There are two modes of watching TV in my opinion: intentional and casual
Intentional: look for a certain show/movie, e.g. the weekly episode of House MD, Lost, Friends, HBO, ... -> This is the streaming war between Netflix, HBO, Disney, ...
Casual: You turn on the tv with the aim to just browse around and relax, and get something accidentally interesting/amusing -> Youtube is king and more or less the only option here (and a bit of Nebula)
I watch things on Youtube intentionally. Right now I'm watching That UK Sound[1]. There are many more things worth watching intentionally on Youtube then there are on Netflix, HBO and Disney together. There's nothing like 3Blue1Brown on these.
Same here. We have the benefit of a nice projector, so we have biweekly movie nights with friends; when it's just us we'll fire up YouTube and watch whatever tickles out fancy.
With YouTube not only is it easy to not look for other stuff to watch, it’s easy to skip other activities. It’s low hanging fruit for just about any interest. I’m trying to use it less.
The amount of human knowledge available today on youtube I think nothing will ever come close as apart from formal knowledge we have millions of small hacks improvements that would probably not been written down but have been recorded. If you are dedicated enough today you can go from being a novice to being quite proficient in 100s of different things. And every day the knowledge keeps increasing as well as improving.
I think there is much more information on the internet in written format though. Which I personally find a lot more accessible as well.
I always find video really slow and not very information dense, I don't have the patience for it. I get frustrated with the slow delivery whereas I can consume written text at my own speed. Skipping video works of course but I constantly have to "resync" my mind after a skip which happens automatically with written content. Written text can also be overly verbose and woolly but somehow I can scan through it even faster and summarise it without even thinking. It's really weird.
But it's great video exists for those who love it of course. And I think most people find video more easily accessible. I'm more of an outlier.
Fwiw I already stopped watching live TV many years ago :) All the ads, the endless game shows and talkshows with the celebs loving the sound of their own voices, no thanks.
> I always find video really slow and not very information dense
That always depends on the actual "information". Some stuff is "better" in written form, other things need audio and for other video is neccesary. Trivial thing is needing audio to e.g. hear music (yes, even if I can read musical notation) or pronunciation, intonation and accentuation of words or videos of physical "movement" in sports, crafts and art (dancing, theater,...).
But no, I wouldn't watch somebody programming for hours instead of reading about that either.
Most things that aren’t academic can’t really be learned by reading about it. You have to see someone do it to get all the thousands of different bits of information you cannot possibly write down. Videos are extremely information dense depending on what you’re trying to learn.
I know it's silly but I sometimes feel anxiety at the prospect of that enormous bank of knowledge getting lost in some way or another (e.g. Google deciding it wants to do something else or some disaster).
The medium-term threat is the gradual replacement of that knowledge in search results with AI para-knowledge that looks plausible but is not actually true or useful.
youtube is doing it's best to now hobble search functionality on youtube, which is already a disaster from a discoverablity perspective. not to mention the huge amount of content that gets deleted due to claims of all kinda of nonsense and other bogus reports and faulty automated detection.
The problem is that Youtube severely nerfed their search (ironic given that Google still pretends it's a search company).
Now if you search for something will give you 5 relevant videos, 10 "for you videos" and then an endless list of something it hopes you will engage with, whether relevant or not
I use google search then select videos try it you will probably get better results instead of youtube search. I wonder if they google search scans the subtitles as well from youtube so has better results.
I just opened the YouTube app and the first recommended video is "youtube's search function is atrocious now". Their search function may be bad, but the addiction feed is spot on!
Who knew something as basic as streaming videos would basically be a monopoly. It makes sense in hindsight with all the expensive storage required. It’s still mind boggling that you could literally upload video to them 24/7 and they will host it for free.
I'd say there's two types of them: independent mixes (someone just recorded a DJ set for the fun of it), and podcast-like radio shows, usually backed by a label. The first group is getting kinda smaller, but the second group is definitely more on Soundcloud than anywhere else -- it's just completely undiscoverable. Sometimes it goes to the artist profile, sometimes it has its own "radio show" profile, and Soundcloud does fuck all in terms of displaying such "podcasts" separately.
For me the most interesting of the platforms in this niche is Mixcloud, whose whole concept is streaming DJ mixes, legally, with some of the money somehow going back to the artists whose records you play. But to negotiatate that sort of legality they had to introduce some rather unexpected restrictions, like how many songs you can play by one artist, how many from a certain album, how many consective songs by artist/album... So it's fine in most cases, but doing something like "best of Daft Punk" mix would go against the rules.
And with YouTube it's pretty much a dice roll. A common tactic is to upload an unlisted blank video with the snippets of the music you want to record yourself playling and see how lucky you get with the copyright algorithm. Sometimes a certain song you want to play is just a no-go, so you have to swap it for a different one before recording yourself, otherwise all your effort goes straight to trash, never to be seen by anyone. And you get up to three strikes in a 90 day period, so you can't be too regular with your uploads.
You also get Youtube Music with premium. That's pretty nice. It's not as good at playlists as Spotify, etc, but it's got most music you wanna listen to.
