I still don't understand the appeal of YouTube shorts... It feels like the rational behind it is "hey, I can watch 10 meaningless shorts in the same amount of time it would take to watch one video that has an actual point". I guess that's why I've never gotten in to tiktok either lol
Would it make more sense if they were labelled "YouTube Dopamine Hits" ?
Would that make a list of shorts a line? Can I snort them?
There isnt any appeal. It is just them trying to carve into that tiktok market, but the people watching tiktok are already just watching tiktok, so it is basically just there to annoy the rest of us.
i hate it because I can't move through the timeline
Tiktok just doesn't seem worth it to me. Why would I spend days scrolling past cringey dance videos until the algorithm figures me out, when I can just see all the best Tiktoks reposted on Lemmy and Reddit?
It's funny because everyone shits on tiktok for it's short videos yet I regularly watch videos that are 3-5 minutes long if not longer.
Your feed shows you what you interact with. Outside of ads I rarely see content that's not related to my interests and most of the videos I see are much longer than a vine.
Which is especially ironic to me how vines weren't considered attention span killing brain rot that everyone sees tiktok to be.
Vines were never culturally ubiquitous enough for old people to know what they were and rant about it.
Unless I'm looking up something very specific I generally don't bother with videos that are less than 15 minutes long anymore. Otherwise I feel like I'm spending more time looking for more videos than actually watching them...
Your algorithm still suggests videos that have a point?
Mine is mostly educational content.
The appeal is to the creators, resulting from the differences in unit economics for monetisation structures related to youtube shorts, tiktok, reels, snapchat etc., vs. conventional youtube, facebook or instagram videos.
And also there's appeal to Youtube as a platform, being a place logically suited to this new paradigm of shorter vertical videos where discovery is mostly algorithmically driven but having some issues with the organisational structure of their content that make it uncompetitive with platforms which popularised the format.
It's not appealing to Youtube users because a choice to use Youtube has historically always included a deference to the conventional youtube video format. People that prefer tiktok format would organically become tiktok users not because tiktok is a better platform than Shorts for it, but because youtube already existed and established its own format, so it's not the logical place to go for something that isn't that.
I get the appeal, I just hate that I can’t cast them to my TV normally. I can watch shorts on the TV, but I have to disconnect the devices (phones). I can watch it on my phone, but I have to disconnect from the TV, ending the queue. BUT I can watch them on my phone the look into my history and cast them as a normal video. WHY IS THIS PROCESS EVEN THERE IF THERE CAN BE A NORMAL FUCKING VIDEO???
I’m just so tired of the stupid shit.
ReVanced literally solves every single one of these problems.
I need to update it.
Again.
It's broken.
Again.I've literally been watching YT on my mobile browser instead because it's a PITA to update.
Strange, months-old versions work fine for me, and the update is not too difficult either. On an ARM64 device, you open RVX Manager, check for the recommended YouTube version, download it from APKMirror, optionally check its hash, pick it in RVX Manager, and patch it (takes 2-5 minutes). You can also press the 💾 icon to save the trusted APK you made so you can share it to other devices, including ARMv7 ones.
Also newpipe x sponsorblock and libretube (amazing when it works)
It's now called tubular, by the same dev
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
The old repository got archived
Can you block shorts? Those still come up in my recs
Yeah, there's a option to hide shorts in the feed as well as to hide the shorts button from the bottom bar. Can't even remember the last time I saw any shorts lol
You should be able to I believe
sad iphone noises
I do think it's funny that the one company that won't let you solve a problem Google created, is Apple. Meanwhile Android has had sideloaded apps for ages.
So, un-jailbroken iPhones can run uYouPlus, or similar apps through AltStore. You can sign into your account, view/post comments, see dislikes, auto-skip ads, intros, outros, etc., completely disable Shorts, and so many more things…
The only problem is you have to re-sign the app by tethering it to a computer once every year (if you have an Apple Developer account) or every week for everyone else.
Newpipe is also a solid choice
Or untraped for YouTube (FF extension) if you're fine with using the web page
bloated though
Maybe if you compare it to LibreTube or NewPipe, but it must be slimmer than the normal app.
Search on YouTube is truly terrible now. 8/10 results are sponsored ads, other things you may like, watch it again, etc. Like wtf I literally searched something else.
