Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
YouTube Doesn't “Get It”
84 points by wankle on Jan 16, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 131 comments
Today I'm signing out of YouTube and here's why...

You know how you click the X to disable Shorts and it says "Shelf will be hidden for 30 days" but then it pops up again in like a week or less?

Or how when you X one of those panels on some topic you have no interest in and it says "Got it, message hidden" then pops back up in a few days?

If YouTube is using AI then why is it so demonstrably, phenomenally bad at learning X means NO; not [Ok not today]?

If YT does use AI, and if it's AI is powering any other parts of Google's (Alphabet's soup) then could it explain why all Google products suck at remembering basic preferences we tell them?

Hey Google AI, NO means NO. Clicking X means NO. No as in forever NO, not just today or the next few days.



The AI is not the reason for the poor experience. The poor experience is caused by misguided policies excessively pushing for features (like Shorts). An AI would have toned it down long ago.

I also think Shorts is garbage, especially for a desktop/laptop. The reason I use YouTube is BECAUSE it's not TikTok. Not every service must emulate every other service.

Also, I am still bitter about the missing dislike stats. They were very useful for deciding among tutorials or courses, and avoiding misleading ones.


Shorts is led by a former VP for Alexa Experiences. If Alexa's incessant "By the way ..." notifications are any guide, the pushing will probably continue indefinitely.


I actually like shorts. YouTube is the only platform with this form of video that isn't always a like for like repost of tiktok content.

What I don't like about shorts is how they've been integrated.

They either appear in the subscriptions page so they're treated the same way as normal creators content or they appear in the 'shorts' tab but alongside other creators so I can't just watch my subscriptions

What I would like:

- option to show just videos, just shorts or both in my /subscriptions views and playlists (and while we're at it hide premiers and lives!)

- When filtered to show just shorts it says click here to view all from just your subscriptions

- the option to view the algorithm recommended shorts as they currently have and the option to view just my subscriptions (as tiktok does) in the shorts tab

I've actually written my own crappy playlist manager that flags shorts and let's me treat them separately which is how I've been coping so far!


> Also, I am still bitter about the missing dislike stats. They were very useful for deciding among tutorials or courses, and avoiding misleading ones.

The Firefox plugin "Return Youtube Dislike" does exactly that.


Where does it get its data?


https://returnyoutubedislike.com/faq

"A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior."

You're retrieving like/dislike data from that site's API. And when you set a dislike, it gets sent to Google AND returnyoutubedislike.com

Given I watch Youtube in a FF container not logged in, I'm not worried at all. But I could see how some people could be concerned .


A problem I see here is that it extrapolates the statistics of users users of the extension, onto all users of Youtube.

Fortunately the users of the extensions are most probably better informed than the average Youtube user. However, if the downvotes are more "accurate" (more deserved) because of that, it means they are also more accurate for new videos as opposed to old videos.

So I suspect new Youtube videos might have more downvotes than old Youtube videos. Perhaps we could find some reuploads of all Youtube videos and compare the downvotes…


You always have heads of products who feel they need to do something to make their name known or feel like they're doing their job. They did more and the product is clearly worse.

What they needed to do was nothing, but thats out of line with restless employees.


Shorts is becoming pretty addictive to me. They might actually be working for others. Also, I noticed that it actually autogenerated shorts out of old short videos I had posted.


There are a lot of reasons that I do not like Shorts on YT but the biggest one is that hotkey controls for Forward-scrub Back-scrub etc. are either different or simply not available.

Why on earth would they bifurcate the UX like this?!!?!


They're influencing user behavior and psychology. Just like instagram and tiktok do. In the name of convenience, of course! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18429078 (and lots of others)


Strangely I vastly prefer youtube's short recommendations tiktok's. Guess they know more about me.


It seems to consist of a collection of recent channels you have visited. Sometimes I check out a new channel and the shorts for that channel start to appear in the mix until I watch enough other channels to get the original channel out of my "queue".


