> Unfortunately, using an advanced analytics package I’ve projected that around May 2026 the YouTube homepage will just be one video, and by September there will be no videos at all on the homepage.
That's not the only extension Firefox still allows that's blocked in Chrome. FF also blocks 3rd party cookies and has shown no interest in Google's "privacy sandbox" tracking features. Funny how much better a browser can be without a massive conflict of interest
I agree with you that Firefox is better, but it's not for lack of conflict of interest. No browser that is funded by any means other than user payments or donations is going to be free of a conflict of interest, and in Firefox's case Google funds them.
Sure, but it matters why Google is funding them. Google funds Mozilla in order to keep them afloat as a foil to detract from antitrust scrutiny. That's only credible if Google does not exert any kind of pressure over them as a condition for that funding. If they did exert that kind of pressure, it would completely defeat the purpose of funding them in the first place.
So I don't consider that to create a conflict of interest.
Mozilla config makes the old Windows registry look logically organized and named.
(try to disable cache, for example...)
i am unclear if Google merely counts on Mozilla acting like a reincarnation of the living-fossil that is the Apache foundation, or if their money steers this.
well if you are still gonna browse on chrome don't settle for the ublock originless experience.
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets).
* go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on
* click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
The following CSS equivalent worked for me, using the "Custom CSS by Denis" Chrome extension[1]:
ytd-rich-grid-renderer div#contents {
/* number of video thumbnails per row */
--ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row: 5 !important;
/* number of Shorts per row in its dedicated section */
--ytd-rich-grid-slim-items-per-row: 6 !important;
}
I first tried it with the "User JavaScript and CSS" extension, but somehow it didn't seem able to inject CSS on YouTube. Even a simple `html { border: 5px solid red; }` would not show anything, while I could see it being applied immediately with the "Denis" CSS extension.
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
The YouTube abominations keep piling up: Vertical videos on a desktop, endless ads (thanks to the Chrome manifest change that disables decent adblockers), useless feed.
I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.
I think in (South-East) Asia the people like vertical videos for some reason. Seems how many people record videos on their phones - at least in Thailand.
I don’t have the numbers, but I’m pretty sure that Asia (lots of people) use phones as their primary (sole, even) device.
Since a phone can show portrait or landscape videos in fullscreen (just hold the phone vertically or horizontally), it makes sense to shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or situation best.
The real problem is that computer monitors don’t easily offer orientation switching :)
> shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or situation best.
I'm with you there. It's the same for shooting still photos.
...but that doesn't stop people from shooting portrait video and then constantly panning back and forth because the whole (crowd, landscape, giant sea monster, whatever) doesn't fit in the frame.
The most infuriating thing is that there is no technical reason for vertical filming sucking so much.
The phone camera sensors often have a aspect ration of 4:3 but the sides are cropped in software. So the videos just get mutilated because convention.
Though at least 4:3 format is making a come-back because it is the prefect comprise format. Looks great on a tablet, is usable in both landscape and portrait mode. On Desktop it leave space to read comments. Perfect for youtube videos.
Except it's a natural position, quicker and gives you better position. And since most of content will be consumed on mobile makes no sense to shoot horizontally.
I gave up this fight a decade ago, can't believe people still struggle with this concept.
Been looking for a comment to post my own pet peeve under:
Pausing a Youtube video overlays the video with a row of more video recommendations.
So if I'm pausing the video to see something in the video, video thumbnails are in the way.
This happens in the Roku app and sometimes in the desktop browser, but for some reason I couldn't trigger it when I tested it just now. Maybe one of my extensions blocks it.
Pausing for me on mobile downsizes and letterboxes the video, shifts it to the left, and shows an ad on the right. The forward/play or pause/back buttons also shift to the left, which means that you can't tap the same spot to resume.
I'm not a fan of this trend either. My suspicion is this change is to increase scrolling to pump more ad space; it makes sense from a business standpoint. But this combined with the Algo changes makes it hard to keep coming back looking for new content VS just consuming the people/content I know and enjoy.