It's actually really really shitty. A search result shouldn't show just general recommendations and definitely shouldn't ignore your query in favor of showing ads for bigger videos completely unrelated.
That actually makes the platform completely garbage.
YouTube is just public broadcast TV now anyways and needs to start being regulated as such.
Is this a power user problem somehow?
They had to’ve [A/B test] optimized it to the absolute stay-on-YouTube-as-long-as-possible max, if that’s not being too generous.
Does the general public disregard their original search intent often enough by clicking unrelated videos that it makes sense to spam us like that? Lemmings hate it for sure, but the data must show it’s beneficial… wondering if I’m missing something.
I fucking hate how they mix in "popular" videos with your search results.
Like, the first few results are related, then there's a few that are completely unrelated but "popular". Then they go back to showing related results.
They don't even try to differentiate between the two. It's scummy as hell and yet another nail in the coffin for youtube.
that's google for you. "Don't be evil!" ^TM
They've changed that to "don't be evil, obviously"
It is shit but if you click on the videos button after the search it's a lot more like what it used to be. Not completely though.
For some reason, the 4th video on my "home" feed is always a video with ~300 views from some small account I've never heard of on a topic I'm only passingly interested in.
For a while YouTube got weirdly fixated on showing me videos about steam trains. At the moment, it's a video called "20 Random Yet Interesting Facts"; a 5 day old video with 220 views from a channel called "The Fact Files"
I actually watch those small accounts (they tend to be short and related to games I know), it feels a bit more comfy when the guy actually reads and replies to my comment.
I think I also came upon aftermath of some personal quarrel between the account and a commenter, they were talking about how sorry they were and the guy accepted the apology. It was wholesome, and probably as memorable as other videos I
waste time onwatch.The algo is breaking down. They rested on their laurels and were caught sleeping. Lots of services are looking to poach viewers and are far more willing to take risks and innovate. Web indexed yellow pages are long in the tooth and tainted with people abusing that algo or buying rank. Maybe 2-3 more years left in that tank. I genuinely think Google is starting to panic.
It's good they are suggesting smaller channels, they should do it more.
Fresh isn't another carbon copy of one of the mega channels with the same content.
Fresh isn't a sea full of reaction faces all trying to game the algorithm.
Fresh is someone having fun on camera, someone bearing their soul to whomever will watch, someone with passion for what they are doing and the desire to share it.
YouTube needs to start finding the people that made it interesting in the first place and lose the mindless drones gaming the system.
I think they added that to help smaller channels get a start. In principle it's actually a nice idea, but those small channels have no data to tell them what videos are similar to theirs, so they end up being recommended to people who don't care about their content
My fellow train enthusiast!
I think it's because I watched this good old viral video literally one time that YouTube decided I must be HUGE on trainspotting and suggested every trainspotting channel under the sun for months.
I'll fully admit that seeing the UP Big Boy 4014 go through Altoona, PA back in 2010-2011 was absolutely one of my best experiences so far in life, and I'm 43. You could hear the thing for miles.
The worst thing about shorts is that they are just the videos you were already going to watch but cut up into 10 shorts devoid of relevant context. No thanks youtube I will watch the full video
As ProZD just pointed out, never use the home screen, just go straight to your Subscriptions feed. It helps the people you subscribed to and you get more videos.
How do you get more Subscriptions if you don't randomly browse YT for new content? Sometimes a youtuber will mention another channel, like Adam Savage giving a shout out to Bobby Fingers, but that's rare. And when I went to Bobby Fingers he had like only 4 videos.
It still suggests vids for you after you finish one, or in the side bar.
Am I the only one who finds those stupid looping shorts annoying? It honestly makes me feel like I have amnesia... The second I hear the video transition into a loop I'm like nope, I'm out of here...
My wife will show me instagram nonsense and it's just annoying as fuck. There's text and video and speaking all at the same time immediately in the video, there's no possible way to get all of it on the first view, so you have to let it loop. I fucking hate it
It’s even worse if you refuse to download the app or make an account. My friend used to send me Instagram links fairly frequently (until they started allowing you to download the videos instead) and the instant you open the page the video starts playing muted, with the cookie shit covering half of it. By the time you’ve dismissed that and unmuted it you’ve missed the start of the clip, and for some reason it doesn’t let you replay without making an account (or refreshing the entire page but that muted the video again)
It's one of these things where i can't even imagine the target audience for.
