Youtube says CYA to CEO.

[rcmaehl]

Summary

Susan Wojcicki, CEO of youtube, has decided to step down, but will remain on as an advisor.

 

Quotes

Quote

Susan Wojcicki, YouTube’s CEO... said on Thursday that she was stepping down from her longtime role. Ms. Wojcicki’s departure signifies an end to the early, pioneering days of YouTube and its parent company, Google. “Today, after nearly 25 years here, I’ve decided to step back from my role as the head of YouTube and start a new chapter focused on my family, health and personal projects I’m passionate about,” Ms. Wojcicki wrote in a letter to employees, which was published on YouTube’s official blog. “Susan has a unique place in Google history and has made the most incredible contribution to products used by people everywhere,” Mr. Page and Mr. Brin said in a joint statement. “We’re so grateful for all she’s done over the last 25 years.” Andrea Faville, a YouTube spokeswoman, declined to comment on Ms. Wojcicki’s health. But in recent months, Ms. Wojcicki appeared to cut down on public appearances, such as missing a “Made on YouTube” event in September. Ms. Wojcicki will remain as an adviser at Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Mr. Mohan inherits YouTube during a period of challenges. The company is contending with a slowdown in digital advertising that has halted its growth, and it faces increasing competition from TikTok, a Chinese-owned short video service.

 

My thoughts

I wonder if this event will mark the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one. With so much about to change from Section 230, to AI, to challengers such as TikTok it's hard to not say it might. I wonder how YouTubers themselves, such as Linus and crew feel about this.

 

Sources

NY Times (Quote source)

Youtube Blog

[da na]

As a creator, I won't mind change. Change meaning, undoing many of the recent changes made to the site. Abstract policies, copyright system, dislikes, ability to sort by oldest, etc...

[Lurick]

56 minutes ago, Mel0n. said:

As a creator, I won't mind change. Change meaning, undoing many of the recent changes made to the site. Abstract policies, copyright system, dislikes, ability to sort by oldest, etc...

So, YouTube has heard your issues and complaints, we'll now announce our intent to announce an announcement for change

[AlTech]

Eli [the computer guy] is going to be so happy!

 

He's going to be able to rawr without as much fear as before.

[Erioch]

Youtube says Cover Your Ass to CEO?  I don't get it.

[Taf the Ghost]

Wojcicki was functionally unfirable. What we can probably expect, however, is a chain of short-term CEOs because the fiefdoms will be at war for control within the company. In 3-4 years and after probably 3 more CEOs, they might finally setting into a new norm. Probably about the time they might get forcibly split by anti-trust. haha

 

While Wojcicki goes down as possibly the "worst" Executive in history by total paid losses (not stock value lost), I don't actually think she was terrible. It was just beyond her to keep the entire structure operating. It's weird to say, but her completely safe position probably meant YT was more creator friendly than it probably would have stayed.

 

Reality is that it's going to get worse. Probably a lot worse. Especially if policy gets extremely at odds in different sections.

[suicidalfranco]

Looking at how crap twitter went to craptastic when Dorsey got replaced by Agrawal... It can only get worst for YouTube. Lost all faith in any company based in the US. If they are crap now they can only manage to become crappier with a head change

[LAwLz]

It will be interesting to see how people react to this.

I've seen so many conspiracy theories regarding Susan that it's absurd. It's as if people think Youtube operates like a small mom-and-pop shop where the CEO can do whatever they want and micromanages their (the viewer's) favorit creator(s).

 

 

 

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Eli [the computer guy] is going to be so happy!

 

He's going to be able to rawr without as much fear as before.

Eli the computer guy is one of the worst IT channels on Youtube.

Way too much opinions instead of facts.

Very drawn out videos for no reason, just him repeating himself over and over.

Have gotten a ton of predictions utterly wrong.

He doesn't understand a lot of the things he is talking about, but he is very cocky and say things in a very authoritative manner so people believe him.

And the reason why he has gotten strikes on his Youtube channel is because he have posted a bunch of videos where he calls the holocaust fake among other things.

 

I honestly think Youtube is a better platform without him on it. Because at least now he can't spread a bunch of misinformation or trick people into thinking his very misguided and strange opinions are facts.

[AlTech]

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

It will be interesting to see how people react to this.

I've seen so many conspiracy theories regarding Susan that it's absurd. It's as if people think Youtube operates like a small mom-and-pop shop where the CEO can do whatever they want and micromanages their (the viewer's) favorit creator(s).

 

 

 

Eli the computer guy is one of the worst IT channels on Youtube.

Way too much opinions instead of facts.

IT can be about opinions though. Doesn't have to be entirely fact based.

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Very drawn out videos for no reason, just him repeating himself over and over.

Sure, but so do a lot of opinion videos people do.

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Have gotten a ton of predictions utterly wrong.

He doesn't understand a lot of the things he is talking about, but he is very cocky and say things in a very authoritative manner so people believe him.

I respectfully disagree.