Business goals trump good UX. Their executives have decided that you will like the TikTokification or else. Google is certainly more than capable of saving the state of a “close this” flag..


I am skeptical even the bottom line gains from it.

Whenever I click a Short, I am extremely annoyed. The scroll wheel is repurposed to skip the video, rather than the typical desktop interaction of going to the description and comments. When that happens, I close the tab and visit some place other than YouTube.


> I am skeptical even the bottom line gains from it.

By the time the parent company realises there's no money to be made hosting endless amounts of stupid, repetitive and crappy content aimed at attention-deficient children, bonuses would've been paid and promotions would've been offered - the latter is what drives this crap, not necessarily some hypothetical bottom-line impact that's hard to measure and easy to excuse away should it not pan out.


One thing weird about shorts is how Youtube shows you a horizontal list of shorts it thinks you will like, and I generally do (for me they are recipes and health related).

Yet when you click into one and scroll through them, instead of showing you the other shorts on the recommended list, it shows you general trending shorts.

Always thought that was weird. In other words you have to click one, then navigate back and click into each other recommendation.


I find that bizarre and frustrating too. Why even bother to recommend things if they presume the trending content is good enough for us?


The eyes they care about are on mobile, the desktop experience is an afterthought.


> Whenever I click a Short, I am extremely annoyed.

Why do you keep clicking it?


Because they get inserted into the timeline like normal videos, or maybe there's just one that you really want to watch.

By design, it's hard to avoid them entirely.


Ublock makes it trivial to block the panel. I have a rule set to automatically hide it as if it were an ad (which, in some sense, it is)


That's cool. Pity you can't do this in the mobile app...


I recommend NewPipe instead of the mobile app.


> or maybe there's just one that you really want to watch

So in those cases you want them to be there?


I did it like, three times ever. I was curious about the content at some point. Then I remembered why I never click it.


Wonder if their focus on becoming more TikTok like will open the door to TikTok having the opportunity to take a meaningful chunk of YouTube’s long form video market.


Just put some money behind the effort to make tiktok illegal, solves that problem


Except that effort may well make much of Youtube/Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat illegal as well, at least in their current format.

At least, I hope it does.

E: You'd think Google's money would be most effectively spent trying to manipulate that outcome though.


> Except that effort may well make much of Youtube/Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat illegal as well

It won't, because the primary rationale for banning TikTok in the US is driven by the CCP-related fear-mongering (whether it is justified or not is a separate question), with a little dash of other common "scary" flavors mixed-in (privacy, algorithms shaping your feed, etc.).

As long as YT/IG/Snapchat aren't companies based in China, the hypothetical banhammer hitting TikTok won't even touch them.


YT/IG/Snapchat also are ostensibly NOT state-run enterprises.

(please note the use of the word "ostensibly" as a caveat before you try to remind me about The Twitter Files)


Agreed. Which is why I think it is a ridiculous notion that making TikTok illegal would somehow outlaw YT/FB/IG/Snap as well.


Valid points - I should clarify what I was describing.

I've seen arguments that instead of targeting TikTok specifically, we should create a nationwide law similar to GDPR or CCPA, which would also impact other social media.

I tend to agree with this stance, though I don't see it being likely to go through unfortunately.


I don’t believe Google or and social media company or streaming company is lobbying for the outlawing of their competitors. Or do you have other information that the rest of us don’t have?

They are not that shortsighted.


> I don’t believe Google or and social media company or streaming company is lobbying for the outlawing of their competitors

I think the GP might be alluding to:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/30/faceboo...


>Google is certainly more than capable of saving the state of a “close this” flag..

With the new generation of devs I'm not too sure anymore.


I don't think it is a business goal, but it is absolutely the case that somebody is getting a good bonus if the shorts takes of.

Which they might do if people could actually make them.


