YouTube as it is right now, makes me very sad.
Truth be told, it’s all of the social media sites, but YouTube is the one I enjoyed the most in the past and that I feel added most positive value to my life, so YouTube’s fall makes me especially sad.
I have written two other posts about why I am unhappy with current YouTube as a creator. I have spend five years posting videos and have more than 300 educational videos available. You can start the series here:
The problem with educational content on YouTube
Today I would like to talk about how YouTube makes me sad as a consumer, past consumer I should say.
For past few months YouTube has been blocked in my browser and the app uninstalled from my phone. Sadly I have concluded that any time spent on YouTube is time wasted at this point and doesn’t add anything positive to my life, not education nor entertainment. Just waste.
What changed
I wouldn’t say there was a specific moment I noticed YouTube has changed. It was a slow degradation, hard to notice at any specific point, but added up together, it led to YouTube just not being worth my time.
Here are some of the changes to the platform that make me not want to spend time there anymore:
- Search
YouTube used to be an amazing platform for learning. You could search for any topic and find many tutorials and explanations covering just what you needed. Now, the search is completely unusable. That’s not a hyperbole. It’s completely useless.After searching for anything, I get maybe three relevant videos, two ads and bunch of shorts on sometimes relevant topic. Afterwards it’s a “People also watched” category, which is just algorithm recommendation of trendy videos.That’s from Search. Feature specifically intended to search for content relevant to your keywords.I find this unacceptable and what’s worse unusable. Days when YouTube would give you content you ask for are gone it seems.
Subscriptions
- It used to be the case, that subscribing to a channel meant you would see videos from it. It used to mean you want to see all or at least most of what the channel posts.Well, no more of that apparently. There still is a subscription panel on YouTube, but it doesn’t seem to serve what it should. This may be purely my experience, but I found myself often checking a channel which I liked and realizing they posted bunch of videos that never made it to my feed nor subscription page. To some degree I understand YouTube pushing content with most signals to me, but I am very unhappy about YT making a decision for what I should watch even if I explicitly said I am interested in something else.
Likes/Dislikes
- Not much to be said, I think the decision to hide dislikes from the videos was very poorly thought through. It was very easy to check whether tutorial is worth watching or just clickbait by like/dislike ratio.Well, no more of that. YouTube has decided that’s not what I am allowed to do.
Everything is the same, everything is content
- I find myself very disappointed with vast majority of content produced on YouTube at the moment. Everything is same, everything is uniform and boring.There is a formula followed by all channels at a time. Everyone copies Mr Beast or whoever is currently trending.Don’t get me wrong, nothing against what Mr Beast is doing. I find this sort of bombastic content very boring, but I think it’s great he can make it and there are a lot of people who enjoy it.The problem isn’t that Mr Beast specifically does bombastic content, the problem is that everyone copies him or whoever is currently popular. All the thumbnails, formats, video editing and usually even stories within. They are all same. Opening a YouTube homepage is like looking at a bonbonniere with 30 shades of mediocre chocolate. Each of them is slightly different, but in the end they are all produced in the same factory with slightly different shade of the same color. It’s simply boring and all the same. I miss the variety and strangeness, that made me really like YouTube.
What’s next?
I am afraid I don’t have an answer to that. To some degree this outcome was inevitable. YouTube’s goal was to always collect as many users as possible and then monetize us.
YouTube has complete monopoly over online video, so they can do whatever they want. I don’t think it will get better unless we will see a real competition and it’s really difficult to compete with YouTube’s network effect.
In the end, I as a consumer make decision with my attention and my wallet. I don’t want to support YouTube as it is now in any form, so I won’t.
All my videos have switched off monetization and I don’t watch YouTube myself.
I miss old YouTube.