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Thoughts on Youtube Backstage
Youtube backstage is a consequence of Youtube comments not playing nicely within Google+. Google+ is a pleasant social network where people who want to have conversations and share pictures can meet and broaden their horizons. It is a place where you can write comments that are as long or as short as you want. Misunderstandings, as a result are less common.
The idea of youtube backstage is to expand youtube channels so that content creators can share images, polls and more. In so doing Youtube would provide people with a one stop shop. The need for twitter, instagram and facebook would be reduced.
Some youtube content creators have from two hundred thousand to ten million followers. With such a big audience youtube pages would become self contained communities. If you’re watching No Man Sky videos rather than commenting on episode videos you will comment on the game. Would this encourage people to move away from Reddit?
One of the most interesting benefits of youtube implementing text, images and polls is that it would create an environment in which for advertisers to be seen without distracting people from the content. When you watch youtube videos you see pre-roll videos and banners. When videos are longer an advert is shown after a certain number of minutes. With text, images and polls adverts could be shown for longer. As channels are themed adverts will be relevant to the channel rather than a person’s browsing history.
I spent a few weeks watching content created by youtubers. In that time I have watched “series” and “episodes”. If youtube finds a way to monetise the niches that content creators have built up over time then Google and Youtube will benefit. People will go from passive viewing and occasional commenting to active conversations. Conversations make social networks sticky. A sticky social network provides value for advertisers. Advertisers provide funding to content creators and this provides content creators with a higher income, providing them with the incentive to do more of the same.
My love/hate relationship with twitter turns Ten
I have been active on the World Wide Web for two decades, two thirds of my life. Half of that time has been spent as a twitter  user. I was among the first to use the service and I saw it go from being a curiousity to being the most popular conversation tool around. When twitter was young the iPhone was in it’s infancy and data plans did not exist. As a result it was SMS based. The SMS idea was short lived as it ended up costing the twitter founders too much.
Twitter owes an immense debt of gratitude to Apple, the iPhone and the shift towards mobile data plans somewhere other than Finland. When we were Twitter infants, when we were discovering the network and thinking of how to use it we were stuck at a computer and dependent on wifi and power sockets. If we left the house we missed on the conversation. Twitter at the time was a compelling network, especially since I was lucky enough to live in London during the golden age of Twitter.
Twitter is a fantastic and compelling social network that has the wrong people affecting its feature. Marketers, public relations professionals, investors and other groups are too busy trying to push content to people rather than attract people.
Yesterday afternoon I came across the term “Organic Social media” in relation to Instagram’s shift from a reverse chronological timeline to an algorithm driven timeline. A shift in the definition of social media has taken place. A decade ago social media implied that people were sharing content and commenting on it. They were making statements and friends and colleagues would comment conversationally. Marketers et al have destroyed the conversation and shifted everything towards an “I am the best so look at me” fed by likes, comments, shares and other tricks.
As Twitter turns ten years old I grow curious about the future of friendships and online conversations. I question whether social media landscapes will become as unfriendly to introverts as bars in the physical world. Will social media become the place where the most conventionally appealing individuals thrive?
Le Sentier des Toblerones
Le Sentier des Toblerones
from Mainvision on Vimeo.
Hidden among the trees in the Canton de Vaud you can find concrete blocks put there as a defensive line to slow down invading armies. The concrete blocks have a similar shape to chocolate Toblerones. There is a hiking trail that you can follow from Bassin down to the lake side. Along the way you can find concrete bunkers camouflaged as houses.
YouTube And Sensationalism
I love the medium of video and I have love having a choice of thousands, or even millions of videos to choose from. In effect my love of the medium of video should mean that I love YouTube. I don’t, because of sensationalism and clickbait.
I have paid for YouTube prime twice now, to cut out all the adverts, and I love that. In theory plugins do the same thing, for free, and I did use plugins for years before finally deciding to spend money on YouTube Prime.
The thing that paying for YouTube Prime can’t remove is the sensationalist headlines and clickbait titles. It also doesn’t remove the content creators with a million viewers saying “please like and subscribe” ten seconds into a video. It doesn’t cut out of them saying “with my half a million viewers” and other grating phrases.
The second thing I don’t like is having videos with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views recommended. I want to find the smaller content creators that are sharing video for pleasure, rather than as a job. I want to use YouTube on a human rather than a broadcast scale. If I want to be an anonymous statistic I can watch mainstream media content.
By showing content with hundreds of thousands or even millions of views it feels like an enormous amount of content is being ignored and silenced. We are seeing what the algorithms think everyone wants to see, rather than what individuals want to see.
A content creator camps in interesting places with a diversity of equipment. It’s interesting until you notice that the content has a million or more views, for what would be considered junk, or a waste of time in other scenarios.
It feels like a positive feedback loop. Popular content gets promoted so people watch it, and because people watch it it gets promoted even more. When I refresh YouTube today I get 6 videos, where I used to see 20 videos. The most popular content is forced upon us, making it even more popular. It feels like we’re being compelled to watch certain content, rather than free to choose.
And Finally
I come from a time when we browsed the web. We had 20-30 articles and bits of news on a single page and we chose which content we wanted to view. Today browsing has been replaced by algorithm driven recommendations, so we are forced to see sensationalist, populist content, rather than something that is unique and interesting. We need to revert to browsing again. I don’t want recommendations. I want choice. I want to feel that I am not being forced to see content that an algorithm chose for me. I get fatigue, with YouTube today.