Do you guys think Youtube has gone to crap?

[FreedomFighter777]

I'm not sure if this should go in the Debate forum or just here; I would just like a discussion [not a debate].

Does anyone else hold the same opinion about the Youtube gaming category? I mean does anyone else think its bullshit that some channels with little actual value to offer--get popular and make it to the front page of Youtube?

The crap that ends up on the front page is popular, there's no arguing with that but I think most of it is analogous to Spongebob. It can be entertaining, but when the show is over what have you gained? Knowledge about something? A more informed opinion about a given political group or issue? An enriched mind as the result of someone's witty and intelligent commentary?

I'm not jealous of any of it. I would rather make something witty, smart, and worth someone's time instead of this crap. The only time I recall anyone making the front page with Gaming commentaries was about two years ago; and that was Woody'sGamertag.

Another great commentator is thePwnStar4Hire. He called out LevelCap for throwing Pwnstar under the bus when they worked together; then LevelCap crapped all over his own fans and proceeded to become more successful than ThePwnStar. LevelCap's content SUCKS anyhow; he "teaches people how to play Battlefield better" which sounds like a pseudo-oxymoron to me. Most of the crap he uploads is about the stats of a particular weapon or item, and the guy has done ZERO analysis of the actual stat values. He does things scientifically within game; for example setting up a "dummy player" and firing X bullet in to various parts of his hitbox, recording Y of hits til' death.

ThePwnStar4Hire actually said most big Youtubers are total pricks; and I believe him. I have no reason not too. He's been very open about everything.

Devs can't and don't make weapon stats even out; afaik and that makes sense to me too. To balance a game with only integer damage, and health values would be a strange and difficult thing to do imho.

Going back to the pseudo-oxymoron thing; even if you knew the stats they are not going to help your skills in a tense gunfight in any game (unless its a turn based game).

I'm just miffed at the idea that Youtube has gone to crap. Great site, great idea, the money attracted assholes and they ruined it for me.

What do you guys think? Is the most popular stuff on Youtube crap?

[Donut]

This strikes me as a great topic with wasted potential on Modacity.

Youtube's biggest problem is an utter absence of moderation. Youtube comments are a fucking cesspool of spam, insults, hate speech, trolling, and other unsubstantiated bullshit that drown out any legitimate meaningful conversation that could take place. Nobody is held accountable for anything they say or do on Youtube, short of posting copyrighted material. The comment rating system was straight up broken for a long time, and I'm thoroughly convinced the reporting system still is. Yet legitimate comments disappear left and right while hateful, bile-filled shit posts never seem to go anywhere. On top of that, comments are organized by activity, so people who intentially make controversial posts naturally rise to the top of the page from all the negative attention, which attracts even more negative attention. With no consequence to the original poster whatsoever.

Youtube needs some human moderators. Part of becoming a popular Youtube channel should be the ability to appoint a few subscribers as moderators for your channel. Currently the responsibility for keeping comments clean rests solely on the person making the content, and they wouldn't have the time in the day to do that if they cut out sleep entirely. On top of that, thumbs up should mean something, and thumbs down should be publicly shown. Karma on Reddit (or hell, rep on this site) is a great example of people assigning their own extrinsic value to otherwise meaningless points. The second people become accountable for their posts, we'll see a sharp decline in shit-posting. You mention Youtubers acting shitty toward their fans. Every single video I watch on youtube with more than like, 10 comments has some kind of shit post on it. Now multiply that by 300 and deal with it on a daily basis for years on end. Tell me you're not ready to kill some of those pricks.

So either add some moderation, or remove comments entirely. I love me a good youtube shit-storm as much as the next guy, but it's been a non-stop shitstorm since fucking 2006. I've about had my fill.

E: I realize what I said has next to nothing to do with what you said. I'm completely aware of that. I just don't see what we're going to accomplish by bashing LevelCap for doing a style of videos you don't like. Focusing on the comment system (which is almost universally despised) seems like a much more productive thing to do to reduce youtube's shittiness.

[FreedomFighter777]

Yeah, I agree. I would have talked about other topics but I didn't feel like typing that much. As for the LevelCap thing, that was half an example and half a rant :P

[Dwood]

Hmmmm. Well, I'll talk about ff's point. I agree the popular youtubers in general have lost my interest. I used to watch markiplier back in the day, but lately he's churned out a bunch of obnoxious crap. Pewdiepie is a significantly better and more genuine caster.

[Donut]

I feel like losing interest in Youtubers just happens over time. I used to watch every single one of Xfactor's and GameGrumps' videos. Now I watch like, maybe one in every 10. I also just recently started watching TotalBisquit's channel too. Over time I've just found so many channels I enjoy that I can't keep up with them all.

