The act of interacting on YouTube used to be an entirely public matter. You could say anything you want as long as it didn’t break any laws and trust it to be thrown into the public. Nowadays you comment on something, and there’s a 75% chance of you being shadowbanned without knowing why, with the video owner being the main filter of what people see, forcing feuds to take place not in comments but in back and forth videos, since this means everyone’s content has become their own little echo chamber, which means a stable argument is impossible, and combined with the fact YouTube is highly indifferent to even most of its most important rules broken, as well as combined with the fact popularity is based entirely on luck now, means anyone can use it as a platform to slander any person or topic completely unchallenged if they’re the one who gets popular while the challenger cannot. And because YouTube once had a reputation for being the best platform for information, most people who grew up with this reputation who have never had to deal with its modern incarnation don’t think to question anything. It’s a literal den of snakes now, you got misinformation trolls coming out its wazoo. What ways have you used to circumvent the issue?
- The first rule of YouTube is you do not look at the comments. The second rule of YouTube is you do not look at the comments.
- I ignore YouTube’s recommendations for the most part nowadays. The algorithm is fucked.
- Some of the channels I’ve followed are being demonetized or outright banned, and have had to move to places like Patreon, Substack, and Means TV.
What ways have you used to bypass YouTube’s echo chamber format?
Easy, I barely use YouTube at all anymore.
When I do use it, it’s for specific videos. I never use it for content discovery.
Yeah, I have switched quite a bit of my viewing over to Nebula. Bunch of the creators I like are over there since Youtube punishes high-effort content.
Care to share your opinion/experience? I’m thinking about it
Nebula focuses mostly on 7-50min, edited content. That is to say, not shorts and no let’s plays. They have some solid originals, like the Battle of Britain series, however most of their content is also available on youtube. What most creators do is offer the ad free version on Nebula (ie no in-video ad-reads), and Nebula doesn’t add ads themselves. Many creators will also create supplemental videos that aren’t available elsewhere that go into more detail on one part of the prior story; something LowSpecGamer does quite a bit.
On the negative side, because the content is all edited (ie, not things like lets play) and there are less creators overall, you can’t sit down and watch Nebula all day every day like you can youtube. Also, as mentioned earlier, much of the content is also available on youtube.
I personally like it and happy to support creators I like. The extra content is solid and it’s nice creators are rewarded for making quality content.
Use Newpipe instead. No more personalized algo, and you can just browse your subscription videos instead. It does have trending videos if you’re interested as well.
You don’t use a Google account to watch YouTube videos and never allow cookies or browser history.
Every single time I open YouTube it’s as if I am a new user who has never accessed the site before.
I watch way too much YouTube, but it sounds like you are describing a microblogging platform…
I just follow people that provides me quality, I’ve never experienced any upload war.
Simple. Disable watch history.
This doesn’t fix it. Try re enabling it and lo and behold all the previous suggestions are back. Google never deletes anything.
youtube is like all heavily backed social media platforms and legacy media; you’re wasting your time is you want something other than bickering or propagandized information.
i just only follow a few creators i like, i dont use youtube for discovery or discussion
The best? No, it does not have that reputation. Everyone knows it’s mostly full of shit, with some good channels here and there. The biggest? Maybe, depending what you are talking about.
I use youtube less and less because it’s not as information dense as other sources. When I do brave YT, I have a simple css override via stylus to hide thumbnails. It has helped reduce that sad feeling about the human spirit YT leaves me with.
The stylus snippet:
ytd-thumbnail { background-color: #000000 !important; display: none; }I only use YouTube for instructional videos, and I only comment to say thanks, so I don’t have any issues.
Don’t use it.
If you have to, it could be as a search result from an engine.
And because YouTube once had a reputation for being the best platform for information
I had to stop and think for a while to try and remember a time that I thought YouTube was a good place to be informed. I do remember back in 2016 a news-focused youtuber I trusted not only quit YouTube but also quit news entirely after getting disillusioned with the media ecosystem. (That was a sad day.) Back then he was only one of a few youtubers I trusted to deliver news to my ear holes. I can’t remember any point in time that I thought I could find good news by scrolling YouTube.
These days my news channel is Sir Swag, who does once-per-month world news videos. This gives them plenty of time to research and fact check, and overall are pretty good.
I have been using internet since before youtube was born and not for one day have I believed that youtube is a good source of information by itself, in spite of watching entire nptel courses there.
Marketing cliches, and/or coteries under their influence, are not part of “reputation”.
So I had this idea for a long time; tell me what you think. What if we build a web crawler to build a database of YouTube URLs? There’s just so much content out there that is only a couple of years old that I feel like nobody is shown anymore. Build a nice little web UI that people can utilize with literally iframes. Basically adjust YouTubes algo to show people what they really want. Maybe get a LLM to parse the titles to determine what kind of video it is, and use it to group related videos together
