zlacker

Clickbait is a part of it, sure. But there are also many other content types that I wouldn’t characterize that way: 3+ hour long video podcasts, ambient music channels, niche indie musicians, short entertaining videos like Mr. Beast, etc. YouTube is increasingly a huge tent that includes tons of different kinds of content.

My point was more that YouTube is increasingly designed for a world in which people have their devices everywhere and jump in and out of watching videos.

Netflix isn’t, because it is still using the “old” model of sitting down for 30-200 minutes to watch a movie.

I’m not saying that the film model is bad or somehow worth getting rid of - I love films myself - just that it’s probably not the future of video content for most people.

>>keifer+(OP)
I can see this working for individuals but what about families? And although i dont feel thinking too much about netflixes business it raises the question if this would requre to adapt their model to an ad based model rather than subscription.

Anyhow- i see a gigantic problem coming towards us caused by rapidly decreasing attention capacities and this does not help.

>>HellDu+m3
Not sure what you mean by families, but I would be willing to bet that most families today already let their children watch more YouTube family content than Netflix content.

And I do believe Netflix introduced a cheaper ad tier recently?

>>keifer+G3
Every parent I know forbids Youtube, for obvious reasons. Even the content on the Kids service is utter crap (I know several who tried the service and dropped it.)

>>relaxi+6f
The app has 2.5 million reviews and 131 million downloads, so it is obviously used by a lot of parents.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251942/global-youtube-k...

>>relaxi+6f
(Also a parent) there are two ways to use Youtube. One is to let the child choose what to watch and, I agree, this is a disaster. There's no possible guardrails that would work with their current algorithmic models. The other is to find things they (or I) are interested in, particularly tutorials, and then watch them together and then apply that to real life. It is a fantastic tutorial device and my kids have learned how to do things I wouldn't have known how to do or teach myself. I don't think there is a better substitute for this use case.

>>keifer+(OP)
Unfortunately all content is being optimized for increasingly brief attention spans and availability / focus.

>>keifer+ej
we’ve all seen the people with the kid glued to youtube and clearly self-navigating. just because there are many people doing this doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

>>relaxi+6f
Anecdote is not data. We have data

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1301730/us-time-spent-ch...

>>binary+7l
I didn’t claim it was a good thing, I just said it was popular.

>>binary+0l
Interestingly it’s not all content. Super long videos are doing well too, particularly interviews and video podcasts.

>>keifer+xn
I assume some of this is the same trend of people putting long content on and half watching it in the background.

>>relaxi+6f
Yep, YouTube is banned for our daughter except for pre-vetted videos as the content and ads can’t be trusted. We tried the Kids app but the content was 99% terrible.

I do recommend The Kid Should See This though, a really good selection of curated videos.

https://thekidshouldseethis.com/

>>relaxi+6f
My kids routinely watch YouTube (with me): videos about carpentry, pottery, machining, robotics, electronics, chemistry, microbiology, recreational mathematics, visual effects, history, ...

>>relaxi+6f
It’s really hard to (really truly) ban YouTube and not ban any search engine.

You might find your child spending 2 hours a day on ddg.