If there's one thing Youtube is doing well, it's keeping relevant stuff on my home page. It can take a while for it to start showing you stuff you actually like, but for the past year and a half or so I find myself losing several hours daily just watching shit Youtube recommends me.

[PopeAK49]

I watch seananners and tfs dragonball z. But that is about it.

[Rentafence]

http://31.media.tumblr.com/8ae554904ba12f042255f04dee7af019/tumblr_muz10w7cFV1rby4vso1_250.gif
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[PopeAK49]

http://www.modacity.net/forums/images/customavatars/avatar1339_19.gif

[t3h m00kz]

http://www.modacity.net/forums/styles/modacity/misc/logo.jpg

[n00b1n8R]

http://www.modacity.net/forums/styles/modacity/reputation/reputation_highpos.png

[Warsaw]

YouTube has gone to crap in my book for one reason:

They embedded video ads into the videos.

Now, I don't see them because I'm a pro and have AdBlock+. However, I would gladly turn off AdBlock if ads were simply banners around the video and not in the video itself. Nothing irritates me more about marketing than embedded video ads. You want me to really not consider your product? Don't shove a video ad at me. Make a banner that will open a video, but don't put it in what I'm trying to watch.

[Bodzilla]

theres alot of shit wrong with youtube in ALOT of ways.

Broken flagging, the guilty till proven innocent part of the DMCA take-downs, view bot manipulations, broken algorithm's so that animators get COMPLETELY FUCKED on any monetary aspect of it... and that doesn't say ANYTHING about the bullshit copy-right shit.

but it's been like this for YEARS, it's not something that just suddenly happened.

Hell remember when you used to be able to see reply's at the bottom of video's and follow conversations and debates back and forth between users?
http://esportsexpress.com/2014/05/twitch-chat-users-may-destroy-youtube-ecosystem/

[Psydefco]

Where has YouTube date joined gone? The option to hide your YouTube
date joined has disappeared and is no longer available under the "about"
link on your YouTube channel home page. Has it been moved to
somewhere else or is it no longer possible to hide the date joined in YouTube?
Anybody know?

[rossmum]

Youtube has been on a steady decline in every aspect. A lot of the worst ways, but the least noticed, are the ones Bodie's mentioned - shit, I remember when YT comments formed coherent, chronologically ordered threads and so it was easy to keep track of a discussion. Now, there are a lot of orphaned replies which link back to posts which no longer exist or which appear before replies to them in turn. The like/dislike rating system has been justified a million and one times, but that doesn't make it good. The fact that most people tend to rate 1 or 5 and seldom anything in between doesn't mean we should further reduce the human experience to whether you "like" or "dislike" something. The actual page layout is shit, and has forever failed to take advantage of wider monitor aspect ratios, which is profoundly retarded with how common 16:9 24"+ monitors are these days (if anything, the internet is getting worse for this as it stumbles over itself trying to cater to mobile users at the expense of anyone on an actual computer).

Really, the two positive changes I can think of since I started using YT in 2006 are HD video support and the ability to put as many videos as you want into your favourites. Everything else has been either pointless fluff or a downgrade in the name of design appeal or "user friendliness" (for retards who can't work a computer).

Of course, one of the most offensive changes has been the introduction of automated content recognition and DMCA flagging. I've had two separate fucking gameplay videos flagged by some random music publishing house. Neither claim was legitimate, and neither bore any resemblance to what they accused me of using. One video was Il-2 gameplay (somehow the constant drone of the plane's engine triggered a content match for some new-agey ambient bullshit track) and another was an ArmA 3 video where it was raining ingame (the content match was for one of those white noise CDs people hawk to help you get to sleep, as if you can't just record rain sounds yourself or go find a fucking video of it somewhere else on YT). It's blatantly broken, and either means the automated recognition is so shit-poor it detects things that are nothing like the content in question, or that the companies involved are deliberately designing it to ensure it makes as many spurious claims as possible in order to allow them to plaster people's videos with adverts that generate income for said companies. I'm pretty sure you all know my views on capitalism by now, and to have this kind of shit happen to me twice inside two weeks was beyond the pale. The worst part is that I don't even monetise my own fucking videos and never will, and so pity help any shitcunt who thinks he can get money off of my work by placing bogus copyright claims.

Now, onto the topic of content itself: YT is mostly shit. I don't mind the odd comedy compilation but there is just so much "LOL EPIC FAILS VOL 400,213" and "BEST GIRL FAIL VINES 2014" that it clogs the shit out of the system and makes it difficult to actually find anything useful. Because of the sheer volume of it and the fact most of it is deliberately tagged with everything under the sun, you don't even need to watch something tangentially related to suddenly have your related videos panel or recommended viewing tab filled with garbage.

