Thanks for the analysis. I've got to say. We on Lemmy can be vicious.

The same wsd also reported by Second Wind (old Zero Punctuation) and their experience is the same: way too sudden drop to be anything else except YouTube adjusting their algorithm.

In their video, Yahtzee said it could be related to Restricted Mode on youtube suddenly turns on by itself. Or at least that's their hypothesis, since they checked that if that mode is on, a lot of their videos vanished from their channel.

If a change in the algorithm hurts, it may be a sign that the algorithm had been helping previously. No one questions the algorithm when viewership grows, but it’s largely to blame for the good and the bad.

DarkviperAU also mentioned it.

youtube is probably gearing the algorithim for other content than influencers that draws in more views or revenue.

I'll echo that I have felt an algorithm change. I watch a lot of leather crafting videos and a lot of Adam Savage videos. In the past week I've been getting Adam Savage working on leather videos and I've been thrilled to discover these. As someone who's been watching both Adam Savage and leather crafting videos for months or maybe years, I should have already seen these, but somehow missed these until this past week. Now YouTube shows me video after video of Adam Savage working on leather, which I love.

Could back up that theory that it's autoplay views being reduced and they are not worth much anyway

*the view/ like ratio doubled halved

How does that even work? If someone viewed the video then they viewed the video. Are they simply not counting people who basically clicked by accident or who only watched the first 30sec before deciding that they didn’t actually want to watch the video?

The problem is that there aren't any really viable alternatives. YouTube has three major advantages and all three are necessary. First and most critically it has a viable business model (that is it has a way to earn money to pay creators). It's a shitty business model, but it is viable which already puts it ahead of most services that are coasting on VC funds and hoping they'll trip over a business model before they go bankrupt. Second it has the infrastructure and capital to actually serve content. Running a video streaming service is the single largest bandwidth consumer you could possibly come up with and that means considerable network infrastructure costs, to say nothing of the storage demands. Third it has network effect going for it. Nobody is going to watch videos on your platform if there's only a couple dozen of them total. The sheer size and scope of YouTube means no matter what you're looking for you can find something to watch. It's a one stop shop for AV content.

Every single competitor to YouTube has failed on one of those points, usually the first one, rarely the second. The last service I saw come close to hitting all three was Vimeo, but it flamed out not even a decade after it launched. Twitch.tv is struggling to make their accounting work and isn't even a direct competitor because they're pushing hard for live streams as opposed to pre-recorded videos. Alternatives like PeerTube have no business model and will never attract creators or a mainstream audience. Paid hosting platforms like Floatplane are replacements for traditional video streaming services like Amazon Video or Netflix not really platforms where just anybody can set up a channel and start posting videos.

To paraphrase a famous saying, YouTube is the worst public video streaming service except for every other one. Until someone comes along and figures out how to make enough money to reliably pay creators and has enough capital to actually serve that content reliably and in high quality YouTube isn't going anywhere.

Honestly, YouTube is the “least bad” of most commercial social media.

If people go to Twitter or Discord or whatever instead, that would be awful.

That would be the dream! Not sure about actual data but yeah. I want it to be true lol.

Been paying for Nebula for years, but their app has a long way to go.

If anyone wants to be part of the solution: !peertube@lemmy.world

My heavily biased take is I like peertube. And like the creators on it.

youtube is already replacing it with AI slop, and propaganda. they increased it. thats where the money is, other than getting it from the major television networks.

i think history buff channels were calling out there were clones of his channel in AI form.

Oh, so that is why Veritasium went to shit. That's such a shame. It was a great channel that I was excited about when a new video would drop. Then low quality videos started coming out and I don't watch them anymore. Haven't unsubscribe yet though, maybe I should get around to that.

I have definitely unsubscribed from some big channels that I used to watch routinely, and simply often don't click on videos from channels I haven't yet unsubscribed from. It's just not interesting stuff. It's filler crap. thankfully it seems like there are enough smaller channels to fill that space, including some of the people originally from those other ones (like speed and donut)

Linus Tech Tips is not one of them though. They did receive an offer for $100 million, but refused it to keep their independence.