It's also what bums me out about YouTube. There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos - orders of magnitude more than would go into putting together a well-illustrated blog post.
As with blogs, a lot of this effort is wasted unless you get lucky. But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. Even within a single platform, you usually have multiple tries. If you don't get noticed right away, there's still hope that someone else shares your content down the line.
In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. If you don't already have a zillion subscribers, it shows your video to a couple of people, more or less at random. If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
There are surprisingly few venues for video content outside YT, at least not on a scale that would matter on YT! For example, if you want to get to the top of HN, non-video content has much better odds. Many tech- or science-centric subreddits discourage or ban videos too.
YT is a fairly closed ecosystem that's both insanely resource-intensive to participate in, and that doesn't give creators too many second chances. My specific claim is that it's more of a crapshoot than running a blog. There are so many great science visualizations with 50 views.
HN is relatively tiny and HN's allergy to video is not representative of the internet.
Just create clips from your video and post them on insta, tiktok, twitter, FB, etc. That's the internet at large. If people are interested, they'll watch the full video.
HN is small as a discussion community, but it is huge in terms of the traffic it generates to top-ranked URLs. There are fairly mainstream publications that optimize for HN, and I have spoken to marketers and PR people who described HN as by far the most significant source of traffic to their sites.
It doesn't necessarily translate to sales or lasting attention, but if you're after brand recognition or SEO, it's great. Spend some time on /newest to see how many organizations are desperate to get a piece of this.
It's not really that small and I don't know why people say that.
Last time I saw stats, it was five million monthly visitors. It's small as a platform. It's smaller than Reddit or Facebook, but those aren't discussion communities.
There aren't huge numbers of subreddits larger than five million people and last I looked the largest tended to be about trivial BS.
Last I checked, HN is the largest serious tech discussion board on the planet.
I've gotten traffic from HN and /r/programming, and the influx from HN is larger. I think it's a function of two things. First, /r/programming is higher-volume (i.e., more front-page links per day). Second, Reddit subscriber counts are not DAU / MAU, it likely includes a ton of inactive accounts.
Funny I just looked and Reddit says r/programming is 4.1m which last I checked is less than the 5 million unique visitors HN was getting a few years ago when I last saw stats by the moderator and I don't know what it's at now.
Twitter works completely differently from most platforms and isn't a unified community.
I'm not super active on social media, and I find that all the big/main aggregator sites (like HN and Reddit and others) have become victims of their own success and good stories just fall off the front page very quickly, and so you miss a ton of stuff unless you're checking all the time, and I don't have that kind of time.
Link aggregators aren't good at "long tail"... So your good stories are only really discoverable when they're hot, and get progressively harder to discover over time.
Google search just sucks now, it's all shopping links and SEO trash, even if you search for fairly specific subjects.. You can still find what you want but you have to wade through so much garbage...
Plus there's no discovery. Like pretty much all search engines you can typically only find what you're searching for as opposed to finding new unknown things that are within your topics of interest.
For better or worse I find that YouTube is one of my best resources for surfacing new and interesting things pretty often, and quite regularly from channels big and small that I've never watched before. YT is great at long tail..
So it has become a major source of discovery for me, in many of my areas of interest (which aren't all tech).
Of course some content I don't like consuming as video, so I do sometimes find videos that cover interesting subject matter, which I'll then go search for articles or text-based content on instead.
I see, though I do consider that part of YouTube to be a net negative for everyone but Google considering how it's keeping people on the platform, and therefore less likely to look for more varied sources.
But what I meant is that people share links around, whether in public like here, or in one-on-one discussions (and blogs do have their own recommended lists), so it's quite possible that you would still have found out about them without any kind of algorithmic prodding.
For instance, to put this in practice, here's a science education focused personal website that I like a lot :
We all find content in ways that suit our time/resources/network etc.. I do get lots of links and recommendations from friends and co-workers (and on places like here), but I also get a lot of it from platforms, and I think that's a good thing.
I'm not anti-algorithm (not saying you are) and I believe it's one of many great ways to discover content, in this case in video form. And I think having it all in one place is a huge benefit.
Considering all the resources required to host video, I don't think it would be realistic for everyone to host their own stuff in that medium..
Not to mention how much of a creator economy exists thanks to the centralized platform that is YT. Tons of creators probably wouldn't even bother making their content if they didn't have somewhere with a built-in audience to post it to.
So I disagree with the idea that it's a negative for everyone but Google. Tons of people make a living thanks to that platform, with content they'd likely never be able to make a living from otherwise.
I'm not sure that resources were an issue even in 2006, much less today : P2P is older than that. Ease of use was an issue, but that's almost over thanks to the likes of PeerTube (even for streaming !), though of course it would be better if ISPs also jumped on board (like they did for e-mail and personal websites).