I wish we could go back; A lot of googles UI/UX is based on the next billion users experiences. I'm unsure how much influence this has on a day to day design choices they make. My experience right now on a 1440p monitor is 5 visible videos, 2 video ads, a ton of tags that I can't turn off for finding videos.
There are a ton of great UI/UX choices they've done over the years too; I just wish we had more options as a users.
Genuine question. I’m assuming that, since YouTube is owned by one of the largest tech companies in the world that they’ve optimized their delivered JS to only what is necessary to run the page.
What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone? Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code? Obviously ballpark and LoC != complexity, but that seems absurd to me.
Fun fact: Googles own web performance team recommends avoiding YouTube embeds because they're so obscenely bloated. Placing their <iframe> on a page will pull in about 4MB of assets, most of which is Javascript, even if the user never plays the video.
Depends on how you do it, loading="lazy" helps a bit, but the iframe still gets loaded when it enters the viewport even if the user has no intention of watching the video. The best approach is to initially show a fake facade of the player and only swap in the real iframe after the user interacts with it, which is what Google recommends doing in that article.
>but the iframe still gets loaded when it enters the viewport even if the user has no intention of watching the video
That doesn't affect page speed scores if the video is "below the fold", and that's all that I really care about. If Google Lighthouse doesn't complain about it, then my job is done.
>What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone?
all of the code that hoovers up your analytics on what's been looked at, what's been scrolled past, etc. maybe I'm just jaded, but I'd suspect so much of it is nothing but tracking and does little for making the site function
Webpages are dumptrucks for every bad feature anyone ever thought up and are in a constant state of trying to re-framework their way out of the complete mess of utils that get shipped by default. Need a gadget that implements eye tracking via sidechannels? Yeah, they got that. And then justify that with "analytics" or anti-fraud and abuse, and no "click jacking" or whatever crap, and roll it times 1000.
> Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code?
The code is minified so there's relatively few characters for each source line, if you run it through a pretty-printer to restore sensible formatting then it turns into well over half a million lines of code.
Meanwhile, loading up a channel page with Invidious pulls in about 700k and half of that is the banner. JavaScript was not mandatory (on public instances) but it is now due to AI scrapers.
The perfect oppurtunity for more AI, image upscaling! /s
Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.
Yet the number of points being accumulated on the thread is rapidly increasing and you're getting down-voted. It would seem you did not reflect on your comments before writing and publishing them.
Their mobile site is also terrible. It's like the designers forgot that people watch videos in landscape mode. For example, comments won't load unless you rotate to portrait mode first. I mean, come on.
Also when clicking from a search result to a video, it replaces the url instead of pushing to navigation history. So when I click into a video and try to go back, it takes me to the homepage instead of the search results! It only happens on mobile!
My guess would be that this is in support of the preview hover feature. For a while now, you can watch an entire video just by hovering over it, complete with captions, scrubbing and audio. This wouldn't be very useful if the thumbnails were still tiny like in the past. Personally, I like this feature and don't often need to look at tons of thumbnails at once, but to each their own.
The excellent “Play”⁽¹⁾ app (available for iOS, macOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro) can also use these feeds, plus give you the ability to conveniently save other videos to “watch later”. Highly recommended!
In addition to the main purchase price, this app charges 3.99/month for:
-following channels
-following playlists
-removing shorts
and many more features on top of those.
In the past several months, I've moved to using an RSS Reader + Watch Later Playlist + DF Tube extension (you could use whatever to nuke parts of the UI you dislike). This has greatly improved how I use YouTube. This method allows me to be significantly more intentional with what I'm watching and how much time I'm spending. The only frustrating part is that YT shorts still come through RSS, but they are much easier to avoid in a reader than YT's UI.
I used this to make a Youtube viewer "application" that lists my subscriptions most recent videos, and i can watch them when i get a chance. Just a list. no thumbnails, no click bait, no random algorithm recommendations, just stuff i want to watch.