"And that's why..."
loop
"I have diarrhoea."
There's a plug-in that forces the YouTube ads to play as normal videos that end when you get to the end. Or you can just straight up hide the while section.
NewPipe on Android, cheers.
Cheers
Even better: Grayjay on Android, cheers. (or NewPipe x Sponsorblock)
On the website on a desktop, the shorts section has an X on the top right of its section. That should hide shorts for a few days. It says 30 days but I'm not convinced.
You can click the options on any video to say you aren't interested in that video or that channel.
You can delete videos from your watch history if your algorithm gets tainted. Like my nephew was watching a bunch of train videos on my TV. So algo started sending me all these train recommendations. I just deleted them from my watch history and haven't seen a train video since.
uBlock origin can block most annoying elements from the YouTube website.
This website has some useful filters for YouTube and other websites, for instance hiding already watched videos, shorts community posts etc. https://letsblock.it/filters
Use revanced
And SmartTube on AndroidTV! Has the sponsor skipping too just like vanced
I thought Revanced was discontinued or wasn't able to be downloaded anymore? That's why I got NewPipe
Vanced was. Revanced is running smooth and keeps getting updated. Watch out to install only from revanced.app url though.
I was at work the other day, where I can't install browser addons, watching a 25 Minute video. It got interrupted by 9 fucking ads! 9 FUCKING ADS!
I really had no fucking clue how bad it's gotten and had heard people complain. I went on my partners apple tv to show a cool youtube video I thought they would be interested in. 30 min video, Ads every few minutes, no skips (shows skip in: but it's literally the entire length of the ad), multiple ads every break, and if you're not sitting on the button you're about to watch a 90second to 5 minute ad.
I personally grew up on local broadcast and cable tv, Youtube is so much worse now and way less regulated. At least local advertisers and customers got something out of it. I think it's about time to permanently ditch youtube, plenty of the creators I watch have alternative ways to view now. Just like Reddit, I think I'm ready to move on because of how the company truly is regardless of my hyper-customized way of viewing it. There will be niche resources that will still exist on those platforms (from creators mind you), but the company shouldn't get my leisure and entertainment time with how they treat their casual viewers.
Local broadcast and cable TV were already bad, but their ad breaks - at least here in germany - were generally less than 5 Minutes and they only appeared every 15-20 minutes. It was annoying, but at least you had a reasonable time to actually watch some content, before it got interupted by a 5 Minute ad-break, that allowed you to go to the toilet or fridge or whatever.
Ad-breaks on youtube videos now appear so frequently, that it cuts the actual content into short-form content that is often less than 2 Minutes long. On the video I mentioned above, it took youtube exactly 1:38 minutes of actual content before it showed me the first ad. If I wanted to watch youtube shorts, i'd watch youtube shorts, I am not interested in having long form content cut into short-form throw-away content, seemingly at random points in the video, often mid-sentence.
Holy shit that's cray cray, Google=Evil
Honestly it’s annoying as fuck. Nobody asked for YouTube to become TikTok. In fact, I feel like we’d need to go in the opposite direction…
It’s sadly a fact that attention spans have gotten worse over the years. When it’s too much effort for people to watch a ten minute video or read more than a paragraph of text, we’re in serious trouble.
I’m doing my part by rewarding creators who put out actual quality content in longer videos. But I fear they’ve got a difficult time ahead if this trend continues.
It’s sadly a fact that attention spans have gotten worse over the years. When it’s too much effort for people to watch a ten minute video or read more than a paragraph of text, we’re in serious trouble.
Interesting to note that this isn't necessarily a fact, as at the very least there hasn't been any research to support this widely held notion.
Busting the Attention Span Myth offers a higher level overview concerning the subject.
There's also this video that covers some of that article but also digs through other sources, listed in the description.
There certainly have been studies on it, like this one:
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/490177
But you’re right in that more empirical evidence would be nice. Right now, everyone ‘knows’ that attention spans are worse. We can feel it in ourselves, and we see it in others, according to surveys.
But it’s hard to quantify how much or the exact reasons. Even research like the one above points out that it’s not just social media. It’s basically everything, all at once, which makes it hard to focus.
More evidence would certainly be good. Either we discover that it’s nothing to worry about or we discover that it’s a thing we should definitely attempt to fix before it gets worse.