IMO the only page worth visiting on Youtube is https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions

Only the channels you've subscribed to, in chronological order. Sadly it does include shorts in that - but at least they're not a dedicated section of the page.


Absolutely. At this point in time, the "Home" page is hot garbage, which seems to focus on showing me either videos I've already watched or videos that I'll never watch.


Recently i installed a neat extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/df-youtube/ it allows you to hide elements of the UI, including the Home feed, the recommendations, shorts and even the comment section. Very useful if you can't resist the urge to scroll like me


I use this uBlock filter to hide all the shorts garbage. https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts


I did the same, but removed the last rule that hides short videos that might not be shorts


I also have a feed of subscriptions via RSS and one thing I have noticed happens quite a lot is that a video might actually get hidden and only appear in the RSS. That same video however will often appear as the top video on the home page, as if you just "missed" it and once you go back to subscriptions its present.

Youtube is messing with the subscriptions page too unfortunately but it remains the most useful page its just not as good as it should be due to the hiding of videos.


I use some bookmarklets I made up either highlight or remove shorts from the subs page! Also deals with premiers and lives. It's not always right though but it helps!

https://gist.github.com/apricot13/0d8f0ea32138e2d36e6f5ff3de...


yeah but what about content discovery?


The recommendations, main home page, search etc are still there if you want them - and you can get recommendations from friends, family, and people on other social media.

Personally I watch perhaps 20 minutes of video per day, and I've got enough subscriptions to give me that much content, so I don't really need content discovery. Or at least, not the type of content discovery Youtube has to offer me!


Show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome.

The incentive is likely engagement and that comes at a cost of satisfaction.

Computers are great at following directions like your preferences for being shown certain types of content or disabling functionality you don't want to use. Yet every platform somehow "forgets" your preferences regularly.


I’m surprised YouTube is getting all the heat here.

User-hostile product design has become the norm in the industry, _especially_ among FAANG/MAMA. Twitter, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, all streaming sites (anything that makes you scroll to find the “continue watching” list), arguably Apple, Nextdoor, anything that uses an algorithmic feed and won’t let you permanently enable chronological feed, anything that prioritizes “engagement” in a coercive way (so all social media including YouTube), etc.

I used to aspire to work at a company like Microsoft or Google, but now I’m so glad I dodged that bullet. I care too much about making a _positive_ impact on the lives/experiences of users. I also have values that don’t tolerate industrial scale fraud and abuse (and yes, promising relief for 30 days and withdrawing it after 7 is clearly fraudulent).

I hope more engineers would be willing to consider their role in making the world a worse place, and consider working for a company that doesn’t actively harm their users. But it seems most engineers will do anything in exchange for a total comp package bigger than the next guy.

P.S. To the user-hostile PMs who aren’t swayed by a values argument consider this: if you let off the gas just 5% and allowed some breathing room for objectives other than user/engagement growth this quarter, you might spare yourself the PR/reputation hit that lead to things like hostile HN posts, popular support for antitrust enforcement, and executives being called to testify.


Why do people go to YouTube? To be entertained, or to learn something.

The more videos you watch, isn’t that a strong signal that the user’s needs are served better?


Only in a paper clip factory view of the world.

Situations where the simplistic PM dashboard metrics model breaks down:

- Users watch more videos than they want because they can’t find the right ones (maybe because the dislike button was reviewed)

- The user went to complete a task, then got distracted by a bad recommendation

- The user has a gambling addiction and is being served ads for gambling content.

- The user went to learn something but was served highly engaging but false content

Viewership is one signal among many.


- the user fat fingered the next video button on mobile while trying to skip ahead 30 seconds

Drives me nuts.


Was trying to shrink or enlarge the screen but hit one of the end-of-vid recommendations. Now all I get on the YT home screen are recommendations for more of those fat finger vids.


