HN Reader

After Game of thrones season 8, people wonder why they should invest into a show when there’s a high chance it won’t pay off. Even for a good show it can feel like work. That plus the high cost for studios and over abundance of supply, meant studios pulled back.

Instead we’re seeing a reemergence of low effort TV. And YouTube plays nicely into that.

At some point this pendulum may swing back (remember in 2000s when everything was low effort reality TV).

1 day agoby softwaredoug

I just don't really care for TV that much, but my husband was on at least three streaming services. I would occasionally manually pirate shows and movies when he asked, but a while back I hooked up radarr to my jellyfin server. Now he's canceled all our streaming services and gone full pirate.

Our entire tv and movie budget is now condensed into a single subscription: the VPN behind my torrent box. And also all the new disks I have to keep adding to the media array to support his new habit.

16 hours agoby estimator7292

There was a time when the algorithm was truly amazing and the recommendations were smart, spot-on, and mostly high quality. I don't know what happened but you have to search now for decent content.

The recommendations part of YouTube just seems to give me old content or will show me things I've already watched. Despite it feeling almost user-hostile, I still use Youtube,

1 day agoby speak_plainly

I subscribe to Amazon Prime/Apple TV+/NetFlix.

But I also have subscriptions to 2 Usenet services, a paid Plex account, couple of Nzbget instances running full-time attached to a Qnap NAS and an instances of Sonnar.

Just so that I can get unfettered access to 4K content and consume it anyway I want it (Stream using Infuse on Apple TV box or AVP, or download them to my MacBook Pro for watching it while travelling, etc).

But suprisingly I am watching more content on a paid YouTube subscription. The Youtube Apple TV app sucks somewhat, but there is always YT-DLP.

16 hours agoby jnaina

I recently noticed that a channel I subscribed completely gave up. She used to have a lot of reselling and business content, and even had an Amazon Liquidations storefront, etc. Now all that's gone, and she's showing typical rage bait BS, like Walmart shoplifters getting caught and the like, and every video she's wearing low-cut tops to get extra cleavage out there. I have no doubt she's getting more engagement than she used to.

11 hours agoby bdcravens

I remember when people laughted off the valuation at the time of Google acquiring YouTube.com ($1.65 billion). With the benefit of hindsight, this was a wise move that has payed enormous dividends, and more benefits no doubt still lie ahead.

1 day agoby jll29

We're going back to discs. Rerouting a fraction of the money we spent on streaming services buys a lot of DVDs/BluRays. Plus it stopped the brain rot dead in its tracks. The family TV was turning into a constant stream of YT shorts AI voices non-stop talk shouting over 3 vids of brainrot.

I own the tv, yet have no way of just blocking yt shorts, or even easily blocking the YT app on the tv. So YT is blocked at the router level.

edit: a word

3 hours agoby j-kent

I really love newpipe[1]. No ads, continue playing with screen switched off, download option, and i appreciate the lack of recommendations (This way I only see news from the channels I'm subscribed to and don't get drawn into a recommendation-loop).

I'm not sure what will happen to it once google enforces their developer registration thing [2]. I assume that f-droid and newpipe will still work on rooted phones, but in general I don't like the direction in which this is going...

[1] https://newpipe.net/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794

1 day agoby jonesjohnson

The cycle of:

Cable TV

Cable TV with a million add-on packages, eg: “oh you want to watch hockey? Thats extra. Oh you want this channel too? Different add-on”

A couple streaming services

Tons of streaming services with a mess of territorial ownership, eg: Thursday night football on Amazon, other games on different services.

We just took the cable + tons of packages model and instead ended up with a ton of services.

