Maybe at some point we can all stop watching and hence supporting YouTube, that’d be nice.

I stopped watching LTT years ago. His channel is crap. He’s a tech personality who seems to barely understand technology, so most of his videos are just over the top bullshit and stunts. Not to mention his awful annoying vocal fry. He’s like the male Fran Drescher.

Plus, Linus has been a complete asshole to GamersNexus, one of the best channels for investigative journalism in tech. As far as I’m concerned, Linus is your typical business entity, and lacking ethics.

Everyone here is speculating about their content, but the simple answer is YouTube just changed how they count the view number. The change basically happened overnight, so it’s not some slow attrition of views. They said in the WAN Show that while the view count halved, the number of likes hasn’t changed (the view/like ratio doubled), and the revenue they earned hasn’t changed (CPM doubled). All of this points that the same number of humans are watching, but what counts as a view in the “views” number just changed.

I think the biggest channels I watch have under 4 million subscribers, and most of my channels have less than a million. I’ve never watched the big channels, so I don’t really care.

A while back, YT asked me about turning on my watch history, but I didn’t know it was off. I don’t know what that was about–I think they changed something–but my knee-jerk reaction is to NOT do what they want me to do, so I left it off. Now I just watch whatever is new from my subscriptions, and don’t have any suggestions cluttering my front page, which is a much better way to use YT, imo. So, thanks, YT.

I stopped watching LTT videos when they just became long-form ads. Or when everyone five minutes was a sponsored segment.

Probably doesn’t help that a bunch of the decent channels were bought by private equity and are now churning out boring, safe and uninteresting content.

https://youtu.be/hJ-rRXWhElI (a yt link, lol).

A brief summary from https://www.dailydot.com/news/youtube-channel-private-equity/

Some channels like Donut Media, Veritasium, and Task and Purpose have been acquired publicly. Others, such as Dude Perfect and Coco Melon, have been acquired more privately, with no public disclosure.

Plenty others. A key giveaway is when a channel diverges their risk. When the front man who is the reason you have watched the channel suddenly has co-hosts and large segments from other channels in their regular content.

Anyone here youtube creators? Are you seeing the same thing, a general downturn in viewership?

I have a channel with over 20k subs, nearly all evergreen content. Haven’t uploaded a video in many years, so it’s slowly getting fewer views. Fun fact, the pandemic saw the highest view counts, and I also didn’t add content back then.

Every enhancement YouTube brings is specifically to improve monetization, and since I disable ads on my channel and don’t have any sponsored content, I’m not getting any benefits. I also refuse to do shorts, so I’m losing a ton of exposure there, too.

If an active channel isn’t doing well, they should call it quits, TBH. They’ll either have to compromise the quality of their content “for the algorithm”, or their content isn’t actually useful outside of a single view.

This might be another example of over reliance on AI to judge what’s good or not to show users: https://news.clownfishtv.com/p/reddit-asks-did-youtube-break-itself

isnt well know he had incident with a former employer over something like last year? the sub/fans are all just shilling/meming for him. isnt his shtick all just reaction videos on various tech items.

People are jumping the gun on Linus here, but it’s real, the Second Wind crew do a great job and their recent videos, even the Fully Ramblomatic series are doing way worse.

Google is making users/consumers not want to use/consume google things by making those things more difficult, more invasive, less user friendly to use/consume.

That’s it. That’s all.

If I just want to watch a clip that I could before but now I have to sign in because it thinks I’m a not, NO

If it wants me to watch ads for things I’ll never buy and actually forces me to, NO.

If it kills the front ends I prefer to use, or kills the ability to watch via proxy, for my privacy and/or security. NO.

If it feeds me Nazi shit without clicking a single link on a new install on a new browser with no profile on a new IP, fucking NO.

Maybe if he did videos that were interesting again…not like my wife hates our tech at home videos or whatever

Reasons I see:

a) the generation that grew up watching LTT is now at age where they don’t watch as much YT as they did before b) increasing amount of things happen which put viewers off c) consumer technology peaked and is now “boring” d) new generations don’t have as much interest in technology altogether

Let’s explain:

a + c) people watching LTT years ago were living in an exiting tech era where it boomed and you had mayor leaps in tech basically on a yearly basis. Moving from floppy disks to CD’s to USB sticks. CRT to LCD displays. 16-bit to 32-bit color. Solitare and Minesweeper to Call of Duty 4 and Need for Speed. Symbian and Blackberry to Android and iOS. Tons of manufacturers, tons of competition, tons of new and exctiting stuff.

Let’s observe the state today: iPhone looks the same for the past half decade. Android is basically just Google and Samsung. Storage is now all in cloud. New games are recycled and upscaled old games. Every new generation of hardware is same thing just 10% better/faster. New OS releases are just refinements without new features. Most changes are done just for the sake of change. Existing hardware can basically be enough for 5+ years. What is LTT realistically supposed to talk about that is interesting? There is simply no more interesting tech.

This ties in into d) - tech peaked, new generations “just use it as it is”, there is no need to tinker with it, prebuilt PC’s are more than fine for years to come. Since AI the IT job landscape seems to be in decline, both in demand and in pay. People do other stuff now that is more lucrative.

LTT is dependent on stuff happening so that they can make videos about it. But, stuff kinda just isn’t happening. Or the stuff that happens is just not noteworthy news anymore.

Yeah, because Linus is kinda shit more and more. Hes wholly turned me off from his content over the years because of how he acts, what he says, etc. And you can ‘trust me bro’ on that.

I really like and appreciate people like Steve. I like what he’s doing and how he’s doing things. He hasn’t become a greedy corpo and hes just a very intelligent and caring person who believes in standing up for what’s right; Even if that means calling out a friend in the industry.

I feel like Linus is out of touch with reality. He’s not at all down to earth anymore.

I completely stopped watching him after the GPU fiasco. I always thought he might be super slimy, but I think I can reasonably say that he is.