
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.)
They do. But as explained, the revenue gained by maybe 100 users paying $5/month won't necessarily exceed an average video release of 10,000 "free" views. It's a " free service", so most subscribers (let alone unsubscribed viewers) won't join the membership for a few extra videos. It's a similar issue Reddit is trying to do right now with paid subreddits.
The idea can work, Nebula as a "competitor" works off this model. But I don't think it can be tacked on 20 years later onto a "free" service.
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-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...
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...
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.
Carriage dispute with Roku. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/08/roku-reaches-agreement-with-...
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.
So which is it: 1) The mRNA vaccine was rushed out without sufficient clinical trials; 2) The results from the clinical trials were delayed to hurt Trump.
You can’t have both you know. So far the far-right argument has been entirely based on scenario 1, but it’s certainly interesting to know that scenario 2 also exists for some people.
https://amp.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/sun-and-uv/sun...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12936899/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-13399-4
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.
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)
Legacy Media made celebrities out of people far worse than Tate decades before Youtube: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Mesrine
Media's propensity to do so has been lampooned before as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Born_Killers
Tagline: "Media made them superstars"
> and is a primary enabler of fringe belief bubbles.
Oh? It's not like anyone's ever seen conspiracy theory programs on TV before Youtube. Heck, if someone re-rendered some of those with AI to use Alex Jones' voice, even his viewers might not be able to tell the difference.
The biggest issue that I had, was that I couldn't find shows that I wanted to see. YT kept shoving a bunch of stuff into the UI that I wasn't interested in. All my searches were littered with results that were not relevant to me. I suspect they were paid.
The Apple App Store has the same problem. It's infuriating.
Listen, I apologize for diverting from the real issue, that a tech luminary died young. I did not know her, but it sounds like she was popular, and did well.
I hope YT Premium is a step in that direction, but only time will tell.
1. less annoying for non-desktop devices. Especially when casting content onto my TV
2. moral niceties: Premium viewers apparently help give more revenue to content creators, and I tend to watch smaller channels. It's nice knowing I can disproportionately help those kinds of creators out.
Also, apparently Google is in the middle of its latest clash with adblocking so even that can get unreliable.
Operation Warp Speed was a signature effort of the Trump administration. As a result, the claim that the vaccine was being “rushed out without sufficient clinical trials” was made by just about all of Trump’s critics.
I’m a Trump critic and I was happy with the priority given to Operation Warp Speed. It’s the only thing he did right during the pandemic. But a lot of the MAGA crowd are anti-vaxxers, so he’s been trying to distance himself from the successful vaccine operation.
Exactly. Trump himself killed his own stance and delayed initatives that cost thousands of lives. Probably killed off a lot of his voter base to boot. if he managed to convince people to lockdown he may have still be president in 2020-2024.
When it comes to “anti-vaxxers”, a lot of people, including both Biden and Harris, were outspokenly skeptical of any vaccine that would have been approved under a Trump administration (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/05/kamala-harris-trump...), so frankly this is largely an artifact of political polarization.
I remember uploading it from my Sony handcam, then editing it in Sony Vegas and exporting it to make sure it hits the required YT file upload limit.
I honestly don’t think YouTube would exist without that particular piece of regulatory capture.
Contrast the video and podcast ecosystems.
Podcasts are arguably much healthier (the publishers maintain creative control), and are certainly decentralized.
The Techmeme page from the day of the announcement (October 9, 2006) if you want to dig into it: https://www.techmeme.com/061009/h2355
I'd be fascinated to look at their peering terms.
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.
That's all due to changes by YouTube to reward length and frequency, which of course makes sense for maximizing their ad revenue. But the result is creators are incentivized to pump out 20-minute fluff videos, not well edited/written videos.
People on here complain about SEO sites being filled with meaningless garbage. That's what YouTube is starting to be. The difference is their search bar still works whereas Google's will only give you the garbage. Though I still get "such and such breaks down their career" even though I've never clicked on that.
And despite all the dredge, there is a lot of good content on YouTube, at least in certain niches. Video essays on media and politics, lots of video-game analysis and other fan communities, history content, lots of e-sports to name just a handful that I personally enjoy.