These days I just have HBO, Netflix, and pay for ESPN for Hockey, and even those 3 feel ridiculous. I can see why piracy is easier and more appealings

1 day agoby captainkrtek

Monopolistic online platforms such as amazon, youtube, netflix arise due to quantum nature of the internet. Lack of spatial location. lack of time duration, lack of distance, instant multiplicity with identical copies are all quantum things attributable to information at speed of light. For life on Earth, locations, distances, time durations, lack exact copies are natural. So Internet directly interfers with everything that is natural. Platforms like Amazon can spawn millions of virtual workers attending to the needs of every customer. This conflicts with natural limitations of traditional businesses and thus destroys decentralization and localization that is vital to human life.

1 day agoby zkmon

Don't worry, Google will find a way to break it so badly that heavy users will stop using it frequenty. AI translation forced even on those who know the language are just a example of what they fail to understand and don't bother to discuss internally.

12 hours agoby qwertox

Not that TV is all that great most of the time either, but if YouTube is the future I feel sorry for people who have to live in that timeline.

As a thought exercise, what would YouTube recommend as related videos next to Breaking Bad episodes?

1 day agoby gorbachev

YouTube has so much questionable content on it that gets millions of views... Parents who've found ways to monetize their kids. Dangerous / unpleasant pranks being pulled on members the public. Conspiracy theories. Fake game shows where the winners being given money are actually friends of the host. Or where the host pretends contestants are doing something dangerous, but actually it's CGI, (misleading young viewers into thinking the dangerous stuff is real / fun). Morons making content that's attractive to kids who don't know better. Etc.

While there is some quality content on there, the amount of terrible content getting vast amount of views is pretty high.

I guess one question is whether TV is much better.. I would say on average it probably is less bad, although there have also been / are questionable unethical tv shows. But at least with TV shows there's more likely to be a few more layers of questioning / analysing / looking at the ethics, with responsible people involved.

1 day agoby froobius

https://archive.is/2kNrh

11 hours agoby mgh2

The streaming services really fucked up to an unbelievable degree. They had done the impossible - persuaded people to give them money instead of downloading for free.

But no they had to get greedy and managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory

16 hours agoby Havoc

Highly ironic for me this is the case as I've embraced (state) TV instead of YouTube.

Mainly because it's gotten so awful in the last few years:

- aggressive ads for everything

- content creators has gotten worse over time (doing abhorrent things, fermenting cult like audiences)

- ragebait/political content is so damn popular and common it sneaks into recommendations despite me not watching it

- Ai is everywhere

- general fatigue with how predictable the content is even with interesting topics

8 hours agoby 0dayz

Yet it still has the worst UI/UX for a TV

1 day agoby ls-a

Is that why Youtube has become unwatchable?

1 day agoby ambicapter

Yeah past few years 95% of all the content I watch is through YouTube. All the studios just need to put 50% or more their content on there! I haven't subscribed to any streaming service in a few years. YouTube is free on my Roku TV, through Firefox on my TV/Mac Mini set up (wireless mouse as remote) and on my phone.

1 day agoby paul7986

https://archive.is/2kNrh

1 day agoby froggertoaster

We need a politically uncensored version (within the law) of YouTube. Things like Rumble do not work well, they are not technically polished. It's a good side project for X.

1 day agoby cft

In a word, way less free. And more commercials.

All you pirates with your archives and torrents. You are Luke Skywalker here.

1 day agoby analog8374

I swear to God, I can't go three clicks on YouTube without seeing a recommended video like "BASED Trump OWNS woke moralist!"

Every time I see anything like that, I'm always clicking not interested, don't recommend channel, etc. But it doesn't help. I would think it's something to do with my searches, or someone in my household watching this sort of content behind my back, but if you look at the front page of YouTube before having searched anything (you can do this through third party services such as GrayJay; it was getting so bad that YouTube itself had to disable their front page when you're not logged in. Seriously, try opening YouTube in an incognito tab. I promise you they would not disable their front page without an extremely important reason to; front pages are prime space!) it's all the same kind of content. Youtube as it stands is worse than the most hyperbolic satirizations of Fox News. FAANG are the ones pushing the fascism. FAANG are the mouths of our owners.

1 day agoby mouse_