The part of YouTube I hate most is Mr Beast. I can’t get rid of the guy. He creates new channels just as quickly as I can block them from my recommendations. I’m sure that is a strategy to force himself in front of people. I wish there was a way to say that I don’t want any Mr Beast channels, I don’t want any Mr Beast collaborations, and I don’t want any Mr Beast reactions.


This is the first i'm hearing of MrBeast having multiple channels so I looked it up. Turns out he has 5 channels total which includes his main channel.

The creation dates of his channels are as follows:

Feb 19, 2012

Apr 24, 2016

Apr 7, 2020

Aug 21, 2020

Sep 17, 2020

How often are you blocking? MrBeast is one of the most popular Youtuber(I think he is the second largest American channel) so he is going to be a large part of their platform whether you like it or not.


He's a clickbaity youtuber profiting on 'free money scams' I hope he gets banned.


When youtube used to let me report malicious ads, it used to tell me those ads and channels were based out of India... and youtube has had a long-standing issue of not vetting their ads for scams. If it's not MrBeast, it's the "how to get a free Coke mini-fridge" (or Louis Vuitton handbags, or Milwaukee tools).


How are they scams? Assuming you're talking about the videos where he gives people free money


He also paid an advertisement (still running on youtube I assuming, seen it within the last week) "Anyone who visits this page get $1200" or something in that range..


Are you sure that it was him promoting it? Scams like "Send $$$ to Musk/Bezos/MrBeast and get 2x $$$ back" are extremely common but they're just that, scams by random unaffiliated scammers.


I wrote a tamper monkey script that filters out YouTube videos that contain certain keywords, with the main one being any video that contains the word "react".

I'm perfectly capable of reacting to a video myself, the meta-aspect of watching someone else react to another video has a veneer of Bob Saget all over it.

It also helps that I'm a svelte guy myself. :)


My settings remain stable and my recommendations are reasonable. If anything I have the opposite problem where I won't watch videos on a certain topic or from a specific channel for a few weeks and then Youtube thinks I never want to see it ever again, even if I've been manually looking for it.


> I won't watch videos on a certain topic or from a specific channel for a few weeks and then Youtube thinks I never want to see it ever again

For me it's kind of the converse issue. I watch 2 or 3 videos on a topic and then YouTube thinks I'm obsessed with that topic and nothing else.


I have the same experience but I will also say that designing algo’s and UX to find the right balance between exploring new things and exploiting a topic you’re interested in is no small feat. And doing it effectively for a very diverse user base where your intent in the moment cannot be inferred, compounds the complexity.


This is my experience. Sometimes I think it actually makes me avoid clicking on videos that cover new topics. Especially if it's something gross or weird I'm about to click on out of morbid curiosity. It's like, "hmmm.... do I really want to be spammed with recs for videos on this for the next three weeks?"


It’s very annoying to me that google won’t recommend topics I was into years ago.


Why? If you haven’t showed interested in years, why waste limited pixels when it is highly unlikely to resonate?


A lot of the reason I stopped watching content on those topics is they stopped recommending it. Instead they keep trying to get me to watch the same video over and over


Or serve stuff I already watched. Or gets obsessed over a new channel just because I happened to watch 3 videos I was interested in out of their 50 that I was not


The "Remind me later" pattern is completely user-hostile and is getting more and more common.

The way in which we communicate with our software is through these buttons. In a sense, it is our 'voice' to click something. The software uniquely can re-cast your voice into whatever it wants you to say. In a way, it is a sort of mind control. A nudge to think the way they want you to think.

The software that we use to communicate with our world needs to be our own agent. Anything else is morally wrong.


It's not more common, it's sadly the default everywhere for at least 5 years if not longer.

Constantly being nagged with modals that offers no definite "No" option while trying all the time to shove you content or settings provider/developer sees as more "accurate" (for own benefits) is a form of abuse.


NewPipe is a 3rd party Android YouTube client. You might like it, or an alternative.

Online Services and their client interfaces are ideally separated. This removes a conflict of interest and allows for client software to serve one master, the user.