Search is literally one of the things YouTube is poorer at than ever and it blows my mind. I get a handful of results that might be relevant and then it’s just pages and pages of completely unrelated content that has nothing to do remotely with my search.
There's almost no meaningful 3 minute content possible, so a platform like TikTok that only works for short videos is basically condemned to be meaning-less, to be pure entertainment.
In a world full of distractions I for one love the more slow-paced videos than “shorts” churned out by content mills designed to feed the modern day digital ADHD…
Youtube learned the wrong lesson and started to optimize the algorithm for retention and length. It is annoying to click for a review of some product that looks like a lengthy one with probably tests and what not only to see painfully slow unboxing and a wikipedia read of the history of the product and company and then sponsor read and then they turn on the device for a minute and give arbitrary score.
Exact same info could have been communicated in 30seconds, but then they wouldn’t get sponsor money and mid video ad roll
As with all of this crap, it’s about taking offence on behalf of those who aren’t offended or don’t even exist.
> censorship boards in traditional media too, which are typically much stricter.
Which ones? In which country would the word ‘suicide’ be censored? There are countless other examples of topics that YouTube has decided are beyond discussion — even the left-leaning BBC aren’t as censorious.
Yes, they can do what they like on their platform. But by the same token, we can complain about it.
My point is that average YouTube is going to be less censoring overall. The perception may be that there is more censorship because there is simply more content on it that can be censored and they have more stakeholders that they have to appease. BBC released The Modi Question, which got censored on YouTube. However, YouTube has significantly more Modi criticism than anything on TV in India. Likewise, YouTube censors covid related conspiracy theories, but you're still going to find more of them on YouTube than the BBC.
It’s as if a government said ‘we’ll tax you 1000% if you criticise us on social media’. You’d still get some bozos online saying ‘it’s not censorship; people are free to speak’ because you’re not directly prevented from speaking. But you can imagine the effect it would have.
E.g. clickbait content might bring you more, but it doesn't mean the other type of content is censored.
This is evident in (e.g.) WW2 documentaries where an old 4:3 television broadcast is simply put online, and the original footage had perhaps footage of corpses but on Youtube it is blurred.
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.
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.
Anyway, yes. YouTube TV.
This is true; the problem is that the customers aren’t unhappy. No sensible person cares about this kind of posturing, virtue-signalling, euphemism treadmill-riding for-lack-of-a-better-word ‘wokery’. It’s pushed by an incredibly small vocal minority of people who stand to benefit — mainly because it’s now possible not only to gain social cache but to have a whole career and make lots of money pushing this stuff.
Yes, YouTube may find that advertisers choose to virtue signal, ‘make a stand’ and leave their platform when their chosen magic words are not used, but ultimately they’ll come grovelling back. YouTube shouldn’t be so soft. Ultimately it’s just the endless cycle of unsolicited offence-taking.
And, by the way: this is all totally separate from Musk’s management of X, which purports to be rules-based and morally sound but is in reality entirely ad hoc. What Elon says goes… until he changes his mind tomorrow. At least YouTube has policies, even if they’re bonkers.
It's about 2 things
1. the principle. You get something, you pay for it.
2. the practicality. Youtube cannot run on fumes. It needs to generate funds from somewhere
If everyone decides to not take premium, it only incentivises youtube to harvest your data for a profit (yes, they're already doing it but that's not the point). Premium immediately pays for the product, and provides Youtube with the cash to run it's servers and pay it's content creators.
Not to mention, premium is pretty darned good, provides almost all the features and functionality that are available through other clients.
That was it and I side loaded STN. I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.
>I feel bad for content creators, but I let my favorite ones know about it.
Same. Sometimes I try to support my fav ones with a nominal patreon subscription whenever I discontinue my premium.
The answer is the same to all these questions: because I’d rather not live in a world where everyone is a taker.
I see a lot of people say this, where they despise YouTube and it's advertisement scheme but somehow mentally justify it to themselves that Google deserves their $10/month. Before any of you ask "What's wrong with the world these days!?" again, reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it. The free market can pound sand, Google has you right where they want you.
You could choose something better by consuming media from sources that don't engage in the malpractices you're complaining about. There's plenty of media available for purchase without advertisements or subscriptions attached. There's also plenty of media on offer for free from the people who created it.