Can also use google sheet + app scripts + youtube api to add new videos from channels in playlists. Sheet can trigger every few hours to keep things up to date.
It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.
Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.
What does this mean? Does this mean that there will be no more video UI (only the shorts UI)? Does this mean that only shorts will show up on the homepage? etc. (Also a source would be nice.)
The most placebo button I've ever seen is that "Don't show Shorts" where it says something like "We'll show you less Shorts" and then they reappear 30 minutes later
I guess every content platform is moving to forcefully shoving slop into your face now
I make an extension which lets you fix this to your liking (choose the minimum number of videos you want per row, while also fixing the spacing issues overriding the underlying --ytd-rich-grid-items-per-row CSS variable causes), plus many, many more annoyances and what I felt were missing options and features for YouTube, like being able to completely hide Shorts:
Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:
I actually didn't notice until recently. Guess I'm also in the test group.
I wonder what's the purpose of this A/B test? Definitely has nothing to do with revenue, right? So what could it be? More engagement? I doubt that few seconds added upon more scrolling won't be much. Retention? Hard to tell.
As a subscriber, I get 6 algorithm suggested videos (even split 50/50 on subscribed vs suggested).
Then of course the content is also routinely interrupted by rows that take up more space than a row of video suggestions:
* Premium movie suggestions, which also manages to take up half the width with just two sentences: "Discover your next favourite movie. Watch without ads, included with your Premium membership"
* Shorts, despite me continually pressing the triple dots and saying "Stop showing me this crap".
* Interactive Apps (same, I keep saying "not interested" or whatever variant message it shows me).
I think I'm more irritated that youtube gives me the choice to say "don't show me this" and ignores it, than I would be by not having a choice in the first place.
I think it is not just the library but the huge costs associated with storage, encoding and bandwidth. YouTube has innovated significantly to make it as cheap as possible to run such a service and it is likely that it would take an enormous amount of money for any competitor to replicate it.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but no connection to YouTube)
Peertube is trying. There are a bunch of different servers with some interesting content.
Some is the keyword here. As you say youtube's huge library is a hard thing to compete with. Still I've found some good content there and I make it a point to look at peertube first to reward those who are there with my eyes.
I wish PeerTube had a "flagship" instance like mastodon.social [0] for Mastodon or lemmy.world [1] for Lemmy. The lack of a generalist instance with open sign-ups hinders the adoption.
It turns itself back on for me so frequently that I'm sure they must be intentionally having the site reset that preference... I hate it with a passion.
Now when I go on mobile Safari and want to switch off 'video previews' (for the thousandth time), and I tap the switch, it stays switched on but the 'Settings saved' thing comes up on the bottom. You have to tap it again to actually switch it off. I wonder if that's a bug or intentional too now...
It used to be 12 videos until about a year ago. If you zoom in and out the thumbnails don't change size!
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
They think that people are idiots and unable to deal with more that 3 search results. Or maybe they think their search is so good that the wanted video is always within those 3.
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
> is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
I think we need to be careful with the language like “this is what the users want” when something along the lines of “this is what triggers of pattern of compulsive behavior in users” is closer to the truth
Outside of legislation, there isn't a way to make a distinction. Corporations and most individuals are going to do whatever is legally permissible in order to maximize revenue.
And I would say its mostly not YouTube actually producing the content. They are responsible for the "reward mechanism" of clickbaity/shock content driving views, and in return, more views meaning more money for the creators. But I would really like to hear of another model. If YouTube didn't do it, someone else assuredly will. And traditional media is/was barely any better.
As for a business model, I think that we should pay creators, either directly e.g. via Patreon, or slightly indirectly via smaller creator-led platforms like Nebula.
In the same way that compulsive gamblers "want" to feed their retirement savings into slot machines.
I think it's more fair to say that this is a behavior that is profitable to exploit if you care more about making money than what you do to your customers' or society's wellbeing.
I just wish they'd fix the "sort by date" bug in search. I search for something, it gives me endless results. If I then choose to sort by upload date, whoopsie, no results found!