YouTube changes my country/language to whatever place I'm at the moment and starts giving me "recommended" local stuff.

At least twice a week for the past 5 or so years, I have gone to settings -> change country/language, save. That's HUNDREDS of times I've told YT that I want English, US-based content. And it just doesn't get it ...


Agreed, YouTube homepage and recommendations have been garbage for YEARS.

Since around 2018, to my recollection. I just keep getting the same crap recommendations day after day. It's like, dude, you've suggested the same random clip from Mask of Zorro to me for GOD KNOWS WHAT REASON to me for the past several months, and I haven't clicked on it once. Don't think it's time to generate some fresh recs that might induce me, as a user, to click and watch stuff?


I just clicked on a KPOP video link 4-5 years ago once. JUST once. Youtube is still insistively showing me ads for KPOP tutorials despite I havent interacted with ANY KPOP content since then.


Ban all of those channels with “dont recommend channel”. I had this when I clicked on some video ranting about horrible mobile game ads, and youtube decided that I am interested in playing shitty mobile games.


It’s not just YouTube, the Google mobile app feed has the same issues. It’s like they take one thing you read or watched and then try to throw anything even tangentially related at you ad nauseam and don’t really listen when you say “not interested”


Start using “dont recommend channel” option massively.


I have done that a few times, but it's tiring. I don't want to have to play whack-a-mole with it as much as their system seems to demand.


I spent about an hour doing it in total and youtube has been fine ever since. Any video that isn't along the lines I want to watch and I just drop the entire channel, no thinking. Clickbait? Then I'm not interested in your channel. Cute animal video? Nope, wont watch anything from you, etc.

Its well worth the effort if you watch youtube a lot. You can still find them in search, just wont get any recommends from them any more, so you wont be missing anything that you explicitly want to find.


> Cute animal video? Nope, wont watch anything from you, etc.

;___;


Because when it was A/B tested, a non-functional feature-disable button lead to greater user engagement with the feature than the other options.

/s but not really.

edit: also 'No' means 'Remind Me Later'.


So anyways, do you want to start a free trial for YouTube premium? No? It's been no for the last how many years straight? Okay, I'll just ask next time your open the app.


I wonder if someone has started a list of tools for our field which are not adversarial to the user intention like this…


I find most “suggestions” to be bad distractions that I am best guarded from. Custom CSS helped me block them on my laptop, but on my TV and phone I now just watch everything on Plex[1] instead.

It’s a lot of work, but Plex looks beautiful and helps me stay disciplined about what I’m watching, like a sacred space on my TV and phone. I download YouTube videos, movies, and TV shows and organize them on Plex, so I don’t have to hold my breath through ads and suggestions to watch them.

[1]: http://plex.tv


Interesting thought. If I sign up then sign in, can I change the Dark Theme to a Light Theme or are we held captive to a Dark Theme like Amazon Prime and Netflix? That could be a strong potential alternative site thanks!


It’s probably stuck on Dark Theme for now. Maybe check out other local media server apps:

https://github.com/Protektor-Desura/Archon/wiki/Compare-Medi...


> If YouTube is using AI then why is it so demonstrably, phenomenally bad at learning X means NO;

Because unfortunately most users are not consistent in their choices. They might say that they don't like shorts of teenagers doing stupid dance moves, but if they continuously click on those videos when presented, the AI will learn to ignore your explicit choice and go with your implicit one; that you like shit videos. (Not you, specifically, but people in general :)


YouTube’s current front-end is indeed unbearable. I’m nowadays exclusively using Invidious [1]. It is minimalist, fast, open source, has no ads, and most importantly, has no dark patterns.

[1] https://docs.invidious.io/instances/


Or you click on "don't recommend this channel" yet you still get that trash recommended.


You don't mean Facebook now, right? I'm not even joking, they use the exactly same tactics of showing you the exact same (usually fringe) contents regardless how many times you tell them to f*off.