People were making videos even before YouTube started to become commercial, and they will keep making them after YouTube is gone (hopefully soon, considering how enshittified it became, but I'm afraid that with Google's money it will take a while). I disagree that th That you're calling it 'content' is a symptom of that corporatization.
Platforms are evil (and discovery algorithms are a big part of the problem), and especially the people not just using them, but particularly making a living from them are bad people (especially today, they had more than a decade to be aware of the issues). (This is on top of other qualities or faults they might have, of course.) And if there were no platforms, there would still be people making a living from the Internet (and the video format included), the possibilities are just too gigantic.
I'm calling it content because that's what it is. And it's the term that we use for it today.. I don't call it that because of Google, I call it that because that's what it's called. Language evolves.
Content creator is a blanket term for the writers, videographers, researchers, comedians, speakers, musicians, scientists, programmers, artists, architects, singers and every other profession making a living uploading videos to YouTube.
I certainly didn't want to type all of those, so I used the common shorthand. Even you knew what it meant. Not everything is sinister or evil. Sometimes it's just words.
99% (probably more) of people who use YT have never heard of PeerTube. I've heard of it and I've never once tried to use it, and I'm quite technical (I've built a video distribution platform).
You're delusional (sorry) if you think anything out there even comes close to the reach or ease of use of YouTube for the average person.
Look I'm not saying it's perfect either, or that there aren't problems with Google and the rest of big tech, and some of their products have drawbacks and downsides..
Anyways, I just realized I'm trying to have practical conversation and you're having an ideological one.. So maybe that's where this ends, we'll agree to disagree and move on...
From what YouTube creators are saying lately subscriber counts don’t matter anymore. So even if you have a zillion subscribers you’re still almost completely at the mercy of the algorithm.
I saw this, too. I know a Youtuber who has 2 million subscribers and their latest videos get about 5k views when they used to get 500k without a change in quality.
> If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.
As some counterexample anecdata, the YouTube algorithm is being quite generous to me lately, often giving me relatively low-view videos from years ago, some of which have been quite good. Maybe I'm just in a small a/b test, but it seems that videos do get multiple chances.
for better or worse, that's because video's infinitely easier to monetize in ways we've been conditioned with for decades. so the payouts for monetized videos are huge compared to a written blog where an ad can clutter and mess up the entire design (which loses you users, losing you better ad rates, and spirals down).
It's also a chicken and egg issue too. People simply watch more than they read most of the time. So videos target more people who gets more ad money who gets better ad rates etc.
> There is an insane amount of effort that goes into producing high-quality videos
Agreed. I once heard an estimate of 1 hour of editing for 1 minute of video, and I find that to be an extremely low-end estimate in my experience. And then, editing is only one part of the process. I spend possibly more time on writing (from outline to prose to revisions) than on editing, even when including basic motion graphics.
> In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once.
This contradicts the experience that I have with YouTube as a creator. For reference, this is my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@XyrillPlays/videos - Just a silly little gaming channel. Ignore the bulk of the videos that are just VODs; if you sort by "Popular", you can see that practically all the views are on a handful of edited videos.
There is one edited video there early on, which currently has 7.6k views, even though it was posted in a phase of the channel where videos got single-digit views. If it were true that "an algorithm decides essentially once", this would needed to have happened right then and there, except that it didn't. This video got 42 views "on its own", without any promotion of any kind. But here's the thing, as you said yourself:
> But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else.
The same applies to YouTube videos. When I posted another edited video later, I put that previous video as an end card. And just that miniscule click-through traffic alone was enough to have the older video get picked up by the algorithm.
And why did the newer video get picked up? Because I posted it to the subreddit and the Discord for the game. Video analytics on YouTube give a breakdown of where people are coming from, and it was very obvious how the first 100 or so views came from those places. Then after that, something clicked in the algorithm, as though it had become attuned to who might be interested in the videos, and it started recommending the video to people. From one moment to another, 85% of views are coming from algorithmic recommendations, which was 0% before.
With the most-watched video on the channel, which is nearing 200k views as of right now, it actually gained traction with the algorithm right away because I had for the first time a pre-existing subscriber base to get the video off the ground on its own, but it has not really stopped accumulating views. It has certainly flattened off a bit, but I've definitely benefited from the game in question having its 1.0 release recently. I'm also seeing people share my video on the subreddit every once in a while in the same way how people repost old blog posts to HN every now and then.
As with blogs, a lot of this effort is wasted unless you get lucky. But with blogs, at least you have multiple good shots at visibility. Maybe you'll make it to the top of HN, maybe on X, maybe somewhere else. Even within a single platform, you usually have multiple tries. If you don't get noticed right away, there's still hope that someone else shares your content down the line.
In contrast, on YouTube, an algorithm essentially decides once. If you don't already have a zillion subscribers, it shows your video to a couple of people, more or less at random. If they don't engage, that's the end of the road.