I was under impression that this was the reason all follow-ups/recommendations are just irrelevant rubbish.
But the sound of it, it is just a feature of modern YouTube.
Also side note: 3-4 years ago watching hardware reviews was fine on YT. Today it is a pulp of sponsored/biased reviews (disclosed or not). I give youtube 0 trust, on par with Amazon reviews.
Most of trusted creators already moved or double publish to Nebula.
I think Google needs to look into optimizing it better for those of us who prefer watching YouTube on TV.
https://www.thewrap.com/youtube-more-people-watch-tv-vs-mobi...
One of the things that flabbergasts me about YouTube and TikTok is the utter bilge that people will watch. TV had some of this: trash daytime TV, late night infomercials, soaps to some extent. But the stuff social media runs on today is a whole other level.
If you went back in time and told me that millions would spend endless hours watching other people play video games while monologuing about nothing and randomly doing the same juvenile reactions over and over, I would not have believed you. Same goes for obvious zero effort AI slop, machine voices reading Reddit posts to a slide show background, incoherent rambling, or for kids videos of people unboxing toys for eight hours… it’s just astounding.
There seem to be these “hooks” that if mastered can take the place of plot, aesthetics, information, and everything else, and mesmerize people.
Sometimes it seems like the banality and bizarre nonsensical nature of it is the hook, like people just want to stare at nothing.
I watch videos of people playing through games and talking about or alongside it. There are two main reasons, both of which I (obviously) think are valid.
1. I enjoy gaming and use these videos as background noise when I’m doing things for work that don’t have a high cognitive load. If I’m going to have something on TV or streaming, I’d prefer it be associated with one of my interests.
2. For games with some sort of planning or problem solving element, I watch videos of people who are better at them than me so that I can learn different ways to do things. A classic example is Factorio, which has a thousand ways to organize a production line. It’s useful to see different people do this in different ways and optimize for different things, and yes - talk through it while they do. That translates into me being more informed and coming up with better ideas myself, which means more fun playing the game.
It’s very much fine for this to not be for everyone and all, but that doesn’t always make it trash/bilge.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ytmysubs/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lfoephndcoilebphhdb...
On my computer I have an ad blocker which makes it more tolerable but then there’s the added friction of “ugh I have to go start the computer and sit down yadda yadda”.
I could pay for a mobile ad blocker so I could watch crap on my phone. But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life.
The uBlock Origin browser extension removes all YouTube ads. It works fine on Firefox, even on mobile. With Chrome, it is possible to use the "lite" version of this extension that seems to block at least the YouTube ads without issue.
On Android, there are several apps which can do it, for example NewPipe or Grayjay. At least NewPipe works fine on Android TVs as well. Also on Android TVs, it is possible to use Kodi with YouTube and InputStream Adaptive add-ons which can also be used to watch YouTube without ads.
I would avoid buying devices which claim to support YouTube but do not allow watching it without ads, for whatever reason.
For my Kodi box that is connected to a 24" monitor in my bedroom, the Youtube plugin used to work, but it got slower and slower. I've now created a PHP wrapper to yt-dlp, I load the webpage (hosted on my NAS) on my phone, paste the video URL, click download, and a while later the video is an MP4 video stored on my NAS, ready to view on Kodi.
EDIT: also skips sponsor segments.
There are few great creators without them, but these ranks are shrinking fast.
Youtube Music (Premium too) -> RiMusic
13.99 -> free
OP addressed this already: "But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life."
Watch too much Daily Wire? Good luck with your Google interview.
Want to enter the US on a visa? Perhaps they'll demand your YouTube history next.
Every video is just this now:
Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot
This helps protect our community. Learn moreOr you could just do the healthy thing and walk away from YouTube. Plenty of better things to do with one’s time!
The trick with youtube (if you are not paying, like me):
- Use Firefox and a decent ad blocker to skip the ads. I never see any. It think Google just gave up on doing anything about that and just focuses on making life miserable for Chrome users only. Whatever it is, if ads are the reason you are no longer watching Youtube, Firefox is the fix.
- Ignore recommendations and the glorified more of the same shit algorithm that produces them. It's just not very good. And you can't really potty train it to better. The controls are there but they don't do anything useful or productive. I just bookmarked the /subscriptions page and only bother with the front page if I'm really bored.
- Ignore shorts. They are easily recognized because they are portrait mode instead of landscape mode. So, just don't click them. I find them disappointing and bland. And stupid. I have no patience for that.
I can't use YouTube without a handful of extensions. I use waterfox.
Ublock origin. Enhancer for Youtube. Sponsorblock. DeArrow. Privacy Badger.
Enhancer does the heavy lifting while DeArrow unshittifies all the titles/thumbnails. Ublock gets most the ads. Privacy Badger increases load time significantly. Sponsorblock skips those sponsor ads.
I support creators directly through patron or merch. I don't wanna see their ads and there isn't really a way to avoid them in most cases.
Something like this? https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
Fun fact: disabling watch history also disables Shorts.
Every once in a while I click on one because it's not just a small tidbit from a longer video, and every time I get annoyed the feature exists and don't want to see another one for a long time.
I may be unusual but there's an entire subreddit for "mealtime videos" so this use case must be common.
I have YouTube watch history disabled and when I search for something I usually get a few "lines" of search results filled with "Shorts".
But reading through replies here, it looks like people are disabling features like history. Not sure why one would do that, I want to be able to quickly find something I passed by 3 months ago but can't remember the name of.
If I had to go through my browser history to dig up a YT video I'd probably be at a loss, there aren't thumbnails there.
Now its a real joy checking my channel feeds on the weekend and queueing things up to watch later. I have excellent stuff to chew through when I feel like it - in the gym, cooking, cleaning etc. I really look forward to doing these things now.