Have you tried the "Channel Blocker" web browser add-on? It lets you block channels and it then hides them even if YT shows them.


Yes I've seen that happen as well, forgot to mention it thanks!


Or worse, they start recommending it more often :\


> Or how when you X one of those panels on some topic you have no interest in and it says "Got it, message hidden" then pops back up in a few days?

And

> Clicking X means NO.

While clicking X might mean No for all circumstances to you, that doesn’t mean it a the same for everyone else.

To handle more variety, you really want at two affordances: “never” and “not now”.

Note, when a user turns a feature off (your “never” case), now whenever you change that feature all the users who turned it off will now be left behind, even if the change or improvement would be appealing to them. So now you need a way to communicate the changes (even though they said “don’t show this feature”) and a way to change that preference.


I wish apps had some kind of history for the things you said "no" to. Everything is constantly getting in user's way with some pop-ups, usually specifically to try to get me to do or agree to something I don't want, that I'm conditioned to blindly find the non-highlighted button and click it. Especially as these pop-ups usually come just as I visit the site to get something done. Sometimes (often, actually) my brain realizes that the dialog contained (or may have contained) something interesting/actually relevant only after it's already gone.

I found the "red notification dot" works really well. It's nagging enough that I will take a look at it, but doesn't get in my way like a pop-up. I can first get my task done, then look at what it's about, instead of having to choose between interrupting my task and swatting away this obnoxious wall in my face. If you try to force something on me, I'm already much more likely to hate and not want it.


The worst popups are the tutorial-ish ones for new feutures. They might be multiple clicks.


I like that. A Notification Center vs. modal reminders…


Google is somehow incredibly bad at these sorts of products. They have no vision at all if it's not a super technical thing. They just plain suck at consumer products that aren't maps or Gmail.


I was surprised to learn that downvotes are a positive signal for YouTube to show videos to more users.

I think YouTube is betting strong on “it’s not about what you like, but what you end up watching”


Yes, the worst thing you can do to a video is stop and close it ASAP. Any interaction adds to its value.


No, impossible task for now. Because in enterprise world, even adding a simple if then else clause is impossible for current sprint. The worst part is, the code is hard to understand enough that the task could be deprioritized until later, undefined future.


The BlockTube extension can make shorts disappear. In the options, check "Block Youtube Shorts videos". I also block all videos under 59 seconds, since they're effectively shorts. You can also block channels and never see them again.

Combine this with normal adblock, SponsorBlock (to skip the mid-video junk), and Unhook (to hide junk features of the platform), and the site becomes much more useful.

This doesn't solve: the fact that YT will still dip from an endless supply of dreck to keep your recommendations annoying, search results being full of click bait and repeated results, and the fact that watching hours of video on YT is at best marginally better than being a TV addict.


Once YouTube Vanced broke I couldn't be bothered to go through the annoying sequence of steps to reinstall it again. Now I've been off YouTube for 10 months, I never browse for content or peruse the feed anymore.

I don't miss it.


For people looking for an addon to block all the garbage and make youtube a little less hostile: "RYS — Remove YouTube Suggestions" for good and chrome (and on github). It has gotten quite sophisticated.


Don't forget about their search engine. This inexplicable change killed the entire discovery and learning process for me. They now present me with up to 12 videos that were "blessed" by the algorithm, then trim the search results with no way to see the rest, replaced with "Other videos that are completely unrelated, but you might be interested in".

When I search for a certain niche topic I want to see everything that matches my search query, not more and certainly not less.


Just use a YT frontend like Invidious [1] and you're free from whatever shenanigans they pull. You can subscribe to whatever you want without their algorithms or cadre of trained gerbils or whatever they use getting a whiff of it. You don't need a YT account for this as it keeps its own subscription lists on your own server or that of whichever instance you use.

