

Ask HN: Why can't I sit down and watch YouTube at night? Has Google failed? - hoodoof

So Google bought Youtube years ago and it&#x27;s wildly successful.<p>But even with all that content how come I can&#x27;t sit down in front of Youtube on my TV and be entertained for the night? (I use the Xbox Youtube app).
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dsr_
(I'm using a generic universal "you", not the poster in particular.)

It's probably a confluence of two things: first, you don't know what you want.
Second, YT isn't very good at recommending things to you.

You don't know what you want because your environment has encouraged you to be
fed by marketing departments. Trailers, commercials, entertainment-review
magazines and websites all push specific programming at you, programming that
has developed over the last century to be commercially successful. YT doesn't
(primarily) store TV and movies and documentaries that are commercially
viable; for that you want Netflix and Hulu and such. Youtube stores the
amateur, the impromptu, the unrehearsed and the low-budget. You haven't been
taught to like that any more than you have been taught to enjoy gamelan
orchestras and Tuvan throat-singing.

And curating that giant mess is a hard problem, and it's a people-problem, so
it shouldn't be any wonder that YT does a bad job of it. Netflix only does a
mediocre job with recommendations, and they have a much smaller number of
results to return. It's not hard to find a Youtube video that fewer than a
hundred people have ever seen. What sort of statistical recommendation will
you get from that?

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thenomad
I'm a professional Web video creator who has been doing that job for the last
two decades: you've hit the nail right on the head.

There's a surprising amount of interesting short films or series on YouTube.
They're not necessarily studio-quality in terms of lighting, effects or even
acting, but they can be a good watch.

However, the discovery mechanisms for them are truly terrible.

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tobylane
Start building up subscriptions. It really depends what you want - I like
Roosterteeth and Tom Scott but many people will only like one of them.

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omnivore
You probably could if it were curated better. But in the rush to have people
create content, there's less focus on editing and actually figuring out what
we have. Instead it's all about aggregation.

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geuis
Not sure what you mean? I use Youtube all the time from my Xbox.

