Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
What would removing the dates accomplish except making things more confusing and harder to find? What advantage to YouTube is there?
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2024
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Enshittification
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What is enshittification?
The phenomenon of online platforms gradually degrading the quality of their services, often by promoting advertisements and sponsored content, in order to increase profits. (Cory Doctorow, 2022, extracted from Wikitionary) source
The lifecycle of Big Internet
We discuss how predatory big tech platforms live and die by luring people in and then decaying for profit.
Embrace, extend and extinguish
We also discuss how naturally open technologies like the Fediverse can be susceptible to corporate takeovers, rugpulls and subsequent enshittification.
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Well, time to install two new add-ons: Return YouTube View Counts and Return YouTube Upload Dates.
Somebody please make those.
Yes, please! Also, would the add on make the date searchable again?
Because anything that has had an update is now a clusterfuck.. say I want to see how to change a calendar setting in godforsaken Outlook, searching by date is necessary b/c who knows what the version number is.
Or games like Path of Exile, where three months can render some information obsolete because it's a league system.
I can’t stand YouTube’s feed. It’s so bad. This does not help. I know many others already said it, but this is not an improvement.
The date can matter a lot. Especially, when it comes to tech learning. That world moves too fast. If you’re learning programming on YouTube, you need to be sure you have current info.
I desperately with YouTube had real competition.
So I just installed Linux on a new computer and during the short install I went to YouTube for something but it didn't even give me a list of videos to watch instead it told me I had to search so it can build a list of videos to recommend.
I'm not sure if this is a new change or what but along with this and taking away information I'm ready to just drop YouTube altogether probably better for my health... There is one service that was created by the people who do jetlag I might give them a try at this point.
The date can matter a lot.
The original algorithm rewarded engagement absent dates, but this resulted in old classic hits mopping up revenue while newer stuff struggled to grab anyone's attention. You'll never make a music video more popular than Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, so why bother trying?
Then the algorithm shifted to fresh-first bias, which incentivized streamers to constantly churn out new content. But it still contended with users who stubbornly wanted to see the old content. So you got a bunch of content that tried to imitate historical hits or play on trends. This ended up producing 10,000 videos named some variation of "Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, Explained" with a digitally edited picture of the singer with big eyes and a soy face.
Now we've got this deluge of AI generated crap that nobody wants to look at or search for, piling up in YouTube's back catalog. The only way to justify hosting it is to jam it into someone's feed. So every user is being A/B Tested once again, with a new procedurally generated wall of garbage that will eventually narrow down what any given individual is most likely to click on and watch. Then we can solve both of the problems above. Always have new content, but its technically "fresh" rather than a rehash of some prior release.
We are doing Monkeys On Typewriters because someone at YouTube HQ decided it was better than letting anyone watch the Rick Astley video one more time.
I desperately with YouTube had real competition.
There are other places to host video, but they tend to be very boutique or with an abundance of very low quality content. That, plus YouTube leveraging economies of scale and the networking effect means there's nowhere else you'd ever want to try and host a video, unless you were looking to reach a very boutique audience or you were putting out material you didn't really expect anyone to watch.
Has YouTube experienced enshittification?
Ummm, only for the past decade?
Hopefully they'll remove the length, the channel name, the thumbnail, the title and the entire video, too.
I suppose this targets viewers like me who refuse to watch large content creators
Or more likely viewers who just go with large content creators.
It's because users are less likely to watch old videos. They do this on TikTok. You'll see videos that are years old on your feed because they have a lack of new content. You watch the new videos and then move on with your day. Now you're getting shown more videos and more likely to stay.
They do this on YouTube shorts too. Just check the comments..
They continue to foster a culture of ignorance and dependence.
You know why they might be hiding upload dates? My theory is, Youtube doesn’t really want you looking at new stuff. (Very apparent by the algorithm) they want you looking at specific news stories, and specific content but not constantly seeking new uploads from independents.
But that is just a theory a plain theory. Thanks for watching.
Youtube doesn’t really want you looking at new stuff
I think they do want you looking at new stuff. Its just going to be AI generated stuff, and you'll get spooked if you realize it was produced hours or even minutes ago with virtually no other engagement to speak of.
YouTube's search filter sort by "Upload Date" has been broken for awhile now so this is very plausible. It will serve it's favourite creators' irrelevant content in with relevant videos and not display at all some actual relevant videos.
If you filter sort by upload date and filter by Uploaded Today you'll see different results quite often which really makes no sense
Side note:
I like to do a semi-anual audit of the information sources I use, and last year I removed the infographics channel from my feed. It turns out it's a content farm that puts quantity over quality. Some of their videos may actually be good, but they don't have the fact checking safeguards that more reliable channels like kurzgesagt does.
You'll notice Kurzgesagt has several videos that delve into how they do their research, and how the funds they receive from individuals, governments, and corporations affect their videos. Check to see if any of your channels have a "how we make our content" page. If they don't, it's for a reason.
Also, be wary of channels that use the kurzgesagt visual style, or an aesthetic that is similar to a notably trusted source. I've noticed a lot of false info that has an easier time being passed off as good due to using animation that we might associate with quality educational content.
Sometimes I watch videos of The Daily Show and it drives me bonkers that they upload old episodes from a decade ago and it's impossible to tell if it's current Daily Show, or the classic one. If the whole service was like that... I'm completely gone.
Yeah, same with outdated tutorials, old news etc.
For fucks sake. This will do wonders for video tutorials and won't backfire in any way due to the content being outdated /s
view counts, I'm okay with. I do want to see how old a video is and how long a video is.