Zooming out actually makes the thumbnails bigger, because they grow to fill the space ceded by the rest of the UI. Just incredible design all the way through.
> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations
This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.
I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.
The homepage of YT has become a disaster area, it has almost zero customizability or exploration value. Can't remove vertical video shorts, can't control the topics displayed at the top. It maximizes engagement and time waste, not what I need.
But you can use Gemini for better search, recommendations and you can play videos right in the chat window. At the very least replace search and recommendations with the model. You can explain what you want to explore and guide the recommender much better than on YT. There are no ads in Gemini itself.
> You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations
Worst part about this is you search for food recipes and after the first 5 results there are gross out videos, "popping" videos, kids dying in an elevator video.
I'm about to eat dinner here... I know Neal Mohan REAAAALLLLY wants people to watch the video about the kids dying in the elevator because he keeps putting it in the trio of videos that show up when you search unrelated to your search but can he not wait till I'm doing a search that isn't food related to try and make me watch gross out content if he's so desperate to make me watch it.
Report it every time, makes no difference it all has millions of views so they'll keep doing it.
Yeah, the Steam HW survey shows that 16:9 resolutions form a majority (60%+) of their users with 1080p + 4K, so it makes sense as a default design choice for a company that only wants to target one ratio.
As a former user of 16:10, I feel your pain, though.
Wow, that's just a blatant scam. Wakes up bad memories of the old Windows XP days, when this type of trick was used everywhere. And people wonder why we use adblock. Google (the most wealthy company on earth) will of course claim they don't have the resources to review them, when the truth is they are happy to reap their profits from scamming old people. Same with Facebook, happy to serve ads that lure old people into logging in to fake banks and get all their savings stolen.
There's probably a rule against apps impersonating the OS on the App Store, one could only wish for Apple using a more heavy hand against this type of "experience".
This reminds me of Pinterest, a platform I used to love for finding art and inspirational content as an artist myself. Without ad blockers, I would say 1/3 to 1/2 of all “pins” or images are actually ads, some of which are the nefarious “shopping” ads which look just like images and when clicked, take you directly to the sellers site. With the ad blocker, it is full of weird holes that just make the page look terrible. It feels honestly terrible as a consumer to have the experience degraded this much, its like having a storefront and half of the items on display are actually garbage you need to toss aside. And unfortunately there isn’t an obvious better choice or option. Also don’t even get me started on the scammy ads that are ai generated images or just all of the pins that are ai generated slop…
716 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadDoesn't exactly that already exist with TikTok?
It is, just not as capable as before due to the Manifest v3 changes.
So I don't consider that to create a conflict of interest.
(try to disable cache, for example...)
i am unclear if Google merely counts on Mozilla acting like a reincarnation of the living-fossil that is the Apache foundation, or if their money steers this.
* download a release zip: https://github.com/gorhill/ublock/releases (expand Assets). * go to chrome://extensions, toggle developer mode on * click load unpacked and select the file you unzipped the release
then you also have to watch out because chrome will, still time later, disable ublock origin. You have to go to your extensions page and find the option for 'Keep it for now' or something. Then you can continue to browse the internet like a real gee! Thanks ublock origin!
Switching over to firefox is the ultimate best option, regardless of any faults that firefox has.
If someone can recommend a better alternative for custom CSS, I'd be interested to hear it. I guess Tampermonkey could work, if you have that.
[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/custom-css-by-denis...
You can put the relevant CSS into a custom YouTube stylesheet if you like.
(I re-skin many sites, including HN, see my profile page for links to recent-ish CSS.)
https://github.com/Harren06/ublock-yt-shorts
youtube.com##ytm-paid-content-overlay-renderer
The `this video includes sponsored content` that covers and takes over the click into a video.
Whoever designed that, implemented that, approved that, needs to be fired and blacklisted from doing user-facing code changes.
I highly recommend installing an extension that hides the home feed and sidebar recommendations, which at least makes YT non-distracting again.
