YouTube faces creator backlash

Re:YouTube faces creator backlash by pcarolan on Monday July 29, 2019 @08:25PM (#20560956)

I'm pretty sure you just described the first phase of every product's lifecycle. Everyone plays on the same field, early adopters start winning, everyone else follows... eventually you monetize it and it becomes clear that winners-win is a better business strategy than everyone wins. I don't know how to get around the business physics of this. Not sure anyone does. Tik-tok will eventually become the stagnant incumbent and it will try to suppress its challengers or it will die on the Vine.

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Re:YouTube faces creator backlash by frogpelt on Monday July 29, 2019 @10:52PM (#20561724)

> die on the Vine

Clever. Also, I think you nailed it.

YouTube is trying to curate their content. Any site that stays around for a while and wants to attract top advertising dollars does it. Reddit curates to an extent. Facebook is in all kinds of trouble for not curating.

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Re:YouTube faces creator backlash by adminu on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @12:13AM (#20562087)

I thought Facebook is in trouble for over curating. They tweaked their algorithms for maximum stay on page time and thus promoted clickbaity content that now increasingly drives away longer-ish time users. FB user count is growing, sure, but not in its lucrative home market, the US.

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Re:YouTube faces creator backlash by HenryBemis on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @09:12AM (#20564481)

Click-baity and extremist content. Whether the extreme is more and more 80s PC games, cat videos, or politics, FB thrives but making you more passionate/engaged.

Of course dedicating 1 hour per day talking about Saboteur II is not the same as participating in hate-groups, but this has become our problem, not FB's.

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Re:YouTube faces creator backlash by daveguy on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:56PM (#20561418)

> I don't know how to get around the business physics of this.

It seems like the best way to get around the business physics is to switch from a business model to a federation model. Something like Mastodon where hosting costs are distributed and the algorithm can be tweaked for exposure rather than dollars earned for the hosting company. Of course there you have a chicken and egg networking problem and an ease of use problem.

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Re:YouTube faces creator backlash by snake117 on Tuesday July 30, 2019 @11:26AM (#20565739)

Exactly. I was going to make this point myself, but you stated it better than I could. I can imagine a lot of prospective founders wanting to build an alternative platform to mitigate this issue, but then realize that further down the road they will ultimately become the very thing they set out to abolish in the first place.

> I don't know how to get around the business physics of this. Not sure anyone does.

Sometimes I think to myself that if their is less reliance on angel/VC funding from the very beginning, then founders could stay true to their vision. Like how Elon Musk refuses to make SpaceX a publicly traded company as it would squander the ultimate goal of colonizing mars. However, given how resource intensive it must be to process and store petabytes of video every year (exabytes in total), there is just no way around acquiring investment dollars.

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Re:YouTube faces creator backlash by foobarian on Monday July 29, 2019 @10:40PM (#20561667)

Wow, my favorite new phrase this year: business physics. Thank you!

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