YouTube is a mysterious monopoly
anderegg.ca368 points by geerlingguy 5 days ago
368 points by geerlingguy 5 days ago
I doubt there will ever be an alternative to YouTube. "Disrupting" YouTube is difficult because the social conditions that created YouTube do not exist anymore.
Before you get into cdns, bandwidth, advertisers, and social features, you need to have content - and a steady flow of content. What was unique about YouTube is YouTube did not have to pay for content. People made acceptable quality content and uploaded it to YouTube for free.
Any new competitor eventually runs into the fact that
* Your largest users eventually stop posting if you don't pay them (because they can go elsewhere after using your platform as a springboard: see Vine)
* In order to actually pay creators you need to have the capital, legal, and advertising side completely figured out.
So on top of building a giant cdn, you need gobs of money to pay people to stay on your platform, and another gob of money because you will be sued to death (especially because once you start paying people, people will cheat, and pirate content).
All this means is YouTube has an incredible moat. If YouTube dies, I doubt there will ever be a replacement.
I love YouTube, so many things to learn. But their recent push to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages with their auto-translated bullshit and no way to turn it off makes me use YouTube way less.
It’s a bummer that nobody there seems to realize this. They only see a very dumb metric. Probably something like "did this German dude watch at least one Spanish videos, because we auto-translate titles and voice". It feels disrespectful.
"to just ignore people capable of speaking two or more languages"
I'm terribly annoyed by this, and even more so with their latest push to translate the titles, so now you have to click and listen in on the video in order to know which the original language is.
I speak 3 languages, and I want the title and voice to be in the original language. And I won't bother nor would settle with watching an AI translated video even if it is translated from a language which I do not understand. Then I simply do not want to see that video.
Me too. I hate the auto-translation feature. Both on YouTube and other websites that force it on you, such as the new Reddit (I'll just stop using Reddit when they turn off Old Reddit).
Likewise. Reddit just took the preference for old UI away on mobile for my account (seems to be some sort of testing they are doing maybe?). The new UI is jarring an not useful to me. And "old*" always seems to have a broken failure mode, that some links within reddit default to new.
I strongly advise any 3rd party app (I use Relay for Reddit) and it costs me $3/mo for decently heavy usage. About half of that goes to API fees and half to the developer. I consider that fair given the excellent features and lack of ads
And if paying for reddit is unacceptable, it's easy to get it for free.
Either use one of the still-supported third party apps with an accessibility exemption (RedReader for Android or Dystopia for iOS), or use any of the classic 3rd party apps with your own API keys - which you can get for free, if you mod your own subreddit. Takes 5 minutes to set up.
It isn't a feature, at least not for users. I strongly suspect youtube's autotranslate has more to do with regulatory compliance and content moderation. Rather than having people who speak X/Y/Z languages, they want each every video to be translated into English by default so they can be feed more easily into the the system that vets content. Having translated and non-translated copies floating around is probably seen as a needless complication.
Once a monopoly has been established, the next step is to actively make the product worse in order to either reduce costs or push users towards premium features.
I speak at least 3 languages at a native level. Google's autotranslate 80% of the time selects a language I'm not just unfamiliar with, but can't even read due to the writing system difference (i.e. sudden arabic appears).
Considering I'm using it with an account that is about 20 years old now, that gave Google all of the permissions in the world and has all the possible data one might need to make the conclusions on which language I prefer, it is absolutely absurd that it cannot make a solid guess.
As another multilingual person, I keep getting reminded how bad software "features" can be for us. First, from early computers up to at least the Windows XP era, things sucked due to code pages and all that, but that was understandable, technical limitations after all. Now things suck due to what's supposed to be convenient UX.
Google Chrome broke Ctrl-F functionality for my native language ages ago and it's still broken because the breakage is apparently by design.
The Amazon website for my country appears to mostly auto-translate the English product pages into the local language. Product titles sometimes mean totally ridiculous things because of course the translation is poor.
Nobody cares about the Accept-Language header. Way too many websites like to use GeoIP and switch to the local language. Sometimes the geolocation is wrong, sometimes their location-language mappings are, and even when everything is working "correctly" it's a pain if I'm traveling. I have my browser set up with a correct Accept-Language list, but during travel I definitely see websites switch to a language I can't read.
Then of course there's the huge problem, related to autodetection, that you cannot deduce a user's language from their residence. Countries don't have a surjective mapping onto languages.
Why is ctrl-f broken?
Because it ignores diacritics. Searching for ā will find a, searching for š will highlight s. This may make sense for some languages where diacritics are used sparingly to indicate an aspect of pronunciation, but in my language and many others diacritics are used for entirely different letters. The letter ā is not a. Treating them as equivalent makes as little sense as treating e and o as equivalent would in English.
If I'm trying to find kāzas (wedding) in a page, I will get hits for kazas (goats). If I'm looking for šauš, a letter sequence that words about shooting begin with, I will also get hits in šausmas (horror) or sauss (dry). It's nonsense. Windows 3.1 notepad.exe could find the actual word I entered in a text file (though the input required setup), the dominant browser in 2025 cannot do that and finds entirely unrelated words because an English speaker has decided they're visually similar.
It’s typical Google… “here’s the 80% solution that will never go beyond 90%… NEVER… you got that? Stop asking!”
My favorite is Google street view for my EU account translates streets in any random EU city to Japanese. Because why not?
There is a simple fix to disable auto dubbing.
Go into your Google account settings, under General, then add any languages that you watch YouTube videos in. I did this for Spanish and all my Spanish videos stopped getting dubs and translated titles.
What about video titles themselves? It's very annoying.
Didn't work for me, at least instantly. Maybe it takes a while to process through their services. No idea
Err, from a quick check, this might actually work. Thanks I guess, but how come this isn't an easy option in the YouTube UI?!
Doesn't always work, I irregularly get autodubbing on certain creators, like Mark Robber
This only works if you login to YouTube, something I will never do.
They still track you? Is there much of a difference? Get an account you only use for YT, I can't imagine the difference in data leaking will be that much greater if they track you just by IP/other fingerprinting vs a session?
You would need a Google account and that requires another mobile phone number burned.
You used to be able to make a google account without a phone number through Android TV. Not sure if that still works.