I watch niche stuff on Youtube. I watched a guy copy an old ISA adapter card for the very first CD-ROM drive. That's not gonna do BeasTiePie numbers, and I don't care. It isn't information I use to select a video. I think it's useful information to have generally available, but I don't necessarily need it on the home screen. It should maybe be displayed on a channel's Videos page, where there's more screen real estate per video, and in the video's description header.
Date uploaded is pertinent information. Is this a recent entry in a series I enjoy? Is this breaking or old news? Has ANOTHER 10,000 people died in a hurricane or is this just a month old? Is this from before ThE iNcIdEnT, or after?
Why do you think they are getting rid of the date of upload? UX reasons? No, they want to be able to serve you the same video, especially for news. Generates more clicks when you need to check if something is a year old or not.
Engagement, people are probably less likely to click on an old video, especially if they are looking for relevant and up to date information.
Well, or the opposite. Why click on a new video pointing out the errors / fallacies in the old one, when you only see the old one and don't know it's outdated
I figure less text on the screen = more room for the thumbnail. If they invented Youtube today they wouldn't think to show you titles, channel names or other metadata, just the video thumbnail.
Yeah thats what they do with shorts mostly. Huge thumbnail, title, no of views. No date until you click. Which for shorts - not many people give 2 f's if the cat video they are watching is from last month or 15 years ago. Not for regular videos. But then again, youtube / google are too big to fail. They could remake youtube in an absolutely abysmal direction and people would still come on the site.
You know what I wish they would do? I wish they would invent the concept of "shows."
Like you know how on old fashioned tube television you could tune the primitive analog radio receiver to pre-selected narrow frequency bands referred to by the ancient ones as "channels" and on these "channels" one might find a collection of different, though sometimes related "shows." Like on the Discovery "Channel" might produce wildlife documentaries and space documentaries?
There hasn't been a robust way to do that on Youtube since at least the Johnson administration. I'll give the example of Linus Media Group, who operate 14.04*10^666 different channels which are generally related, made mostly by the same creative staff, on broadly the same topics, but Youtube treats them as 100% unrelated. According to Youtube's UI, TechQuickie is as related to Linus Tech Tips as RedLetterMedia is.
You can kind of get this done with playlists. But...when a stupid penis is pushed into an idiot vagina, a moron baby shall soon be born. Youtube doesn't provide a robust playlist controls, and youtubers want people to be able to access the latest episodes, so now Youtube is full of playlists that are backwards with their oldest entries at the bottom.
One account can't silo their own content by topic in a way that's meaningful to the UI. Like, if you like RedLetterMedia for Best of the Worst and Re:View but don't care for Half In the Bag...Go find the nearest anvil, hammer your dick flat and take a 2D piss up a rope for all the good it'll do you.
With a "show" system, you could subscribe to the specific shows you like. This would count as a subscriber for the creator's metrics because a viewer is engaging with them, and they could see which shows are most popular with their viewers to prioritize that content, which should boost engagement. Or, if you like the creator's personality, you could generally subscribe and get notifications on everything they publish. Interested viewers would get notified of the latest shows directly without having to navigate a playlist, and newcoming viewers who discover a creator later on could watch a show from the beginning too. If engagement is what Youtube wants, surely someone stumbling upon a long running series and then lapping up the entire back catalog is a way to achieve this. If they wanted to boost engagement surely they'd want to create a way to more easily attach "second channels" to their main ones. How many people would watch the lower production effort asides/live stream dumps that they're hosting if they lowered the UI pain in the neck?
Return YouTube dislikes will change to
Return YouTube dislikes + view count + upload date
Until they shut down / lock down the APIs that allow querying this information.
Isn't YT the poster child of enshittification?
Facebook set the bar high, but Google is rising to the challenge.
Facebook, surely.
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Welcome, users! See how little hassle you get from ads?
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Welcome, advertisers! See how fat and docile our userbase is?
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Give me your money and thank me for the privilege. What are you gonna do - use MySpace?
The optimist in me hopes this will be used to give smaller channels a push in views and attention, even years later, when they may have been skipped over or ignored previously.
The realist in me knows this will be used to push garbage that would otherwise be self-filtered by users due to the red flags of dates/views.
Youtube also started recommending small channels more often a while ago
It would also make more sense to prefer people watching smaller creators compared to bigger ones because, as far as i know, youtube gets more money from channels that arent monetized yet(getting 100% instead of 55% i think)
The problem for me in my recommended page, is most of the newly created channels are AI generated and it’s really hard for me to tell if it’s real content. I had to ignore small and new channels as a matter of principle.
Enshittification has 3 steps:
- Make a good platform for users
- Make the platform worse for users, but better for business customers
- Make the platform worse for users and business customers to maximize profits
Youtube is past the first step
In the comments for this post i have seen 3 explanations:
Boosting smaller youtubers, which would not make the platform worse for the users, meaning that it couldnt be part of the process
Boosting radical youtubers, which would make the platform worse for business customers, but not increase profits, meaning that it couldnt be part of the process
Making people click on videos more often, which goes against attempts to make people watch single videos for longer
This is just a terrible change, there is no overused word to describe it
Date is how I go by whether or not someone I'm interested in has put up a new video or if YouTube is just showing me an old one I forgot about.
So I'm finally going to have to start fucking subscribing?
Ugh.
There are many third-party YouTube browsers and viewers that will get accurate date information, because that's sitting there in the RSS feeds that YouTube posts.
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The removal of view counts could empower fringe content. Even the most gullible are far less likely to take a video of an extremist nut job seriously when they have 100 views. Part of how radicalisation works is by convincing people that the radical ideology is far more mainstream than it actually is. It's already easy to inflate view counts but removing them entirely makes it much much simpler for crazies to sell the idea that their ideas are popular.
Oh fuck off, the rounded edges on videos was bad enough
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