I'm not even anti-piracy, but your rationalization is just ridiculous. No, you're not sticking it to the man; you're being subsidized by people that are willing to pay for content they consume.
I've pirated a ton of content/software in my lifetime and I use adblockers. Countless mp3s, video games, applications, movies, tv shows, and articles online consumed by me without paying for it. Sometimes it was impossible for me to pay for it because of regional licensing, but a whole lot more of it was simply because I didn't want to pay for it or I couldn't afford it.
Now I pay for music and other media streaming services, including Youtube Premium. I pay for the games I play and I pay for a lot of software that I use. Does that balance things out? Maybe, maybe not. But I'm definitely not someone that is pretending I'm on some moral crusade against advertisements by circumventing them.
I will proceed to live my life paying companies and creators that provide me value and you can continue feeling like a victim where every action you have the option to take is exploitation
This feels like a "you participate in society" argument. Yes, it'd be better if all intrusive ads were banned or heavily regulated. But that's not reality and I can't simply withdraw from the internet in protest.
>If you consider advertising bad enough to pay money to get rid of it, why would you pay that money to the business putting up ads?
it's a calculus of "energy spent" from fighting vs value gained from "giving in". There's fortuntaely more value than "remove ads" so that's how I justify it.
>Because you refuse to leave their client?
because I can't leave the client. I've been de-googling for the past year or so and I realize the main two things I can't leave are
1. Youtube, because it basically has a monopoly on video content.
2. gmail, mostly because there'd be a huge burden ediing almost 20 years of accounts all through the web to leave. From random sites I visit once in a blue moon to my banks and bills. I'd have gmail haunting me for years even if I dropped it today.
If there's one thing that has a reckoning coming, it's Youtube.
>Because you don't want to acknowledge the scary world of choosing something better?
I do it all the time. There is always friction so I think it's a bit dishonest to phrase it as "choosing something better". Firefox still has quirks with translation and the occasional weird interaction with factors like video calls, even after days of researching tweaking settings and installing extensions. Picking up PC gaming still has tons of configuration issues and hardware considerations compared to popping in a disc into a console. There's simply a lot of intersting information I miss out on from not browsing reddit, things that the other 3 forum social media (including HN) just don't catch. It's never objectively better.
>reflect on what you're paying for and how these companies sucker you into buying it.
I suppose you can criticism any bill with that logic. Water is a natural resource, why am I paying for plumbing? video games are just code, all code should be free, why pay for video games? Why am I paying $100 for this art commission when someone in Venezuela would do it for a dime (disclaimer: this is probably a very wrong conversion)?
Some of these are societal (we're never going to escape taxes, some of these should hopefully be so you can support other workers instead of exploiting them. It's your call either way, but I won't fault someone (especially someone decently off) for choosing convinience of entertainment over some grand stand against "the free market".
Yes, that’s me. I sometimes even pay other people to prepare meals and manufacture clothing for me!
I have YT Premium and it works perfectly on every device I have and I have never had to configure anything nor research anything to not see an ad. I only vaguely understand some of the phrases or words you are using (have no clue what a newpipe is, but kind of understand what sideloading) is. I do not care to ever fiddle with my devices, there are more important or at least gratifying things in this world then futzing around with and tweaking devices.
> Paying for YouTube Premium is your eternal reward for submission to the Walled Garden.
If this is the great battle you have chosen to wage with your precious, fleeting time on earth, by all means, go with God -- but a lot of people really don't give a damn about Walled Gardens.
I owe so much to YouTube. The price I pay is small for what I get in return and I only see the service getting better over the years.
I'm not asking you to agree with me. But I hope you find this perspective useful in seeing how other people view it.
I glance away from billboards, I refill my drink during commercial breaks, I show up when the movie starts instead of when the preview starts. These are normal behaviors, not leech behaviors. The ads are not very sophisticated, so I don’t need sophisticated measures to avoid them. On the web, the ads have ratcheted up the intensity (tracking, targeting) with technology and in response I have augmented my ability to ignore with technology. That’s fair.
You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers. It is perfectly fine if you want to guzzle Kiwi Black, but understand not everyone wants to do that.
