It’s not about Linus specifically. Many other channels (with actual good content) have been experiencing the same. Creators are assuming it has to do with restricted mode, but I’m not sure it’s convincing, it probably has more to do with algorithmic changes youtube has made.

He generates far too much content without any depth, and it’s all infotainment.

What I’ve noticed is YouTube recommending me more obscure videos, from very small creators.

I very much appreciate whatever they’re doing, regardless of how these bigger channels are being hit by it. Yesterday I got recommended a video by an elderly woman, showing a mug warmer she bought. It was very sweet, had less than 30 views and it was a lovely contrast to the flashy, over edited videos stretching a paragraph to 10+ minutes.

Not saying the big channels are bad, I just personally like the small time channels and appreciate that YouTube has been (at least with the algorithm it has set for me) giving these small channels a shot at getting an audience.
I’ve connected with a lot of people from smaller channels, joined communities etc. yet this is much more difficult with the larger ones (in some I’ve been to, over the years, the chatrooms they set up are so huge the moderation sometimes just gives up or doesn’t even exist in any practical way).

I’m sure declining viewers has nothing to do with the various controversies such as auctioning off prototypes, rushed reviews with misleading or false conclusions, mistreating staff etc. Channels like Gamers Nexus really laid into him.

Those stupid thumbnails pushed me away

Because people wont stay 14 to 16 year olds for long

he’s a shill.

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 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.

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

If you are unhappy because your views went from 2M to 1M the decline is in your mental health

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.

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

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.

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.