“This space is ripe for disruption”. On the contrary I feel like YouTube is extremely well managed. For an application that is this ubiquitous and this well known, it seems to work pretty well. I can’t remember the last time it was in news for something bad.

Sometimes the answer really is: it is well managed product.

Youtube is such a dominant and ubiquitous monopoly that it is almost easy to forget about it as a monopoly because there is so little competition to contrast against and to even remind you that there ought to be. I've wondered for years why it gets so little attention vs so many of the other tech giants that do have more competition.

I don't think "the news" matters here as much as how it works, and it really doesn't work that well if you compare it to how it used to work.

If I open the Youtube app on my phone, I have to click through 3 menus before I can even see the newest video from the users I'm subscribed to, and then I have to watch 2 ads that change the entire layout of the app to present me more information about those ads - or I can pay $30 a month to skip those ads.

If I have spotty connectivity, I also can't buffer a video to watch anymore. I have to wait for some minimal percent to load, watch that part, then wait again. If I skip ahead, the earlier part is lost and has to be re-buffered.

Furthermore, not of immediate consequence to me, but still insufferably annoying is that creators I follow are regularly suspended from earning income on YouTube due to false copyright strikes, or saying a "bad word" that has no clear enforcement guidelines and seems to be different from person to person or day to day, and thus have begun to produce less content or found other platforms to move their videos to first.

It's pretty terrible, from my point of view. It's a bad service where a good service used to be, surviving on the dregs of goodwill and familiarity from its heyday.

Well managed? Not so sure about that.. the fact that UMG can harass content creators unchecked is a problem, and it's not just UMG abusing the copyright strike system.

Also, the amount of highjacked accounts and the length of time to regain control is absurdly long.

And Shorts. I wish I could disable Shorts from my feed.

What is the "product"?

A website? ("platform" for advertising) A website's users? ("you are the product") Paid subscriptions? (insufficient revenue to sustain operations)

If YouTube is a "product" does that mean US products liability laws apply? (Please support your answer with facts not opinions)

History so far has shown website popularity varies over time

https://hosting.com/blog/the-most-visited-websites-every-yea...

Would anyone today claim that, for example, Yahoo.com was "extremely well managed"? Yahoo was #1 for many years. Change is inevitable

It is hilarious to see people obsessed with targeting virtually anything for "disruption" until their favorite website becomes the target

In any organisation there is always room for improvement. Monopoly power reduces, perhaps even eliminates, incentive to improve

I don't know it's constantly kicking youtubers I subscribe to off the site, and removing videos. It would be nice if it were more censorship resistant

I do not have a youtube account. I never sign in. If I go to watch a video and I get confronted with a puzzle to solve then I immediately close my browser and go do something else. This has led to a personal trend of using youtube less frequently.

For some definition of well, that includes forcing shorts on everyone and getting most of the youth addicted to your product.

I agree that it is a mostly well managed product, but I can think of a lot of things when it was in the news for something bad. Most controversial is probably the increase in the amount of Ads, unskippable ads, then there was multiple problems with Youtube kids, e.g. how bad people get really bad videos there. There was an outcry when the dislike button was removed, and so on..

I agree, it's one of the few last places on the Internet where the content is not just rage bait or AI slop. These things are trying to creep in but so far they failed to dominate unlike other places.

My issues with YouTube are usually limited to some UI problems. I think I can even list them all:

1) Thumbnails autoplay but the disclaimer about paid content is so large that often I click to watch the video and get the paid content info page.

2) Translates stuff depending on my browser language and IP. Very annoying

3) The add to queue button sometimes doesn't work and just plays the video right away. Very annoying

4) When I'm listening to songs, sometimes I just let it auto play the next song it picks and often it picks 2 hours long video of songs sticked one after another. Very annoying

5) The share button adds som ID that I have to remove every time, it's probably to track my sharing behavior. Annoying

6) When chromecasting, tapping on a video or receiving it through airdrop used to give me an option to add it to the queue or play it right away. Now just plays right away. Annoying

7) If I navigate from a page and go back I'm presented with a different page and often the video I noticed previously isn't there.

Besides that, I think I don't have much issues with YT. Best money spent on a premium subscription ever.

YouTube comment section can offer more like reddit. Where extended multiple level discussions can happen on the video with user profile and karma and all.

I think if anyone disrupts it, its going to be over money.

Either reducing the number of ads (they really have increased quite a lot) or give a bigger piece of the advert pie to creators.

The problem is that if youtube is ever threatened its trivial for them to do both those things, and they can almost certainly outlast any up and coming competitor in a price war.

> I can’t remember the last time it was in news for something bad

It was a few days ago for the AI auto-filter and also Beato copyright claims.

Oh? I remember countless times it's been in the news (well, our news) for copyright abuse, appeals processes that are either an AI pretending to be human or a human pretending to be AI. The de-facto only way to clear up rampant abuse like mass claiming of videos over use of public domain music, is to have clout in social media.

Then there's the issue of AI slop channels, and pre-AI slop directed at children like the infamous Elsa and Spiderman spam.

Every so often they also are in the news for AB testing some anti-adblock measure. And people used to adblock who see it with ads for the first time in a while seem to always be shocked at the level of ads for pure fraud or malware.

YouTube seems to be a terrible place if you put anything up there that you actually care about. But I agree on one thing: it's not "ripe for disruption". Google sank so much losses into it for so many years just to have this monopoly, so it's not going to be easy to replace.

Sometimes the answer really is: it is a monopoly and it doesn't matter what they do.

They have all the eyeballs. All creators that got fucked over YT stay on the platform if their accounts are restored. And who can blame them, where are they going to go, Vimeo?