I don't think it's that extreme, but it's always hard making comparisons between physical and digital.
>You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers.
I prefer the framing that doesn't chastise those who are simply ignorant or have their own morals. I recognize adblock is technically "theft" so I don't want to go on a high horse insult the "normal people".
Blocking ads and trackers is no more theft than blocking crypto miners. Malware is malware. You'd be crazy to consider running it as some bizarre form of payment.
> You have framed this as a contrast between leeches and normal people, but this is actually a contrast between normal people and bootlickers.
This is not rational debate, but activism and emotional manipulation. Recommend flagging and not engaging.
> Additionally, Fox alleged that Dish infringed Fox's distribution right through use of PTAT copies and AutoHop. However, mentioning that all copying were conducted on the user's PTAT without "change hands" and that the only thing distributed from Dish to the users was the marking data, the Court denied Fox's claim. Citing Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., the Court concluded that the users' copying at home for the time shift purpose did not infringe Fox's copyright. Then, Dish's secondary liability was also denied.
> you're being subsidized by people that are willing to pay for content they consume.
Good! Those people hate YouTube too, otherwise would be perfectly satisfied with the default service. If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it. Google doesn't deserve this content, they are poor stewards of the service and deserve to be deposed for their lazy management of a shared resource. If we were talking about ad-free Facebook subscriptions HN would be wearing the shoe on the other foot, ripping people to shreds for supporting a demonstrably destructive business. But YouTube is different, because we all have some incentive to prop poor Google up.
I feel zero empathy contributing to "the problem" of ruining the service. This isn't the tragedy of the commons, it's the progression of corporate greed. Keep paying for YouTube Premium, tell me with any honesty your contributions are making the world better or providing a more complete user experience. You can't.
I'd be surprised if Google didn't take adblocked users into account when administering pay, because the pay scale isn't some flat "X money's per Y thousand views". So yes, you are indirectly short-changing them.
>If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it.
or we get a worse format like Tiktok taking over. The most popular reddit alternative during its "protests" was Discord. I don't consider that an obective net good for the free web.
That's not to say Reddit deserves to stay alive, just a consideration that this forced migration will not necessarily lead to a desired solution of "new website like X but without the bullshit"
If I write a song and put it up on bandcamp for purchase and on youtube with the intention to monetize it through Youtube's monetization options, how do you arrive at the conclusion that you're not pirating my content when you're circumventing the medium through which that is monetized? Advertisers will pay Youtube for an advertisement on their platform -> Youtube places advertisements in front of my video -> Revenue from advertisements is determined by how many times an advertisement is viewed on my video. So circumventing advertisement reduces the view count and thus the revenue. This is making it both less profitable for Youtube and for me.
> Good! Those people hate YouTube too, otherwise would be perfectly satisfied with the default service.
The willingness to pay for no advertising is not equivalent to hating Youtube. If you hate Youtube, why do you use it?
You might say it's because the content is there. Why is the content there and not somewhere else? Because Youtube incentivizes people to upload their creations to it. If it is somewhere else, why not watch it there or pay for it there?
> If Google kills YouTube and forces people to finally create a better system of content ownership then humanity will be all the better for it.
Why would Google killing off Youtube force any change to how content ownership works?
> Google doesn't deserve this content, they are poor stewards of the service and deserve to be deposed for their lazy management of a shared resource.
If they didn't deserve the content, then people wouldn't upload their content to Youtube. It is every creator's prerogative to choose how they distribute their content and there's a reason many do so on Youtube.
I could levy plenty of criticisms against Youtube just as many creators on the platform could but there's no coercion involved here. People want what Youtube has to offer.
> If we were talking about ad-free Facebook subscriptions HN would be wearing the shoe on the other foot, ripping people to shreds for supporting a demonstrably destructive business. But YouTube is different, because we all have some incentive to prop poor Google up.
What incentive are you speaking of? If ad-free Facebook subscriptions were tied into revenue-sharing with content creators on the platform, it'd be as reasonable as Youtube Premium.
> I feel zero empathy contributing to "the problem" of ruining the service. This isn't the tragedy of the commons, it's the progression of corporate greed.
I don't care that you're a selfish person acting in their own self interest; I'm no different. I dislike that you're trying to portray your behavior as righteous.