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

And the reason why he has gotten strikes on his Youtube channel is because he have posted a bunch of videos where he calls the holocaust fake among other things.

That's literally not true.

 

He got strikes cos 1) the YT algorithm thought he was talking about how some people were using certain words to hide their holocaust denial on YouTube, 2) he also got a strike for saying something that was true about the UK medical system that YT didn't like 3) he also got a strike talking about other medical stuff, he didn't say anything incorrect or misleading but YT didn't like it.

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I honestly think Youtube is a better platform without him on it. Because at least now he can't spread a bunch of misinformation or trick people into thinking his very misguided and strange opinions are facts.

He's still on YouTube, he's still not spreading misinformarion, and still not tricking people into believing his opinions are facts.

[Spotty]

I think my biggest concern would be that the replacement may come in with the objective of quickly increasing profitability of Youtube and making some pretty drastic changes to achieve it. Locking additional features behind Youtube Premium (such as watching videos in 4k), increasing Premium subscription cost, cutting creator ad revenue split, limiting the videos non-Partners can upload (limit on resolution, individual video size limits or total storage limits), increasing the amount of ads displayed and/or making ads unskippable (remember their recent 10 unskippable ad spots trial)...

[LobbyZ]

I've noticed an increasing trend of people asking Elon to buy Youtube not realizing its owned by Google who's worth a lot more than Elon.

 

I just hope they won't go the way of Twitch with bizarre decisions and put effort into supporting creators

[Kisai]

4 minutes ago, Spotty said:

I think my biggest concern would be that the replacement may come in with the objective of quickly increasing profitability of Youtube and making some pretty drastic changes to achieve it. Locking additional features behind Youtube Premium (such as watching videos in 4k), increasing Premium subscription cost, cutting creator ad revenue split, limiting the videos non-Partners can upload (limit on resolution, individual video size limits or total storage limits), increasing the amount of ads displayed and/or making ads unskippable (remember their recent 10 unskippable ad spots trial)...

My favorite, the people who inflate their video popularity by pushing them as an ad. I don't want to watch your 2 hour video as an ad. Imagine if they made ads unskippable and you got nothing but this stuff.

 

I think what will likely happen is that people who don't understand youtube, it's creators, or its' audience will end up in the CEO's seat (I think the twitter situation is just an outlier, compared to the facebook one.)  The twitter situations shows you everything wrong with putting someone in the CEO's chair that has no interest the site, echo's of when News Corp purchased Myspace and promptly sunk it. Facebook dived head first into something that it's userbase is not interested in using, bet the company on it and thus it's sinking.

 

What I want youtube to do:

- Strike a balance in the copyright, censorship and report/abuse handling

a) Put all these claims in the same page, don't hide the claims under mouse-overs, put a name to a claim, or at least an anoymous token so that people can tell if it's the same people/corpos/government/trolls reporting the content and allowing "blocking" content to some countries that have broken copyright/censorship laws.  (eg there's one rights owner in latin america that claims absolutely-everything as theirs.)

b) Allow users to push back on reports for manual review if the AI has over-reached.

c) Use community weighting to determine if certain kinds of reports are malicious. Like if one user posts mostly news, then it should be suspect if suddenly they're getting copyright claims from someone they mentioned.

 

- Change comment/like handling to require having watched the video

 

- Change comment/like handling to use an internal karma metric (eg this user dislikes everything, this user has their comments deleted, this user's videos routinely result in 'incitation of violence' reports) to shadowban users that negatively impact the site.

 

- lower the "partner threshold", as it stands, it's an insurmountable barrier unless you're bringing an audience from another platform, or you are just lucky.

 

What I don't want you tube to do:

- Charge money for verification

- Charge money for video storage

- Charge money for access to 4K, 8K video

- Charge money to stream

- Charge money to upload per file

- Charge money per GB uploaded

 

Like Twitch should have been the competitor to Youtube, but Twitch decided it would rather not, and thus there are no VOD's on twitch, and thus discovery is absolutely destroyed by making content disappear. Youtube on the other hand, discovery is terrible unless you have an existing audience from another platform. What's the difference between streaming to nobody on Twitch and streaming to nobody on Youtube? You have to stream to a lot more nobodies on youtube just to make it worth streaming on youtube.

 

[Kamina]

Didn't like her as a CEO but she definitely tried her best to make herself present to inform us on the changes. 

[Doobeedoo]

Hopefully AI will be a new CEO though.

[darknessblade]

The only thing I want to know is: Will the new CEO rollback the changes to the dislike button

[Lurick]

9 minutes ago, darknessblade said:

The only thing I want to know is: Will the new CEO rollback the changes to the dislike button

The new CEO, if I read correctly, is the one who proposed the change to begin with so no.

[darknessblade]

8 hours ago, Lurick said:

The new CEO, if I read correctly, is the one who proposed the change to begin with so no.

Seems like Youtube is gonna get some massive outrage, if the new CEO brings in even worse changes.

 

Especially if they Double down on what advertisers demand, [Making the already shitty community guidelines even worse].