Posted by i5heu 17 hours ago
Whether I'm using a real computer or a BFT or an iPad or I'm watching a something with my pocket supercomputer while bored on a plane: It's horizontal. This is simply how I do it, how I have always done it, and how I am likely to always do it.
YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this viewing method.
In addition: Nearly all of the videos I watch are longer than 3 minutes, and YouTube Shorts aren't compatible with this either.
Whether I'm watching a video because I want to be entertained or to learn something new, I want to be involved with it and focused on it. I am very capable of making time to do so when it behooves me.
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Anyway, to answer your question: I have no idea if my YouTube Shorts recommendations are good or not good. I don't partake. I don't need empty, <3-minute dopamine hits in my life.
Everyone else has listed a bunch already. Here's yet another, the pointlessly limited UI.
There are no play controls to back, forward or scrub. You missed something? Hope it was near the beginning because while you can restart by reloading, you can't skip ahead. Want to pause at a particular spot to show your wife? You get to wait for the whole thing to play again from the start so you can hopefully pause it at the right spot. There was one important part? too bad, you can only replay the whole thing... And why? Even if you want to assume the case of some video that is actually legitimately only a couple minutes long, ok fine, but why the artificially stupid UI? There is no legitimate reason. It's pure user manipulation. It's the service calling the shots to do what it wants to get what it wants instead of giving you a service that does what you want to give you what you want. Even if you are paying them money
There are all kinds of other problems, like I simply didn't ask for this. I don't care how great someone else thinks something is, or even if I would agree it's great if I asked for it. But anything that you don't want but can't avoid, and it's not the weather but something someone DOES have control over and is choosing to inflict on you over your expressed wishes, as a paying customer on top of all, is automatically intolerable.
But in fact I don't agree they are great at all ever. It doesn't matter what the content is or who's making it, including people I like on topics I like.
I want to say I don't have ADHD and don't want to develop it, but really idk I might actually have some level by the looks of all my unfinished projects, and even so, shorts make me feel like what people with adhd look and sound like from the outside. It's a hell existence. I don't understand how people can just willingly sit there and let these things feed them this constant stream of spastic hyper ephemeral shit. Even if I can understand how someone can fall into it unwittingly initially, how do they not realize what's happening to them after a while? Is everyone really so utterly unconscious?
I hate it so much that I couldn't even see the content hiding behind it, and don't really know what the recommendation is like.
Actually I guess a browser extension to redirect to a fixed up URL would resolve the problem entirely.
You'll have to disable hiding them first, as they're completly hidden by default
I use YouTube Tweaks which has a lot of different customisation options. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-tweak...
I mean, you can eat Doritos for dinner, and maybe you can convince yourself it's nutritionally sufficient, but it's still garbage.
On the search page, shorts are mostly a mixed bag, but you do occasionally get useful results.
So what does this solve? Seems like a form of protest nobody important (those in power) cares about.
Another thing is, I have, to my own surprise, discovered a few decent channels that I like, that post their videos in form of shorts exclusively. That's a somewhat new trend and mostly relevant to humor-related or music channels, though.
Almost forgot to mention. YouTube recently added the scroll bar to the shorts so they aren't all that different from the other videos now.
Filtering content is not "a form of protest", it is about deciding what content you want to see in your browser and what not. Youtube, even the paid version, does not offer much in terms of customising one's experience (imo the "algorithm" deciding what you should watch based on your history does not count as one) and shorts is a proven addictive pattern that one may not want to encounter online.
It is fine if you like watching shorts, such filter lists are for those who do not want to watch shorts.
If addictiveness really is that much of a factor, I rest my case.
If you’re only “irritated” by them for now, that’s just because the algorithm hasn’t gotten you yet. One day, you will be weak and fall prey.
I really dislike statements like this. It's not cocaine.
Every Reddit mod post is cancer for example. So is every pinned post and automod. 99% of email. Any story about farting or buttholes or diarrhea or any other child joke about how you were unable to be in control of your butthole. I don’t want to hear it and every single day there it is. Any pro-terrorism post from jihadist groups like maga, posts from other nations pretending to be Americans, posts asking people to explain a loaded joke they understand but are trying to get more views on or spread the topic about. Any ai video any video about crypto any fake news.
There’s a lot of room for improvement. Even just detecting things like if a news article doesn’t actually contain information. It seems like we have a ton of areas we could be filtering out cancer a lot better.
I'm liking Apple's "Hide Distracting Items…" feature in Safari. Now if only everyone's audits could be shared, a consensus arrived at, then others could be spared having to spend time hiding-distracting-items themselves.
A kind of HTML shadow banning?
A 'Proxomitron', of sorts.