Switching profiles takes a few clicks but the upside has been totally worth it. It's a shame they don't make this workflow more obvious (You have to go to Account -> Switch accounts -> View all channels -> Create a channel) to set this up.
I wish more social media allowed you to bucket your feed into "interests". Maximizing clicks/views doesn't have to come at the cost of scattered attention.
Maybe this doesn't correlate to a satisfying user experience though. For me, the biggest drop in quality was when they stopped showing the dislike counts. I know there's a Chrome plugin that works as a substitute, not sure if it's good.
Another funny thing for premium subscribers is when their ultra low bitrate 1080p videos have an enchanted bitrate option available to subscribers, you have to enable it manually every time instead of being a convenient feature.
My thinking is that in their pursuance of optimization lead them to overserve locally cached videos as priority to save on bandwidth, it's like internet providers are demanding more of them and google's projections for growth show a total collapse of the platform in some not-too-distaint future.
It feels like a weird combination of caching, some key expiring, and how YouTube doesn't finish loading the video until you view the tab.
However. Now my YT hmepage includes shorts with females, some of them with big boobs. I never clicked on any of these. But they figured that since I'm a programmer and play bass, I must be into big boobs because well, a stereotype male, so the soulless machine is pushing all this empty BS that millions of people clicked on before. But not me. An I don't have the option to say "don't show this stuff to me".
(These are not erotic per se, but let's say a female guitar player without a bra in the tumbnail, or a bass player with her boobs in the foreground... I understand why people do these, but I really don't want these on my YT hp. it's lowest quality clickbait stuff.)
YouTube is the only place where timeline could be turned off when search history is off and guess what happened I am no longer addicted to YouTube.
Just imagine there is a way for users to opt out of algorithmic feeds in the other social media. Would Instagram still remain addictive? Would Facebook still remain addictive? I think this must be one day of the universal fundamental rights of a human in digital space. They are using our data to do all the crappy things they are doing. Imagine the problems this one small feature could resolve in this world. Remember we are here to improve ourselves spiritually. Using social media and it's algorithmic feeds we are most likely to transcend the baddest quality we have or are born with. So this is an important revolution to happen
I certainly hope it was intentional, because the level of corporate dysfunction necessary to produce an unintentional decline in quality of this magnitude would be something to behold...
Other than hiding that one video I am absolutely convinced that this button does nothing at all. It says "we'll tweak your preferences" but I don't think it does.
Although it was not without a twist. Originally, I blocked asmongold and his shorts channel - so far so good. But then he made a second shorts channel. Okay, blocked that too. But then unrelated third parties made another "fan" shorts channel, so I had to block that too. I'm not sure how many further iterations there will be, but most of the time and for the most part, I did manage to get rid of him from my feeds, so that's something.
I get a lot of content I want and interested in, but I also have a long list of subscriptions. Sometimes I run into a rabbit hole, where I watch some completely different content and youtube then shows that for me for a while, even after I'm not interested anymore. But that is just for some days and then it stops showing it on my home feed.
So for me it does exactly what I want it to do.
Now I wonder, why is there such a massive difference in the experience?
I do not have the paid subscription though, but I do use only android (never web).
But lately? It’s like the algorithm gave up. Same thumbnails haunting me. I used to feel like YouTube knew me. Now we are stranger's.
Makes me wonder, either the algorithm broke, or we’re part of a marketing experiment.
Now, I strongly feel it's based on a wrongly inferred social graph. It recommends videos according to what's happen in the group. It's really unsettling.
I wish there were a setting to disable this "feature." and to stick on my history.
You search for something you 100% know exists to show someone and it just gives up after a couple videos and starts showing recommendations.
Just the other day I was out at my parents house and I wanted to show them this channel my young daughter likes, a young woman who is herself learning to play banjo.
When we're home, to find her videos for my daughter I simply enter the girls name and "banjo" and her channel comes up. At my parents house however this just returned famous banjo players and completely ignored the name I had entered.
I was frustrated, shocked, and baffled as I scrolled through results where YouTube entirely buried this tiny creator behind giant creators, even when searched for explicitly by name. I then entered the exact same query into Google on my parent's computer and she was the top result.
My advice these days would be to just avoid YouTube search entirely and head straight to Google, as that still kind of works.
With YouTube, Google has full control of the platform and its data, there is no excuse for why the search is so useless.
I bet there is some product owner in Google that did some A/B test and took as “proof” that adding random recommendation in the search results increases engagement, and then got a promotion and a raise because of that.
What really got me using YouTube less was using uBlock to zap the shorts feeds. That alone improved my experience by orders of magnitude, along with disabling (not deleting, unfortunately) YouTube on my phone.
I have to lower the scale to see more videos in the homescreen and even then, they reverted that change; so now I'm stuck with 3 videos instead of the 8 that used to appear. Add that to the refresh problem, and youtube feels unresponsive.
I think they just couldn’t get personalisation in line with other goals and just gave up at some point because to them it’s just a long tail with their volume.
When I choose to watch, it's stuff I truly enjoy, not algorithmic sludge.
Even though Google has I imagine 10+ ways to determine you're not a bot, they choose to require a login. I'm mostly de-Googled, so I rarely sign in and have no incentive to do so.
Anyway, it's the reason why I pay extra for music streaming despite having Youtube Music for free together with my Subscription. YouTube for some reason thinks that I want to keep listening the same stuff over and over again.
It's also why I love TikTok. Most of my find on TikTok happen to have a YouTube channel too but for some reason YouTube never bothered to show me any of those. It was for TikTok to let me try something new and drill down from there.
I still like YouTube a lot, it has some very high quality content that shines brightly among the slop that the wider internet has become but YouTube really needs to up its content discovery game.
What alternatives are there?