Yea, the Youtube algorithm is the "pick me girl" of algorithms.
I watched one video by a creator I already follow about their solar panel installation and water-catcher garden irrigation.
What do I get in my recommendations? Dozens and dozens of videos from completely random channels about solar panel installation and gardening.
I very rarely find new creators on YouTube, who produce consistent high quality content. I follow a handful of channels and even from them I lookat 20-40% of their videos.
TikTok on the other hand I swore I'd never use. Then came Covid19 and lockdowns. I reached the end of HN, Reddit and Youtube, so I installed it.
The Algorthm is fucking amazing. Dunno how they do it, but 80-90% of stuff it shows me I end up watching (it is 10secs to 3 mins so the investment isn't that huge =) ).
I've ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f'd up cars they get to service, to farrier and sheep shearing videos to a guy who does comedy about weird animal facts.
I'd never actually go search anything like that on purpose, but I actually kinda found out I enjoy looking at. It's a good way to space out for 30 minutes and relax. Most TikTok videos get to the point before a stereotypical YouTuber has gone through their intro and sponsor segments :)
> I've ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f'd up cars they get to service, to farrier and sheep shearing videos to a guy who does comedy about weird animal facts.
I bet some of the uptick in quality of content on tiktok vs youtube is based on the length of videos. If they only have three minutes, all the interesting things will be shoehorned into the available time. Whereas youtube creators are incentivized by the payment structure to lengthen their content to increase their adshare pay so they extend their content to 10 minutes + leading to a lot of filler and "heyyyyy guys let me tell you about my day blah blah blah before we jump into the meat and potatoes" etc.
It's exactly where the issue is. It's no mistake, product management at Google isn't dumb.. here is how it works.
YouTube, for years even post acquisition made no money, kept bleeding to aquire users. At one point a revenue stream is implemented, which must keep growing to recoup the large investments. Not to mention, pure greed.
The algorithm isn't designed to promote quality content to enhance the user experience and love for the product. It's designed to keep users engaged, while allowing for as much ads time possible. So, the 10 or or 16 mins length was identified as sweet spots to allow for at least one ad placement without loosing engagement. Click bait videos aren't demoted, they work. They keep users engaged as they get promoted to watch yet another video, until brain saturation. They maximised profit, they didn't strike the right balance, perhaps too naive to imagine competition could steal from their market share.
Here we have tiktok, knowing very well they would need to be order of magnitude better to gain traction, at least where the market was already taken up by YouTube. They created an app making it easier and faster to push well cut content, with better tech, better suited UI and overall UX proven to be attracting younger audiences who tend to make trends with their creativity.
Take a good look at the YouTube app, despite the few visual improvements it feels like a decade old library system with auto play, ported to mobile phones. Look at tiktok, it's mobile first, it's fluid and design for touch interaction, the social features are right there, not outside the video in the form of two thumbs button and a thread of text blobs.
Google clearly don't understand or refuses to understand trends. They build minimalist systems , boring to look at but that perform very well, and it is now capitalist greed that set the direction of the company, the bottom line is to squeeze more and more money before the competitions finishes them. They got a few years to go on like that.
Of course. You are probably in that age range yourself so that's your circle, and barely content creator
I would assume. Youngsters innovate, the previous generations tend to follow.
Please. I don’t want social features in my video library app. I unsubscribed from YouTube since I can’t remove “shorts” from the interface. I’m not going to pay for them to lobotomize me…
The social aspect is on YouTube as much as it is on tiktok, one got it work better in term of UX. As for shorts, the same critic can be made of Twitter, which I despite but the content is forced concise for the reason mentioned in another comment. Shorts on YouTube and Facebook are some poorly implemented afterthought, in playing catch up, I also find it sad we can't hide them altogether.
I like watching makeup videos and product reveals and I've just started straight away immediately skipping to the ~3:30min mark because that is when they actually start showing the damn palette.
i’ve watched a lot of youtube this year. every day, and i rarely consume any other media at all. Its overtuned to locking you in and i generally agree with OP. I was watching a lot of guitar stuff and at one point that’s literally all it would show me, despite having other interests. i think i appreciated it was a bit lacking when i realized i was regularly clicking into my subscriptions and searching (manually) for new stuff they or related channels may have uploaded — and finding many interesting videos after wards.
Its a hard problem and perhaps im an exception, but if you are searching for new stuff, and finding amd watching it, that’s a miss by the algorithm. Especially if that becomes the main thing you do.
I saw so much promotion of the tiktok algorithm on HN so I decided to check it out. For the first hour I was laughing at almost every video. The app very quickly optimized to show me funny videos from people like me. And then after a few times using the app, I quickly became bored. I don't want to see endless funny videos, I want to watch some longer informative videos and I couldn't see how to make the app do that.
When I go on youtube it shows me 10-20 minute science and engineering videos which I can put on and sit on the couch watching. This provides lasting value for me because I never get bored of these like I do with 20 second comedy videos.
YouTube creators create a new channel for one or two videos or avoid content entirely because they're terrified the algorithm will ruin the good thing they have going if they branch out into a new topic. They do it once and see the hit and never do it again.
I watched one video by a creator I already follow about their solar panel installation and water-catcher garden irrigation.
What do I get in my recommendations? Dozens and dozens of videos from completely random channels about solar panel installation and gardening.
I very rarely find new creators on YouTube, who produce consistent high quality content. I follow a handful of channels and even from them I lookat 20-40% of their videos.
TikTok on the other hand I swore I'd never use. Then came Covid19 and lockdowns. I reached the end of HN, Reddit and Youtube, so I installed it.
The Algorthm is fucking amazing. Dunno how they do it, but 80-90% of stuff it shows me I end up watching (it is 10secs to 3 mins so the investment isn't that huge =) ).
I've ended up following, among others, an opthalmologist who does sketches about hospital stuff, to mechanics who show the most f'd up cars they get to service, to farrier and sheep shearing videos to a guy who does comedy about weird animal facts.
I'd never actually go search anything like that on purpose, but I actually kinda found out I enjoy looking at. It's a good way to space out for 30 minutes and relax. Most TikTok videos get to the point before a stereotypical YouTuber has gone through their intro and sponsor segments :)