Since a phone can show portrait or landscape videos in fullscreen (just hold the phone vertically or horizontally), it makes sense to shoot in whatever orientation fits the content or situation best.
The real problem is that computer monitors don’t easily offer orientation switching :)
I'm with you there. It's the same for shooting still photos.
...but that doesn't stop people from shooting portrait video and then constantly panning back and forth because the whole (crowd, landscape, giant sea monster, whatever) doesn't fit in the frame.
The phone camera sensors often have a aspect ration of 4:3 but the sides are cropped in software. So the videos just get mutilated because convention.
Though at least 4:3 format is making a come-back because it is the prefect comprise format. Looks great on a tablet, is usable in both landscape and portrait mode. On Desktop it leave space to read comments. Perfect for youtube videos.
The first world had a lot of computers, video cameras and horizontal screens in general before they had smartphones.
I think it plays a part.
I gave up this fight a decade ago, can't believe people still struggle with this concept.
Gaming on mobile phones, even MOBA games and first person shooters, seems quite popular here. For me, it's unplayable.
Pausing a Youtube video overlays the video with a row of more video recommendations.
So if I'm pausing the video to see something in the video, video thumbnails are in the way.
This happens in the Roku app and sometimes in the desktop browser, but for some reason I couldn't trigger it when I tested it just now. Maybe one of my extensions blocks it.
There are a ton of great UI/UX choices they've done over the years too; I just wish we had more options as a users.
The preview is 530x300px on a 1920x1080 screen vs the image shown being 336x188px
How this passed any sort of QA is beyond me
What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone? Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code? Obviously ballpark and LoC != complexity, but that seems absurd to me.
https://developer.chrome.com/docs/lighthouse/performance/thi...
YouTubes frontend people just don't care about bloat, even when other Googlers are yelling at them to cut it out.
That doesn't affect page speed scores if the video is "below the fold", and that's all that I really care about. If Google Lighthouse doesn't complain about it, then my job is done.
all of the code that hoovers up your analytics on what's been looked at, what's been scrolled past, etc. maybe I'm just jaded, but I'd suspect so much of it is nothing but tracking and does little for making the site function
The code is minified so there's relatively few characters for each source line, if you run it through a pretty-printer to restore sensible formatting then it turns into well over half a million lines of code.
Or maybe the next step will be automated AI-generated thumbnails based on the video and the user itself, so each user will be grouped into a different category and gets served a different thumbnail accordingly.
> maximized viewport on a 32" monitor is pretty moronic
Sure seems like you think your “personal preferences are powerful and universal” ;)
https://shorts.aviparshan.com/rss-feed
⁽¹⁾ https://marcosatanaka.com/
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/unwatched-for-youtube/id647728...
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCS0N5ba...
... works but:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UULFS0N5...
... is 404.
I'm guessing it's only a feature of playlist URLs which that SO answer is about, not RSS feed URLs.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFS0N...
Seriously, though, w/o RSS feeds Youtube would be completely useless to me. I keep waiting for Google to kill them.
It does get more complicated if monitoring too many channels since execution will timeout due to sheets limit. But can make it to pickup where previously timedout.
Bonus using API gets you video info so you can filter by length (shorts), keywords etc. Limitation is ~150 videos added per day due to API limits.
I guess every content platform is moving to forcefully shoving slop into your face now
Cable TV figured this out a long time ago.
https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
Edit: for comparison with the screenshot in TFA, this is my Home feed on a 14" MacBook. No Shorts, no Mixes, videos which are 85% (configurable) watched or more are hidden, stream VODs from channels which also stream, Movies and TV, and any channels "Don't recommend channel" refuses to work on, can all be hidden for you:
https://imgur.com/LUnpz9e
I wonder what's the purpose of this A/B test? Definitely has nothing to do with revenue, right? So what could it be? More engagement? I doubt that few seconds added upon more scrolling won't be much. Retention? Hard to tell.
