Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Just like with FB’s purchase of Instagram. I remember people making fun of Zuckerberg for paying $1B for a “filter app than can be made in few hours”.

I think the magic wasn’t in those apps or websites but the traction they got and how that was preserved. Both FB and Google were very careful to preserve the origins when evolving.

I remember Google videos, it was very bad. If this wasn’t Google but Microsoft, they may have tried to integrate Youtube into their Video platform and destroy everything.

Being good custodian is just as important.

View on HN

Yeah, he was buying market share. Google was buying advertising potential and market share. The largest video streaming platform on the planet, still not a silly buy.

At the time YouTube was acquired their infrastructure costs were quite high. Not as crazy as today's AI companies, but in the same way a lot of people were questioning if they could ever make money because of it.

Ah I see, I think I was still in my teens when that purchase happened, so I had no idea about the concerns or anything. I just was shocked at the amount of money because it's a lot of money.

the first version of YT were based on Flash/MM, IIRC

The Youtube acquisition and growth strategy was interesting (I left another comment about this). IG was also quite interesting.

Many here will be familiar with how the founders of these tech companies basically keep control over their companies while holding minority stakes through different classes of shares. Zuckerberg was the only one to hold these shares I believe and could basically authorize the IG purchase by himself. And that's what he did. He told the board after the fact. At least that's the story I read.

IG was growing fast but it blossomed under FB's stewardship in a way that I'm not sure it would've had it stayed independent or someone else had bought it. For many years, IG was allowed to operate semi-autonomously within FB (kinda similar to Youtube under Google actually). They continue to have their own tech stack, which has caused its fair share of problems, and essentially operated seprately from a product perspective.

But scaling requires a whole bunch of infrastructure that isn't all technical. Things like site safety, taking down problematic content, creating an ads ecosystem and so on. FB had a lot of expertise and existing infrastructure for all of this because of, well, Facebook. And whatever fauts FB has, this is something they did very well.

I totally think Google would've screwed it up, for example.

I guess my point is that they didn't exactly buy a $100B+ business for $1B. They turned it into a $100B+ business. Just like Youtube.

That being said, I think IG has actually faltered from a product perspective over the last 5+ years. Reels (like Youtube Shorts) are a kneejerk reaction to Tiktok, who is eating both of them alive in short-form video. And Tiktok's recommendation algorithms are a step above of anything I've seen on FB, IG or Youtube.

I was never a big IG user but from what I hear from people who are or were and what I read online, it feels like IG has kinda lost its way and nobody really knows what it's for anymore. It's certainly not for sharing among your friends (which is how FB started too). Photo-sharing seems to be falling away to video. So who exactly is it for?

> Tiktok's recommendation algorithms are a step above of anything I've seen on FB, IG or Youtube.

That's because their main UI isn't anything like Tik Tok. You start out with a normal feed on IG, on YouTube you might see recommended videos, but its not BAM HERES SHORT FORM. Tik Tok was by design this UI and recommendation scheme. I think its a UX issue not an algorithm issue necessarily. If I open YouTube shorts I get a lot of the content I keep going back on YouTube to watch, on IG probably not since I dont use FB or IG much if at all. If these UIs were more prominent, I could see them matching or competing with Tik Tok on these fronts.

What's funny to me is Tik Tok users quitting Tik Tok because they think the US has poisoned it, and then running to YouTube or reddit. Look on r/tiktok sometime, I have been checking on it anytime Tik Tok has 'drama' and it never disappoints.

I agree that the UX on Tiktok is cleaner and, like you say, in part part that's due to it being only short-form. It's worth noting that "short form" here means up to ~10 minutes long at this point, includes live videos and also includes photo galleries.

But it's more than that.

When I started using Tiktok, Charli D'Amelio was the biggest creator I believe and not once did I ever see one of her videos. I'm just not in that demographic. I've had repeated experiences on Tiktok where I'd see a new creator and see they have like 17M followers and I'd think "how have I never heard of them before?"

The way I describe this is that Tiktok's content is effectively segmented and isn't "global". By "global" I mean if someone is a top creator on IG or FB or Twitter, you'll see them. The platform will push them out to you and Tiktok is just more sophisticated than that.

The second big difference is the responsiveness. It takes other platforms longer to learn. Maybe they've gotten better now but, from what I know, historically other platforms had daily jobs that updated user recommendation preferences based on your activity. So if I started watching a lot of gaming videos, this wouldn't be reflected in my feed until the next day. Tiktok I think was the first to have a truly real-time updating feed.

Now this isn't a straight real-time vs overnight situation. It is/was more hybrid than that. So in FB's case, recommendations were more real-time but updating your preferences wasn't.

Inventory.

Insta was tapping out of how much content (and therefore ads) they could show a user. They could either find new content to show or add more ads per unit of content. There are only so many friends, who only take so many photos. Social media stopped being “social” because it just wasn’t as good of a business as generic media. There are endless influencers and videos is way more engaging. Influencer content is semi-professional content and is way better made and way more engaging than your family who posts only at big events. Meta is very data driven, and they understand exactly how reels is increasing duration of app sessions - which means more ads.

YouTube is close to losing that preservation. It's so slow and clunky to load in the desktop browser that I'm finding myself using it a lot less. It's absurd how heavy it is now.

UX is getting worse too, e.g. the save to list dialog closing after adding to a single list instead of allowing multiple to be selected. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't take forever to open.

A few things I can’t stand about Youtube’s desktop website:

1) Spacebar sometimes skips to the next video when playing a playlist. Just why?

2) You never know if the small buttons like play next on the thumbnails will work or just play that video right away.

2) when on the homepage, you open a few videos in new tabs and close the homepage only to find out that you just open bunch of “this video contains paid promotion” disclaimer pages. Re-open the homepage to actually open the videos and they are all gone, the page shows a grid of different videos.

so yes, I agree that the web interface went downhill.

I am using it less because I can't find any videos as the search is completely broken (no, I won't enable history tracking). Many days when I am in the mood to watch videos, I just give up. It doesn't help now that most searches return AI-generated video (that has millions of views). Who watches these things?

glad it’s not just me. we used to have multi-playlist saves with a modal that showed more than three pixels of your library. now it’s slow, cramped, and forces you to hit SAVE over and over even though the backend supports it. feels like a regression dressed up as bad UX.

Zuck clearly saw some detaillied KPI before signing on the napkin: Acceleration & growth numbers.

It also turns out that $1B is like... pennies to those people now

Reply on news.ycombinator.com