This doesn't only apply to generic "fail" compilations or cat videos, either; most things that exist now have an unholy number of "top 10" compilations put together by idiots for idiots. I don't need some sweaty neckbearded CoD shitlord to tell me what he thinks the 10 best tanks in the world are, because he's probably never fucking seen a tank in person and is inevitably going to place the Merkava, Leo 2, and Abrams somewhere in the top 3 unless his country of origin has some bizarro, obscure failed prototype for him to jizz over. It's bad enough when formerly educational channels like Discovery do this shit (protip: any Discovery/History Channel/Military Channel doco made post-1995 is generally garbage, and anything less than 15 years old is blatant fucking propaganda), worse yet when watching an actually informative documentary about something then causes YT to shove the idiotic opinions of several prominent shitlords under my nose.

Gaming is no better for this. In fact, it's probably one of the worst of all. Here is my summary of what you can expect to find about gaming on YT:

- Some autist's dramatic meltdown about some inconsequential bullshit nobody cares about
- Gamers flipping their shit about things that are self-evident to anyone whose knowledge of world history reaches back to 1972 (#gamergate is fucking retarded on every level)
- Top 10 lists, which are somehow even less objective or informative than the ones I already bitched about
- Shitty attempts at cashing in on the popularity of the LP format, usually by someone who sucks at the game they're playing and who has all the charisma of a toad that just got run over by a ride-on mower
- Shitty attempts at reviews which somehow exhibit even less journalistic integrity than the already garbage mainstream gaming journalists
- Shitty AMVs (technically, a tautology; I should've just said AMVs).

Occasionally you come across people who are actually quite decent at what they do. ShackTac members unanimously put out good content. There are good guides and walkthroughs (Chip & Ironicus' Revengeance LP is excellent in both technical skill and presentation). There are comedy videos which are actually amusing (at least until the beating-caused internal bleeding finally kills the horse, like Lowtax's shitty game playthroughs which should have ended long ago when they were still funny). Some people put out content that isn't very good in presentation but is at least not totally obnoxious (I like to think this is what I do, since I don't monetise my shit and don't pander to viewers).

However, the vast bulk of what's on YT and isn't shit to begin with rapidly turns into it. Streamers are especially bad with this. For every one good player who streams and gets a handful of viewers, there are about ten whose viewercounts come from pandering and presentation, not skill. I'm going to use World of Tanks as the example here since it's a game I know, I have an idea how the community works, and I'm fairly decent at it myself. Some of the best players I know have relatively small but dedicated fanbases - Hardest, Anfield, Sela, Dodoma. Hardest probably has the hardest time getting viewers out of that group because he's particularly abrasive, but in each case these are players who know their shit and focus more on actual play than presentation. Meanwhile, one of the biggest names in WoT on YT and Twitch (BohemianEagle/Jingles) is a slightly-better-than-average player who is popular because a) he has a "favourite uncle" sort of personality and voice, and b) he does pander to his fans. He doesn't actually know the game hugely well, something he does thoughtfully admit, but it does little to stem the tide of idiots parroting his (often wrong) opinions and advice across the internet. QuickyBaby is probably one of the most authoritative personalities in WoT, even more than Jingles since he's actually quite decent at the game, but he does loads of stupid stuff and gives bad advice just for his viewers' sake. Trying to counter this shit with actual logic gets you shit on because how dare anyone question QB, even players who are objectively better than him (not myself, in this case).

Of course, there's also the fucking ubiquitous needy "LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, COMMENT!!!!!" nagging as well, but you find that fucking everywhere, because people dream of being able to live solely off of streaming or uploading shit to YT. Very few are capable of doing this and it is never, ever the ones who deserve to (look at how popular that shitbird PewDiePie is, all from being an obnoxious loudmouth who makes loads of unfunny juvenile jokes and pretends to be scared of shit games).

Sorry if I crushed any of your dreams, but that's just the way the world works. Get a real job, save up some money, do your gaming on the side as a hobby and don't expect it to ever do more than provide a little supplementary income.

[n00b1n8R]

Am I the only one who finds my settings for video quality are totally ignored and it always defaults to the highest setting as soion as I open fullscreen?

[rossmum]

Am I the only one who finds my settings for video quality are totally ignored and it always defaults to the highest setting as soion as I open fullscreen?

It does that for me too. It also automatically sets to shit quality if my net is even a little slow, so I have to manually change it and let it buffer, like I was going to in the first place.

YT is dumb, "user friendly" web design is dumb.

[Dwood]

YT is dumb, "user friendly" web design is dumb.

I don't even know if i'd call it 'user friendly', in fact, I'd call it 'all our users are retarded and so are we, so we'll make it even worse'