The State of YouTube
YouTube’s issues and challenges for the new CEO
I love YouTube and spend way too much time watching it every day.
However, especially after some recent updates, I have noticed more and more issues slowly creeping up.
With the long-term CEO Susan Wojcicki stepping down and Neal Mohan taking over, I wanted to address some of the issues and challenges of YouTube.
Algorithm
In the last few months, the YouTube algorithm has become more and more insane, especially when it comes to auto-playing the next video. I can deal with some crazy recommendations on the home screen and every once in a while, I might actually want to watch one of them, but the auto-playing videos are a big issue for me.
A lot of content on YouTube is episodic and most episodes are numbered. When I click on episode 42, I expect the next video to be episode 43. In the past, this has always worked, but now the algorithm is all over the place. It randomly plays a completely unrelated video from a different channel or it just skips an episode. When you are sitting at your computer, this is a minor inconvenience, but when you are watching on the couch or in bed, it’s extremely annoying when you have to get up and change the video. I resorted to manually queueing up the videos…