> Keep paying for YouTube Premium, tell me with any honesty your contributions are making the world better or providing a more complete user experience. You can't.
Paying for Youtube Premium supports the upkeep of the platform and directly contributes to creators through revenue sharing. Both the platform and its creators make for a better world. You could absolutely replace the platform, but there's undeniable value in one that allows basically anyone to share what they have to offer to the world and create mechanisms to monetize their content. The content speaks for itself. There's countless hours of educational and entertaining content. There's content for niche subjects and hobbies that would never have appeared in traditional media.
...and the reason is: they were the first. Now they are so huge that you can't go past them. If you want to have your video seen, you HAVE to go to YouTube. It's not an argument for them. It's just a quasi monopoly. Every Smart TV these days comes with an YouTube app pre-installed. It has it's app on most of the phones on this planet.
There is no real choice.
Edit: I’ve posted this argument on HN before, but if you insist on expanding the accepted definition of theft, then malware, crypto miners, video ads, and other garbage that is frequently served via ad networks are also stealing from me, by wasting electricity and possibly also taking my personal data. So I block ads to prevent this theft. Who is in the right in this case?
You can track a bunch of metrics for software and perceive ad blockers, so the loss is more explicit.
>You'd be crazy to consider running it as some bizarre form of payment.
I wont say reality isn't crazy, especially these days. But that's the reality, yes.
In any case, why would I care about how people who are trying to scam me set up their business deals? If I don't run their script, they didn't "lose" anything. Their malware was never allowed to run on my machines in the first place. They failed to steal something from me.
>why would I care about how people who are trying to scam me set up their business deals?
1. Because you are spending much of your energy and time getting around them. Because by silent consensus people would rather consume ads than pay for their content. Keep your friends close...
2. Because it's an indirect contract. I don't care if you don't care, but I'd at least wish people would be honest and admit that they aren't in some moral high horse for evading such a contract. People get so pompous as if they are combatting the behemoth by taking 10 seconds to download a program.
The house always wins. We're allowed to steal because the cost to catch us is less than the cost to lock the doors. And the company is profitable anyway. The main downside to this is similar to hardware: pricing is a bit more expensive because stores expect X% theft/defects/refunds. I'm sure the same thing happens where content creators get paid a bit less, and YT premium costing a bit more to offset adblock users.
I think you're understanding the value in the platform itself, then. It is pretty trivial for someone to share their video online but it's extremely difficult to get it to propagate.
> There is no real choice.
There is kind of a choice. You already added the primary condition for uploading it to Youtube and that condition isn't something that matters to everyone for everything. Traditional media is Youtube's competition for attention on long form content.
Also, suggesting that this "value" is something YouTube still delivers or creates, is ridiculous. It was luck and from then on the value is being provided by the people who upload content there. What they get in return is ridiculous compared to what YT generates financially. This is nothing to be proud of. It's your usual digital rip-off through privilege.
Content means absolutely fuck all if it can't reach its audience. Youtube hosts, encodes, streams, distributes, and circulates the content and has recommendation algorithms to increase the productivity of every public video published on the platform. It was lucky that it was a first mover and gained the momentum that it continues to enjoy from its massive user base, but a massive user base means fuck all if you can't deliver a product that they want to use... and Youtube as a platform means absolutely fuck all if people don't create and share videos.
If you want to argue that Youtube takes too much of a cut because of their position as a natural monopoly in the long form video content market, you might have a reasonable argument. To say that Youtube as a platform does not provide value to both its creators and its regular users is simply asinine.
There is no contract with me at all. It is not theft. It is preventing others from misappropriating my computing resources, and in fact the US government recommends citizens use ad blockers. It's basic computer security.
>There is no contract with me at all. It is not theft.
Hence my wording:
>Indirect contract are those where there is no direct contract between parties but the law presumes that there is a contracts between the parties and such could be enforced.
>is preventing others from misappropriating my computing resources,
You chose to access their servers, I don't see how YouTube is "misapproiating your resources". You're basically getting a service and refusing to pay for it. That's theft.
It's like I said, I don't care if people still from a trillion dollar corporation. But people who really only think software can't be stolen really shouldn't be considered a software "engineer", as many here claim to be.