Use your subscription tab.
I use a frontend for YouTube that only shows my subscriptions, so no algorithm, it's nice
well … third party apps.
Where?
F-droid has a bunch … like PipePipe, LibreTube, SkyTube, NewPipe.
I only use f-droid, so it could be that google doesn't allow them in play store. But using f-droid got a lot easier in modern android. After you allowed a store to insrall an app, it doesn't have to ask for permission to install subsequent updates, which allows hassle-free background updates.
IzzyOnDroid repo also has Tabular, which is NewPipe with SponsorBlock.
Edit: Seems you need to allow installing apps from unknown sources and then get an alternative store via browser https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid/ https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/com.machiav3lli.fdroid/
Or via different web frontends: https://fossdroid.com/a/fdroid.html https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.machiav3lli.fdroid
LPT: Access youtube from a Swiss IP address. You will get a big "reject all" button up front. Reject all includes "watch history"
Youtube algorithm the same as the rest of them, based on your own history.
What amazing laws do you have in Switzerland that makes that happen?
What do you mean, they're right.... ohhhh. Thanks uBlock Origin!
NewPipe. Problem solved. Now if only Google search results were worth a damn again.
Glad this isn't just my experience. I hardly ever use youtube except for mma clips and the why files; the absolute bullshit they think i want to watch, I have no idea why. Their algos are flat out wrong.
Pro tip though, you can use uBlock to zap the Shorts element right off your screen.
I use uBlock Origin, disable watch history, and pretty much only watch my subscribed channels, so I don't see any of that nonsense.
I think I'm too old, been using smart phones since they've been a thing. But I can't imagine watching videos on it, feel like it's annoy the people around me. And if it won't, it means I can watch YouTube on something better
Try NewPipe, be happy.
Or libretube!
ReVanced.
I find that ReVanced, I haven't been able to get rid of the shorts & community posts.
I can watch adfree but I still have all the trash even if I enable all the fixes
where are my videos
Tap “You” → “Your videos”
Haha you funny fucker
Now seriously, the videos recommended by the algorithm to someone aren’t theirs. People use these posessive pronouns way too often in English and it drives me mad.
Never had that problem. Sure, the search is terrible on YouTube, but subscriptions list works pretty much the same it did 10 years ago, although there's useless section of YouTube shorts that I never watch.
I can't relate. I stopped using the official YouTube app due to ads alone.
You mean people just go to the front page of Youtube? Like a psychopath?
Youtube is just somewhere Google takes me when I search for a video, it's like StackOverflow in that regard. It's not somewhere I'd just visit.
youtube is on its way out, thankfully.
Lol no
Same thing trying to find music on MTV before it became irrelevant.
i haaaaate the fucking blog posts that clutter the mobile subscriptions feed. unfortunately the ios equivalent to vanced only removes ads and gets you sponsorblock, doesn’t let you purge the myspace shit
real
Obligatory: Firefox YT adblockers, but also just use sites like Piped to watch YT.
Just use NewPipe or invidious Lol.
The website or tv app is better than the phone app if that's any help
Revanced is the best
I use the Brave browser and as of today, it still defeats youtube ads.
I swear people don't use YouTube properly and then complain that YouTube doesn't work. Sure it's shit, but it's your fault for not having subscriptions. If you don't have subscriptions you'll just get served whatever the most popular content is which is usually or just trash.
That’s true but I have consistently found more and more non-video junk in my sub feed. Things like text posts, polls, live streams, etc.
I'm pretty sure in the subscriptions tab you just get your subscriptions. I think you also get live streams if they're from content creators you've subscribed to but that's okay.
Nah, you get fed mostly similar stuff to what you watched so far.
Watched a bunch of tutorials on how to repair your washing machine? YouTube is going to show you more of that.
Even worse, if you do have some subscriptions but don't watch those videos they will disappear from your feed. Occasionally one might pop back up if it gets really popular. But for the most part they are gone unless you look at your subscriptions.
Even the device you use is taken into consideration. I'm logged into my desktop PC, my laptop and my phone. I mostly watch my stuff on my laptop and phone. My kid watches on my desktop. They get their kids recommendations on the desktop while I get my recommendations on the phone. Sometimes there is a slight overlap. But for the most part it looks like YouTube is treating them like separate accounts.
