Comment by nicetryguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicetryguy | Hacker News Reader

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100% Agree. The sad part is, at least for me, it works... i definitely waste more time on youtube now....

That said, i also think production value in popular channels has really skyrocked the last few years. We've entered kind of a golden age for user generated content, for better or worse. It is very entertaining but very much more addicting.

For example, i watched a guy for years who reviewed classic synthesizers and made silly songs. He has recently made an entire 2hr documentary on the history of ARP synthesizers with engineer interviews and everything! It is like some Ken Burns level stuff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l31RXiVSI9s Nothing on youtube existed like this a few years ago. It is an amazing world we live in now.

Alex Ball is freaking amazing. He did a short podcast about that video last week, which I found interesting. https://www.soundonsound.com/people/alex-ball-making-arp-syn...

There's no question about the value of the content youtube has accumulated. It's their stewardship of it that worries me.

Google tends to let automation do most of the work and apply a heavy hand to issues. I lost an entire account a few years ago, gmail address and all, due to copyrighted music on video games i was streaming. I got hard locked out, I didn't have personal info tied to that account, and they wanted some crazy validation information like what month did i create the account, and i had no idea. Since i only had 300 followers or so, there was nothing i could do to get it back. It was a bad feeling. It really made me think twice about what you do with big G, because they can take everything all away in an instant.

I can't imagine trying to administrate / police all of the people / content on youtube. It's an impossible task. There are hundreds of millions of users with thousands of hours of content being generated every second of every day. It also cost more to run than it generates, so it's practically a public service. I wish there were more customization for recommendations though.

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