>in fact the US government recommends citizens use ad blockers. It's
1. The fbi is not the government. For good reason given their history.
2. Their context was for malware, not for getting around undesired ads for an otherwise "free" service.
On misappropriation, do you think it's okay if e.g. a blogger puts a crypto miner on their page? If you choose to request a web page, is it okay for them to run background workers on your computer, and in fact it is theft of service if you do not allow it? Do you also need to give them e.g. location, accelerometer, microphone, and local filesystem access if they'd like to have it? Why are ads special among malware payloads in that you must run them? Why are computer ads special unlike physical ads (e.g. in the mail or inserts in a free newspaper) where people toss them in the bin without opening/looking at them? Or an ad-blocking DVR?
Many of e.g. Google's tracking domains are simply blocked on my network. I don't have any idea of what web pages are going to try to get me to load them, but it doesn't matter because none of them are allowed to. It's ridiculous to say that I must allow my computers to reach out to malicious servers and run scripts they deliver. Must I allow random North Korean servers to run scripts too?
The FBI is part of the government, and the context was that certain search engines (e.g. Google) were presenting ads for scams, and so to protect yourself from fraud, you should install an ad blocker so that you do not see ads.
On morals, I'll put forward that if you have children, it is in fact a moral imperative to remove as many sources of advertising from their lives as you can. Ads attempt to shape them into worse people (pushing them to embrace materialism and hedonism), and their influence should not be tolerated.
1. Because you are spending much of your energy and time getting around them.
2. People get so pompous as if they are combatting the behemoth by taking 10 seconds to download a program.
Obviously no, or YouTube wouldn't be where it is today...
> Youtube hosts, encodes, streams, distributes, and circulates the content and has recommendation algorithms to increase the productivity of every public video published on the platform
Nothing of this is in any way special. Nobody would care if they wouldn't already have their quasi monopoly. The algorithm is a topic for itself. Enforcing hate, misinformation, etc. but in the end always working in such a way as to maximize YT profits and not recommend useful content to the user. What are you trying to sell here? The way the algorithm got terrible is a meme by ow. What is it even supposed to justify?
> but a massive user base means fuck all if you can't deliver a product that they want to use...
The fact that the algorithm was much better before and works perfectly on other pages who actually care about what you wrote more then about the artificial limits YT forces on their content providers shows that this approach at justification is ridiculous.
If there would be even one competitor out there with the same amount of luck and YT would work exactly as it does now while the other would actually care about their content providers, YT would go broke.
Youtube is where it is today because the content on it reached its audience.
> Nothing of this is in any way special. Nobody would care if they wouldn't already have their quasi monopoly. The algorithm is a topic for itself. Enforcing hate, misinformation, etc. but in the end always working in such a way as to maximize YT profits and not recommend useful content to the user. What are you trying to sell here? The way the algorithm got terrible is a meme by ow. What is it even supposed to justify?
I notice sometimes if I watch a video outside of what is normal for me on Youtube, I'll see more videos on that topic. If I stop watching them, they go away. If you are consistently seeing videos of hate or misinformation, that is because you're engaging with those videos.
The reason the algorithm is important is because it is how you deliver videos to users. Several of the topics that I watch are fairly niche, so I do end up receiving recommendations for videos of creators with very low sub counts and view counts. I would never have found these videos without the recommendation algorithm.
It's not perfect, but it's simply incorrect that it doesn't recommend useful content to the user. It is optimized to maximize engagement and it does that by recommending videos that it thinks the user wants to and will watch to completion. That can be at odds with user's interests, but I'd say typically it's working how it should.
There's another can of worms of rabbit holes and echo chambers, but that seems to be an internet issue and more broadly a people issue, not solely a Youtube issue. How Youtube should handle this is another deep and nuanced issue.
> If there would be even one competitor out there with the same amount of luck and YT would work exactly as it does now while the other would actually care about their content providers, YT would go broke.
Same amount of luck, how? Be there at the same time? because Youtube did have competitors like Google Videos and Vimeo and it was the one that won out.
It's obvious that if someone had a better product in every way including luck and youtube didn't change anything that youtube would die out.
.svg){kind=link}