They have ruined recommendations, too, a long time ago. They ruined search, too. If you search for something, it will give you maybe 5 results at best, and as you scroll down, the rest is totally unrelated to the searched term. YouTube has been ruined a long time ago.
It's very annoying if I do want to see that channel, just not THAT video. You also have to be careful with that button because there's no way to selectively unblock channels. There's a feature to undo your entire Do Not Recommend / Not Interested history but not to undo it for an individual channel / video.
The ridiculous amount of ads is what’s made me basically not use YouTube unless I really really need to.
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.
Well, just pay for the subscription. It gives you youtube music as well, and you can share it with several other people. It just a few bucks a month, totally worth it.
Check out the browser extension SponsorBlock which automatically skips over the length of such inline sponsorships (database is maintained manually but does a great job).
Odd take. YouTube has just about anything you might be interested in, in abundance. Even if it is "mostly crap" there would probably still be more non-crap than you could consume in your lifetime.
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.
You seem to suggest that you have a device which does not allow you to watch YouTube videos on it without ads. Is that the case?
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.
I have the YouTube app on iOS. I never found a way to remove ads other than paying (lol). Then again - I didn’t look too hard as by then I’d already realized 99% of YouTube content is crap anyway. Sure I could install a combination of apps that would let me watch ad-free. But at this point I’m weaned off - better off without the damn thing.
Absolutely. People waste their lives away watching it, pointing and clicking for the advertisers, but hey, at least they're more clever than the slobs watching TV, right?
I'm pretty sure Google knows what they're doing regarding addiction. They have all the engagement metrics and train their AI to optimize for that.
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.
Ha! So I am not alone. I thought it was just me as I have search history off and all privacy toggles switched to maximum off.
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.
From my experience, YouTube recommendations on Apple TV suck compared to the home feed you get when you open YT on iOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I opened YouTube on mobile after a long time, it actually felt like what YouTube used to be with a wide variety of new and interesting videos (plus added shorts and posts).
I think Google needs to look into optimizing it better for those of us who prefer watching YouTube on TV.
I’ve noticed the stuff they show by platform is pretty different. On TV the home page is mostly 30-60 minute videos. While on my phone it’s mostly 5 minutes or YouTube shorts. So it’s not surprising TV usage is more when you watch much longer videos.
If that's the case, it's surprising they keep pushing Shorts so hard on the Apple TV app, because watching vertical Shorts videos on a TV is a uniquely terrible experience.
What’s funny and sad is that the evolution of YouTube toward a chum feed that pulls people toward rubbish may have broken some peoples addiction but overall it has probably increased it.
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.
A slightly different perspective for your consideration:
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.
What I can't understand are those videos of 20-something year old nobodies, who apparently got plastic surgery to look like waxy, sticky 40 year old ladies with huge lips, sitting in their car, talking about nothing. No matter what history and features I turn off, no matter how many times I click "No, I don't want this" they end up in my feed. These videos must make a fortune to these companies somehow.
Works fine (read: addictively) here. Have you ever tried marking videos and channels as not of interest? Maybe you're doing something that effectively prevents Google from profiling you "properly" to then "properly" hook you in with recomms?
> Have you ever tried marking videos and channels as not of interest?
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.
Hiding an entire channel should at least work, that much I was able to directly confirm.
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 can't even watch anything anymore. It tells me to sign in, but I don't want to sign in. The great YouTube uubiquitous video host of the web appears to be dying.
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 don't understand Shorts. My primary use case for YouTube is putting some 20-30 min video on the TV while I eat. I barely watch YouTube in any other context.
I may be unusual but there's an entire subreddit for "mealtime videos" so this use case must be common.
What did it for me was disabling my history (a setting). Consequently your YT homepage is blank and it doesn’t suggest any shorts. You can maintain a kind of history by liking videos or just via the browser itself.
Their changes are so bad that someone made a browser extension to jump straight to your subscriptions so you never see the homepage (my watch history was off already and I didn't like the homepage telling me to turn it on).
I get value from not having to look at content I find annoying and uninteresting, or at least avoid the negative value of having that stuff on the screen.
What's even more interesting is that if you turn off watch history, they disable the home feed altogether. They just give up trying to show you anything, which has been great for keeping me off YouTube.
The oddest part to me is among the popular videos and videos from channels I watched, there's the odd 300 views video that is somewhat distantly related to my watch history on the frontpage. Is the algorithm trying to give a chance to small channels?
I have a very different experience. For me the algorithm works pretty well. And I use youtube a lot since many years. Also have the paid subscription so no ads anymore (beside sponsor ads of course).
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 was going to comment this. My experience matches yours, the home page shows videos I may be interested on watch, and the subscriptions page shows videos from my subscriptions. Watch something new and you get related videos for a couple days, but ignore those and they disappear. I also like the occasional videos from old subscriptions or old watched videos, reminders from time to time.
I do not have the paid subscription though, but I do use only android (never web).
Even better, get a VPN and you'll not be able to watch anything without logging in! :)
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.
Well, you could subscribe to YouTube channels using RSS and watch videos at your own pace. A decent content can strip ads and sponsored sections out for you.
I still watch a lot of youtube. I'm subscribed to lots of youtubers providing me with more interesting stuff than I can manage to watch. I'm not aware of a better platform for watching stuff like that.
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.
this is what happens at the the bottom of the feed when you binge whatch a channel or a certain type of content for a few days: https://imgur.com/zHytexT
105 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadOn 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.
There are few great creators without them, but these ranks are shrinking fast.
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.
Youtube Music (Premium too) -> RiMusic
13.99 -> free
EDIT: also skips sponsor segments.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it’s a weird variant of the dude monologuing about some stupid political bullshit in a car so he looks important fad.
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.
When I choose to watch, it's stuff I truly enjoy, not algorithmic sludge.
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 have YouTube watch history disabled and when I search for something I usually get a few "lines" of search results filled with "Shorts".
I may be unusual but there's an entire subreddit for "mealtime videos" so this use case must be common.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-short...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ytmysubs/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lfoephndcoilebphhdb...
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).
Every video is just this now:
Or you could just do the healthy thing and walk away from YouTube. Plenty of better things to do with one’s time!
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.
What alternatives are there?
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.
Something like this? https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
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.