I sort of hope someone more motivated than myself makes a timer for how long before the crappification* of YouTube begins now that it appears MBAs will be taking over. The new CEO probably has some gumption, but it seems inevitable.
* of course this is subjective, but generally I can find lots of great YouTube content. I can buy premium to avoid the ads and become the client, not the product.
Eh, I like some of the shorts. I just scroll by them when I'm not.
I'm thinking about much deeper enshitification like nickel-and-diming content creators until they all leave. Getting rid of premium or adding ads to it, etc. Adding even more ads for regular users.
On mobile that's the biggest reason I use ReVanced. Sure, blocking ads is nice and all, but I'm paying for premium anyway. I just don't want to see shorts
The fact that search is broken (you often only get a few relevant videos and then some recommendations that have nothing to do with your search) and YouTube shorts are shoved in your face constantly are not enough for you to attest enshittification at this point in time?
How bad do you expect it to become in the near future?
Readit News
We watch movies, and youtube as if it were tv.
Old TV is now either 24 hour garbage news, reality shows, or similar nonesense.
Intentional: look for a certain show/movie, e.g. the weekly episode of House MD, Lost, Friends, HBO, ... -> This is the streaming war between Netflix, HBO, Disney, ...
Casual: You turn on the tv with the aim to just browse around and relax, and get something accidentally interesting/amusing -> Youtube is king and more or less the only option here (and a bit of Nebula)
The two together is the traditional TV
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlCEg4hCa1LHLLYk4KQQI...
On a certain movie/show, you can’t be bothered to divert your attention: you’re committed to the show.
Take a look at YouTube's trending page. There's clearly a reason for that content on TV.
Last night it was Vewn animated shorts and music videos by group_inou, here's a favorite: https://youtu.be/JP2728BtJ34?si=UGkXJWJFGdy8muyu
I always find video really slow and not very information dense, I don't have the patience for it. I get frustrated with the slow delivery whereas I can consume written text at my own speed. Skipping video works of course but I constantly have to "resync" my mind after a skip which happens automatically with written content. Written text can also be overly verbose and woolly but somehow I can scan through it even faster and summarise it without even thinking. It's really weird.
But it's great video exists for those who love it of course. And I think most people find video more easily accessible. I'm more of an outlier.
Fwiw I already stopped watching live TV many years ago :) All the ads, the endless game shows and talkshows with the celebs loving the sound of their own voices, no thanks.
That always depends on the actual "information". Some stuff is "better" in written form, other things need audio and for other video is neccesary. Trivial thing is needing audio to e.g. hear music (yes, even if I can read musical notation) or pronunciation, intonation and accentuation of words or videos of physical "movement" in sports, crafts and art (dancing, theater,...).
But no, I wouldn't watch somebody programming for hours instead of reading about that either.
Dead Comment
It is truly invaluable to _humanity_
Now if you search for something will give you 5 relevant videos, 10 "for you videos" and then an endless list of something it hopes you will engage with, whether relevant or not
Deleted Comment
If you down the rabbit hole you start losing your mind.
I didn't really like their “annoyance” style of advertising that, but competitors got worse
There are no DJ mixes on Soundcloud or Spotify any longer, and other platforms are a combination of unused or no mobile app
so I’ll go ahead and get rid of the ads now for just that, but along with everything else on youtube
I'd say there's two types of them: independent mixes (someone just recorded a DJ set for the fun of it), and podcast-like radio shows, usually backed by a label. The first group is getting kinda smaller, but the second group is definitely more on Soundcloud than anywhere else -- it's just completely undiscoverable. Sometimes it goes to the artist profile, sometimes it has its own "radio show" profile, and Soundcloud does fuck all in terms of displaying such "podcasts" separately.
For me the most interesting of the platforms in this niche is Mixcloud, whose whole concept is streaming DJ mixes, legally, with some of the money somehow going back to the artists whose records you play. But to negotiatate that sort of legality they had to introduce some rather unexpected restrictions, like how many songs you can play by one artist, how many from a certain album, how many consective songs by artist/album... So it's fine in most cases, but doing something like "best of Daft Punk" mix would go against the rules.
And with YouTube it's pretty much a dice roll. A common tactic is to upload an unlisted blank video with the snippets of the music you want to record yourself playling and see how lucky you get with the copyright algorithm. Sometimes a certain song you want to play is just a no-go, so you have to swap it for a different one before recording yourself, otherwise all your effort goes straight to trash, never to be seen by anyone. And you get up to three strikes in a 90 day period, so you can't be too regular with your uploads.
I sort of hope someone more motivated than myself makes a timer for how long before the crappification* of YouTube begins now that it appears MBAs will be taking over. The new CEO probably has some gumption, but it seems inevitable.
* of course this is subjective, but generally I can find lots of great YouTube content. I can buy premium to avoid the ads and become the client, not the product.
1: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64675997.amp
How about you hide them forever? Some MBA must have decided that it would not be good for their KPI if people could just ignore the clickbait.
I'm thinking about much deeper enshitification like nickel-and-diming content creators until they all leave. Getting rid of premium or adding ads to it, etc. Adding even more ads for regular users.
1: https://github.com/ReVanced
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification