- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- technews@radiation.party
- cross-posted to:
- technews@radiation.party
- technews@radiation.party
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Honestly, it’s the terrible content moderation policies that are going to kill YouTube, not a certain type of video.
Bingo. I don’t find shorts all that appealing (especially since I can’t cast them to a TV! Wtf, seems like core function there) but I agree, the REAL problem with YouTube is how much creators have to top toe around demonization.
they’re all paying the bills by hawking raid shadow legends anyways, may as well not rely on youtube monetization anyways and host elsewhere
Case in point, when youtube buried one of Caitlin Doughty’s documentaries from Ask a Mortician.
The video in question: The Forgotten Disaster of the SS Eastland. It’s 43 minutes long, both well done, and respectfully done. Her team did a good job on it then some youtube automated system buried it for “violating community guidelines”.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=cN5hNzVqkOk
https://piped.video/watch?v=UCHt2MOVCbg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I’m not even sure it is bad policies. I am pretty sure that they just don’t have moderators.
I doubt anyone reads 99.9% of reports.
So you get bigotry and hate, you get insane and deadly DIYs, you get 12yo girls being creeped while posting random 5s clips from their lives.
Not to mention just the vast amount of extraordinarily low-quality content YouTube serves up. It’s amazing how bad a lot of the videos it thinks you will like are. The algorithm makes no sense.
But hey, here’s 16 different Joe Rogan clips with sigma male music in the background.
The algorithm seems like it is optimized for profit, not for actually being a good platform.
That should mean engagement. It serves up such bad videos that I disengage.
Once in a while I’ll realize I just spent 20, 30 minutes looking at a streak of pretty decent stuff. Rare enough to be remarkable. Usually after just 3 or 4 consecutive crap clips I’ll close it down and get back to work.
I doubt anything disengages a user faster than low-quality content. I bet it does it even faster than the authoritarian politics and bigotry YouTube seems to inexorable serve you.
If that were true, it wouldn’t be the way it is.
Just because it causes your disengagement, doesn’t mean it causes disengagement with the vast majority of their userbase.
They’re also more concerned with ad views and clicks, so if you’re not the kind of person who gives a crap about ads… they don’t really care that much about you.
This is predicated on the belief that Google/YouTube is run in a 100% hyper-competent way. I don’t buy that.
Google does things the easiest way possible to make tons of money. They make unforced errors all the damn time.
They don’t have to be 100% competent, but they are very competent at what they want to do… which is monetize the technologies and services they provide. They’re not trying to make something that people can use well and enjoy… they’re making things to make a shit-ton of money. The two goals are not generally mutually inclusive.
Yours, on the other hand, is predicated on the belief that they’re all super-incompetent and have no capability of doing anything right ever… which is confusing considering they’re a multi-billion dollar company and not just some guy in a shack banging rocks together to see how they sound.
Yours, on the other hand, is predicated on the belief that they’re all super-incompetent and have no capability of doing anything right ever
Nope. It’s only this specific thing that I necessarily think they’re doing a bad job of. And I’m right; they are. Their algorithm is a struggling baby compared to TikTok and YouTube at large is not a major profit center (and indeed may not be profitable at all – but they maintain it because abandoning it would be too costly for them).
TikTok is so good at doing this thing that it is a profitable business for them. YouTube is struggling, and we can clearly see why.
This Shorts issue seems to have measurable, constant and immediate effect in ad revenue and therefore platform profitability. Bad content moderation may or may not decrease engagement but in the end Google is a commercial enterprise that’s looking at the numbers at hand.
The terrible content moderation policies are what keep it alive. No one subscribes to youtube so it’s primary customers are the ad agencies. And they want content moderation
Yup, exactly. Some of the creators I’ve seen tell some horror stories about how YouTube work. Videos being demonised for random bullshit, YouTube giving 0 support to them as it’s Googles usual behaviour.
I feel like if some other big tech makes a decent alternative with ad revenue share it might fuck over YouTube. (And you can see how this can apply to X…)
Not just terrible, but incredibly hypocritical.
Might? It already has.
If shorts were simply a separate section of YouTube with all of its functionality, then that’s understandable. But as they stand, shorts are just YouTube with both reduced functionality (forced vertical aspect ratio, no seek bar, time limit) AND all of the existing flaws (bad recommendation algorithm, reposted content, etc. )
Unless you are some kind of tech contrarian hipster, I don’t think there is one thing that YouTube shorts does better than TikTok, or heck, Instagram Reels.
no seek bar
I really don’t understand who thought that removing the seek bar from a video player was a good idea…
It’s actually there on mobile, just hidden.