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious


I love YouTube, but the shorts feature is pushing really harmful content at their users. Even though I exclusively subscribe to food and skiing channels, every fourth video on shorts is really vile stuff from Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate. Giving it the "thumbs down" appears to do nothing about this.

It reminds me of 2015 when the FB algo was being hijacked by all sorts of shadowy political interests to push weird agendas.


They have been showing me prison and public fights.


Yup, I, too, hate being reminded to clean my room.


You know… If you’re talking and they’re not listening, then stop talking.


I am quite annoyed that youtube app always defaults to low quality for me, even though I ve set multiple times my preferences to be 1080p


https://github.com/iv-org/invidious


YouTube logic:

- I see he liked this video. Great. Let's recommend watching it again for a few months.

- I see he pressed "Don't show, already seen", but, hey, he can't be honest! Let's ignore this.

- I see he's back again. Let's feed his nostalgia by offering him all previously watched videos!

- I see he hid shorts. NOBODY HIDES MY SHORTS!


- I see he said no. Surely, he can't be serious. He'll change his mind in a day.

- I see he's chosen English from Paris. That's rude!

- I see he dislikes this video. Let's keep it secret.

- He must see my viral shorts! Who wants shorts shorts? Everyone loves shorts shorts!


Another find that I dislike about shorts and to me makes no sense: if I'm casting to my TV, clicking on a short asks me to disable the connection, instead of casting it to the TV like a regular (but vertical) video. WHYYYYY??


Google is not customer focused. They're much more like Microsoft than the old "do no evil" Google. Google only cares about raising stock price and are mostly a navel gazing advertising company,


As far as I'm aware, there's a number of browser extensions out there that change the default YouTube experience for the better. Might be worth looking into of the customizations available fits your needs.


I hate that videos appear in my feed long before they are available. I don't want to load a video only to discover it's coming in 48 hours. Just add the video to my feed 48 hours later.


I like to pretend there is a counter somewhere that is noting down every time I explicitly hide Shorts from my feed, and when it gets to a certain number they will realize I don't want them.


They realize you don't want them, they just see it as a bug to fix, and not a reason to quit showing them to you.


Youtube music offers me a "free trial" several times a day.

I "skip trial".

There's no option to permanently not be bothered by being offered a "free trial".

It infuriates me.


I'm just tired of seeing commercials for the Ridge wallet, Baerskin hoodie, and Sasquatch soaps


>I'm just tired of seeing commercials

If only there was something you could do about that.


those are paid promotion inside the video, not an ad


https://sponsor.ajay.app/ Sponsor block.


youtube is a site that oscillates between being a social network and not being. and for the most part they choose not to be. and maybe that's why it's constantly growing and unrivaled. they don't care about things like personalization.


Complete the sentence: You are not the customer, you are the __________.


I really dislike youtube shorts because it's literally unusable on desktop. And it always pushes political content (mostly right wing but also religious stuff) like "x destroys sjw" where someone giving a speach starts "roasting" someone from the audience for their supposedly ridiculous views.

There are also too many videos of people like Andrew Tate and short movie clips. The "funny" part: I still get to see them weeks later even though I disliked the videos.

It seems to me that many Youtube creators do not want to create shorts. However, the algorithm for shorts seems a bit flawed too:

* On Instagram for example I get to see videos in different languages (which does not happen really often on Youtube, even though I speak these languages and watch youtube videos in these languages)

* I get to see much more "crappy" content with like 10 likes

* Some videos I have seen on shorts were a quite disturbing, such a thing did not happen on reels


Youtube absolutely gets it; the profit increases, meaning it's successful at optimizing the most important metric set by the capitalistic system we have the marvelous pleasure to partake in involuntarily.


We do have a wonderful economic system and I'm proud of it. Yet, I no longer feel incentivized to continue watching and throwing Ad dollars their way associated with my personal login, because they habitually ignore what I tell them I don't want, including in multiple Feedback posts using their feedback tool.


YouTube Posts - go away.




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: