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Comment by barbacoa | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone else been slowly watching YouTube turn into cable TV? When I search "Hong Kong protests" I just get a bunch of videos from CNN and Fox News, not that long ago a search like that would turn up first hand videos of people who were there. Now they are copying streaming services in making it harder to tell what is garbage and what is worth watching.

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Yeah, slowly but surely YouTube is destroying itself. Which is very sad, because it's been an amazing resource. I'd love to see ByteDance do a YouTube competitor. (Or, dream of all dreams, see something distributed really take off.)

Sadly as long as google dominates search there is little chance that any other video site will get any traction since Google biases towards youtube and away from start up steaming sites.

Probably has to start w/ an app.

On Android...

good luck getting videos of the hong kong protests with a ByteDance YouTube!

Yes, just like they got rid of the "Discussions" search filter that used to show you results from forums (i.e. the content of individuals) - now every search topic is dominated by sales channels.

BoardReader.com aims to replace this, but IME attempts to search for exact phrases (multiple words in quotes) doesn't work well.

News networks have much better SEO than John Doe with a phone and 0 subscribers.

It's not even SEO. Youtube / Google personally partners with certain businesses and injects them into seemingly organic video feeds. For example, there is an invite only advertisement tier that you don't automatically get access to regardless of view or subscriber count.

Yes I agree with your observations. And I've also noticed an aggressive pop up add campaign from Google asking whether I want purchase Youtube Premium.

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