Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: So many interesting insights in this research. First, the technique used by these ...

So many interesting insights in this research.

First, the technique used by these researchers to find out the actual number of videos hosted on #YouTube is definitely unorthodox (and inefficient), but it worked. Since Google won’t provide these numbers, and relying on traditional crawling techniques is likely to bring to the surface only videos that somebody has already interacted with, researchers have run an algorithm on a bunch of supercomupters that simply brute forced all the possible combinations of YouTube ID strings, and kept track of the requests that didn’t end up with a 404.

Second, even a conservative estimate of the number of videos on the platform is massive. 14 billion. Or nearly two videos for each human alive. With an unfathomably long tail.

To dig more in detail, videos with 10,000 or more views account for nearly 94% of the site’s traffic overall, but less than 4% of total uploads - a quite extreme version of the 80-20 rule. About 5% of videos have no views at all, almost 75% have no comments, and even more have no likes.

This sheds an interesting light on what YouTube actually is. Not a product that should be monetized at all costs, but a collective memory of basically all the media content that the human race has created in the past two decades. It’s vital infrastructure that should require no entry barriers, and it should be treated as such.

Most of the minutes of videos stored on YouTube’s servers aren’t from MrBeast, Veritasium or Tom Scott. They are from church services, weddings, condo-board meetings, graduation ceremonies, school lectures, and all other things that humans record and want to save on a permanent storage - for themselves, their families, their co-workers, their friends or their classmates. With absolutely no intention of monetization, wider reach, or whatever stinky corporate metrics YouTube PMs are obsessed with.

I was at a ceremony for my wife’s grandma a while ago. A guy took a high resolution video of the whole thing. It lasted about 2h and weighted 40GB. Of course, everybody from the family immediately wanted to see it, but a 40GB video isn’t exactly the kind of thing you share on the family’s Whatsapp group. Since I was involved, of course the video eventually ended up on my Nextcloud and Jellyfin servers, and from there the link could be shared with everyone. But what would have anyone else done, if they didn’t have a spare Nextcloud server with a couple of TBs attached in their closet, or didn’t want to upgrade thier Google One plan just to store a single video file on their Google Drive? Simple: upload it to YouTube.

And this is exactly how most of the people use this platform. As infrastructure to store their memories and share them, mostly within their own social circle. Not as a curated place where content is produced mostly by a very small (but very profitable) niche of creators who do that as a job. It was supposed to be the TV-killer, but it’s gradually become just another TV service - with a few channels getting most of the views, and advertisements everywhere.

When you store most of the media content that our whole species created in the past two decades, you have a strong duty of making it accessible to everyone, all the time, with the smallest amount of disruption. And that’s exactly the opposite of what Google has been doing lately.

Another example of how YouTube is used: I just installed a new washing machine in my house today. It came with a minimal cryptic manual, and full graphical instructions in English were only available by scanning a QR code which (of course) redirects you to a YouTube video.

Nowadays, YouTube allows you to watch videos only if you’re logged in. And it’ll keep throwing ads at you during the whole process.

How is this compatible with content such as “base instructions to install household appliances”? Luckily I have tons of way to bypass YouTube’s dumb checks and immediately consume their content everywhere I want. But what if it was up to the average Joe? They’ll need to have a Google account to sign it to YouTube, or they won’t be able to get the full installation instructions for the product they have purchased. And they’ll probably get some annoying ads while following those instructions (maybe while holding some piece of the appliance in uncomfortable positions and waiting for the next step). Because the PMs at YouTube think that all people use their platform for entertainment purposes, and thus they won’t be bothered by a small ad while they watch an entertaining video on their couch. And they don’t even realize that they are just focusing on a tiny subset of the use-cases, while breaking the experience for everybody else.

Going forward, we should all consider not publishing to YouTube anymore. Unless we are professional creators with some actual following there. Because YouTube is increasingly been shaped only around this subset of users, because they are the easiest to monetize and those who bring most of the views, and the company honestly doesn’t give a fuck about everybody else unless they bring views (and thus more eyeballs that spend time watching ads).

It should never be used for storing things to be shared only with a small circle, and even less as a permanent storage of your memories.

Google can’t be trusted in anything, and yet we’ve donated them all of our creations of the past 20 years, thinking that they’ll take care of them forever. Until a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable to invite some friends over to watch a VHS/DVD of your wedding, and getting interrupted by ads every couple of minutes, or getting all the comments and reactions of all of your friends profiled by a 3rd-party for advertisement purposes. How did we let a single corporation change our habits and expectations so deeply, and mostly for the worse?

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/how-many-videos-youtube-research/677250/