Posted by i5heu 5 hours ago
I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.
But apart from ignoring me when I say I’m not interested in whole genres of ‘fun’ videos, it also resets the streaming quality to the lowest setting every single day and then hides the quality setting deep inside a menu with several fiddly clicks.
And this isn’t for my benefit of course: I can easily stream 4K video to my screens. It’s to shave a few cents off each stream and max the gouging.
It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.
All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!
Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.
Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”
Whenever an online community is anthropomorphized as an individual, it looks hypocritical. The only groups that don’t look hypocritical are monocultural backwaters of groupthink, permabans, and self-editing.
[0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ [1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV
> Click More next to the video title.
> Select Don't recommend channel .
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en
Depending on your particular "preference constellation's weights" (over which you have no direct control), you can, in fact, be shown videos from that channel again.
Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.
As such, I’ve simply stopped interacting with googles recommendation systems and most of googles content delivery systems. Including using YouTube as minimally as possible.
The web-browser is the least aggressive and I think I haven’t even seen them on Apple TV.
The iPhone App is the most egregious offender of not respecting the request though, it seems to almost not care at all, and now the thumbnails on the home screen have started autoplaying (with audio) and I can’t find how to disable it (older instructions seem to be invalid).
They have all the content though; so I have no choice but to deal with this, until a good enough competitor comes along and my favourite youtube channels upload to both places.
Do you want $foo?
Yes | Ask again later
I understand why FB/IG do it; I _occasionally_ give in and get sucked into a couple. But that NEVER happens to me with YT.
Seriously though, do any of our German / French compatriots here on HN have different experience of corporations, versus the USA's "maximizing profit" purpose, given the "corporate social responsibility" mandate of those countries?
Greed (opportunism) is human and I wonder if that's "better" in the Germany or French corporate-world?
Germany has unions and works council. It is required by law that companies allow works council to exist and if they exist they get certain rights.
> In Germany, they serve two functions. The first is called co-determination, through which works councils elect members of the board of directors of German companies. The second is called participation, and means that works councils must be consulted about specific issues and have the right to make proposals to management. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany )
Also Germany has good amounts of regulations for certain issues (sometimes too much regulation but oh well).
And Germany has many options to participate in local and regional politics that prevent the worst offenders.
But in the end a company is still a company that is forced to act in a way that maximizes it's profits. I think from my perspective we do not have such wild predator companies like you see them in the US but there are certainly a few very dubious things going on.
Except maybe the gGmbH and Vereine (clubs) which are companies and semi company structures that must act for the common good and without profit interest.
And one funny thing is that in Germany stock companies are required to act to the "best interests of the company" and not the "best interests of the stock holder" - in German law the company includes the worker, the future of the company and social aspects.
1a: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
1b: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...
Shorts are hidden and redirected if you land on one externally by default, and it _was_ also restoring the sort by Upload date filter UI, until YouTube went and killed that in the API ;_;
How do I do that without an entire addon? This pink gradient irritates me so much.
I feel like the only fight back is boycotting.
> doesn't work for shorts anymore, on Firefox
I do get shorts in search results, but if I click they do not load (the audio plays but no video). For the purposes it fills, that blocks them enough for me.
// ==UserScript==
// @name No Shorts
// @match https://www.youtube.com/shorts/*
// @match https://www.facebook.com/reel/*
// ==/UserScript==
window.document.body.innerHTML = ''