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
Is it even a dopamine hit though? I watched a handful of them and they all seemed to just be someone yelling at the camera for 5 seconds, then a 5 second shot of whatever the hell they were yelling about, then 10 to 15 seconds of them asking me to like and subscribe.
No, that actually took effort and creativity to make. Not enough bombardment of emojis and TTS.
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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.
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...
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.
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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.
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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.
It's now called tubular, by the same dev
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
The old repository got archived
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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
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.
yeah i know about that, i had it but removed it since sideloading with linux is a bit of a mess. i don't know if you can disable shorts and community posts there though, i never checked
Yep, you can. It removes both the tabs at the bottom as well as scrubbing them from the subscription feed.
I’m using uYouPlus but I can’t find the option to disable shorts.
Edit: Nvm I figured it out.
It is under settings > general > uYou > home
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Ehh not really. I can't even read comment replies, and as far as I know, you can't make any comments yourself. Syncing your subscriptions is a giant mess. Tho I still use it for downloading purposes, best option for that on mobile imo.
If you have Seal installed you can set it inside Revanced to download the video directly or if you don't want to open it and just want to download it you can share it with Seal and it'll do the job.
Huh, I never use any of those features anyway so I guess I never thought about it.
I don't really comment or read comments and never bothered syncing my subscriptions. I just went through my YouTube subs list and added them on new pipe, took like 3 ish minutes.
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.
Oh absolutely I bet it works to distract people to click on a different video and fall into a whole of watching more. I think it's easy to forget about the mass of lonely sad people who don't talk to anyone or do much other than eat and then turn on YouTube till it's time to sleep.
Easier to feed their addiction if you just make it easy to get the drug.
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.
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 on watch.
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.
Pretty funny how YouTube gets stuck on topics for a while haha
Yours was steam trains, mine was Soviet nuclear accidents
Recently I got alot of videos about reindeer on ice, and how to remove ticks. I have no idea why YT suddenly recommended me these types of videos
I think shorts broke the algorithm, thats around the time it started to act like that for me at least.
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.
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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.
So do people who disable their watch history also just not have any subscriptions because just makes YouTube useless unless you already know the link.
I have lots of subscriptions and disable my search history. I sub to things I want updates for, and search for stuff I don't. Simple and effective.
Right so why disable watch history? It's obviously not a privacy thing because YouTube already know what kind of content you look for because they can see your subscriptions it just seems to be ineffectively making your life more difficult and not really increasing privacy
- YouTube's suggestions are crap, especially since my kids use my account
- Most of my YouTube watching is through NewPipe on Android
- I avoid most Google products and use an ad blocker, so their tracking doesn't really affect me
So I get no value from it, and it is extra tracking, so I disable it.
YouTube used to still recommend you (slightly less relevant) stuff with watch history off.
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.
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...
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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)
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.
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suggestions are kinda the whole point of YouTube.
don't care if they're algorithm-based but they DO work (unlike for example example the twitter feed.) youtube suggests me some good shit and awesome new small channels all the time
i enjoy my YouTube subscription feed quite a lot. I've had watch history off forever and never really clicked on their suggestions.
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the issue with the subscription feed is that
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it makes it harder to find new channels to watch
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it doesn't stop showing channels you don't care about anymore automatically like the algorithm feed
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gives all channels the same value - i like some stuff more and some stuff less.
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subscription feed prioritizes channels which release more videos (quantity over quality), which causes it to quickly fill up with clickbait and low-effort content unless you carefully watch your subscription list
(tbf, I'm not a privacy extremist, i don't care about first party tracking if it's actually used to provide a better service. "personalized" ads (and other third party stuff) can go fuck itself though)
Yeah. These are pretty much the reasons I've enabled watch history despite privacy concerns.
new channels
I'm not really in the market for new channels, but occasionally I'll sub to one when a channel I like refers one. Good channels tend to recommend good channels.
it doesn't stop showing channels you don't care about
I just unsub.
gives all channels the same value
I don't sub to enough channels to matter, just enough to have 1-2 hours of decent content every day, a bit more if there's a big event or something.
subscription feed prioritizes... more videos
Unsubscribe fixes that.
If my channels were available elsewhere, even if that elsewhere charged a nominal fee, I'd leave YouTube. Imo, most of YouTube is trash, especially the top channels, so I'm really not interested in whatever their algorithm thinks I'll like. I like medium sized channels that produce high quality content make most of their money from merch and Patreon, not the clickbait nonsense channels that whore themselves out for views and sponsors.
Some favorites:
- Gamers Nexus - PC gaming news
- Level1Techs - cool IT hardware stuff (mostly prosumer and small scale enterprise)
- Not Just Bikes - discussion about transportation infrastructure
- Louis Rossmann - right to repair
- Tech Ingredients - cool applied science stuff that I could potentially DIY (I never do)
- Sci Show - cool science stuff
- John Stossel - libertarian short form journalism
- Digital Foundry - technical video game analysis
- Audit the Audit - high quality police interaction analysis
Each of those are generally high quality and have minimal nonsense (intros/outros, long sponsors, etc).
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
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.
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.
Ah, thanks for the link! It's definitely a bummer that there isn't more research, especially regarding individuals (as your linked research notes, its focus was on collective attention), and what little research there is is more to do with marketing than science.
I use a frontend for YouTube that only shows my subscriptions, so no algorithm, it's nice
If you're on Android you can install reVanced
Google took down vanced for some reason and then reVanced popped up which is exactly the same as far as I can tell, and for some reason they don't seem to care about that one.
Or NewPipe, though you need to side load it.
I haven't used (re)Vanced, but I like some of NewPipe's features, like controlling brightness and volume by sliding my finger on half of the screen, as well as picture in picture.
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.
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.
Revanced on Android will remove the ad, the community posts, the shorts and all the rest of the stupid fucking bullshit
Can you use it to control a TV like with the official app? I mainly watch YouTube that way, but I'd love to not have to see all the junk.
You can actually install revanced on a TV, it's just not really designed for that kind of interface so you'll also have to plug in a USB mouse.
But apparently if you plug a mouse into modern TV it's just like, yep, guess I have a mouse now, and then just works flawlessly.
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Haven't seen an ad since I've been using Tubular (previously NewPipe + blockers). Why is revanced better?
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