Then of course the content is also routinely interrupted by rows that take up more space than a row of video suggestions: * Premium movie suggestions, which also manages to take up half the width with just two sentences: "Discover your next favourite movie. Watch without ads, included with your Premium membership" * Shorts, despite me continually pressing the triple dots and saying "Stop showing me this crap". * Interactive Apps (same, I keep saying "not interested" or whatever variant message it shows me).
I think I'm more irritated that youtube gives me the choice to say "don't show me this" and ignores it, than I would be by not having a choice in the first place.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but no connection to YouTube)
Some is the keyword here. As you say youtube's huge library is a hard thing to compete with. Still I've found some good content there and I make it a point to look at peertube first to reward those who are there with my eyes.
[0] https://mastodon.social/
[1] https://lemmy.world/
Now when I go on mobile Safari and want to switch off 'video previews' (for the thousandth time), and I tap the switch, it stays switched on but the 'Settings saved' thing comes up on the bottom. You have to tap it again to actually switch it off. I wonder if that's a bug or intentional too now...
The worst casualty of the current design is the search. You get three videos before it inserts completely irrelevant and unrelated algorithmic recommendations. No? Fuck off? Do what I tell you to do!
Maybe a good opportunity to remember that you watching the videos you want to watch is actually just a workaround Google suffers through in the YouTube product.
They have to do it so that you come to the site, but it costs them money and makes it harder for them to optimize the revenue they get from your eyeballs.
Strycturally, their goal is to push the line as far as they can, and they spend a lot of product design and engineering effort to do so. They're only going to get better at it as time goes by.
And of course this principle doesn't just apply to YouTube, but at pretty much all media sites once they get large enough to pivot from growing their audience to optimizing its profitability.
It used to be a Google mantra that "focus on the user and all else will follow." They are so far beyond that they've wrapped around. They actively hate users now.
All Google really cares about is making advertisers happy. Literally nothing else registers as a priority.
Unfortunately this seems to be what people want.
There's plenty of YouTube competitors (Substack, Patreon, Vimeo, Twitch etc.) Unfortunately, they just don't have the traction of YouTube
And I would say its mostly not YouTube actually producing the content. They are responsible for the "reward mechanism" of clickbaity/shock content driving views, and in return, more views meaning more money for the creators. But I would really like to hear of another model. If YouTube didn't do it, someone else assuredly will. And traditional media is/was barely any better.
I think it's more fair to say that this is a behavior that is profitable to exploit if you care more about making money than what you do to your customers' or society's wellbeing.
This has become increasingly annoying for me. Sometimes I want to find a reference I saw a few years ago on some topic. Even if I know the speaker, the topic, sometimes even the title, I can't find the video. I get a handful of results vaguely related to the search terms and then a never ending list of garbage not even slightly related to my search terms.
I really want my own memory augmentation. A personal tracker for all of the content I have ever consumed in any form, indexed and searchable (like in a personal Elastic Search cluster). The trouble is, I only want it for like 1% of the content I have consumed. The modern web is so hostile in general that aggregating any kind of data about my own usage is so onerous that it might as well be impossible. The friction they have purposefully created worked exactly as they intended.
But you can use Gemini for better search, recommendations and you can play videos right in the chat window. At the very least replace search and recommendations with the model. You can explain what you want to explore and guide the recommender much better than on YT. There are no ads in Gemini itself.
Worst part about this is you search for food recipes and after the first 5 results there are gross out videos, "popping" videos, kids dying in an elevator video.
I'm about to eat dinner here... I know Neal Mohan REAAAALLLLY wants people to watch the video about the kids dying in the elevator because he keeps putting it in the trio of videos that show up when you search unrelated to your search but can he not wait till I'm doing a search that isn't food related to try and make me watch gross out content if he's so desperate to make me watch it.
Report it every time, makes no difference it all has millions of views so they'll keep doing it.
As a former user of 16:10, I feel your pain, though.
https://files.catbox.moe/vzo65c.JPG
There's probably a rule against apps impersonating the OS on the App Store, one could only wish for Apple using a more heavy hand against this type of "experience".