I only tried it on desktop. There’s a tiny progress bar at the bottom, but you can’t interact with it.
Even TikTok has a seek bar and has for a long time.
I use it all time. What are you talking about?
Plus no volume control so you often get instantly ear blasted
It technically has a seekbar, but it’s very hard to find and/or might be obscured by their capricious A/B randomized testing
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I have a seek bar, is it because I’m using Revanced? I just that ot was there
Pretty sure that’s one of the Revanced patches.
I use the regular app and the seekbar was always available for me.
Hmm. Guess I was wrong about that then.
Nope, official app has a seek bar on the bottom (I was using vanced before but had to reset my password which reset the login cookie and I am not trying to delete my downloads of years by trying to sign back in)
P.S. I have too many downloads, so if anyone has a method to extract them, I’ll be thankful.
I’m mostly fine with shorts, except for two things:
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You can’t move around in them, it’s either play or pause and repeat, which sucks (as shorts don’t have to be short…)
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On the homepage it doesn’t show who the short is from (which channel) without opening them
You also can’t adjust the volume in browser. You have to go to a normal video, change it, and then go back.
Install Better YouTube Shorts. You can thank me later.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-youtube-shorts/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/better-youtube-shorts/pehohlhkhbcfdneocgnfbnilppmfncdg
Just use the system audio control?
But why do I have to do that when every other video player has a volume slider?
On the contrary, why bother hunting the down the slider for every different player when you could just use the system?
Just curious, since I use the youtube slider like once a month.
I’m not the guy you asked, but I assume they do as I do. My system volume is calibrated for all the various applications I use day to day, including video conferencing. If I have to adjust that, it means everything else is the wrong volume. I’d rather modify YouTube to be the right volume than everything else.
This. My system volume is calibrated to be similar across all applications, games, etc. This means all apps are individually adjusted to reach similar volume level. Why should I have to mess with all of my other volumes just random manager at Youtube decided a volume slider on shorts isn’t necessary despite the site still using volume from regular videos where it can be adjusted? This isn’t an issue with any other app or platform. Maybe the last Youtube video I watched had overly quiet or loud audio compared to the norm and I either have insanely loud audio or I can’t hear a damned thing and I can’t fix it quickly like on any other Youtube page.
Not everyone had a set of dedicated volume buttons, or wheel, etc. on their keyboard, so having to go into Windows settings or reach for a knob or button on the speakers themselves to adjust is a lot more than getting a slider like every other website in the world gives you.
It’s also annoying that you can’t save them without using the hack where you change the URL.
You can scrub around in them. Look for the red bar on the bottom after the short starts. You can tap and drag on it and a little red circle will appear that will show briefly after you release.
You can move around in them. Atleast on Android, there is a hidden red bar at the bottom which becomes visible if you pause the video.
This is a problem with all of these Tik Tok clones (and even Tik Tok let’s you do it for some videos). It’d so annoying to be watching a 45 second reel but if I miss something, I have to watch the whole thing again
I have the exact opposite problem? I can skip around just fine in shorts, but can’t in reels… Is this due to A/B testing or am I dumb?
I simply prefer TikTok for short form videos due to unique community and reasonably entertaining algorithm.
I enjoy YouTube to the point of paying for Premium but I hate that my YouTube subscriptions feed on TV is littered with shorts that I have no way of disabling other than hiding them one by one (which I do to make a point).
Suits at Google will try to shove it into everyone’s throats until they get bored and someone adds it to killedbygoogle.com so why would anyone even bother with it.
This is why I use LibreTube. It just filters all the Shorts
I’m deep in Apple ecosystem and unfortunately this is not an option on Apple TV as far as I know.
You should consider leaving.
In case of Apple TV, it’s the smoothest TV software experience, leaps and bounds above any ad-ridden smart TV or aging Nvidia Shield. I used Android TV and it’s just jank. For a time I had HTPC with Kodi too, it’s been relegated to hosting Plex and downloading stuff from Usenet. I enjoyed freedom to install anything but ultimately this didn’t outweight better audio codec support on Apple TV.
ad-ridden smart TV
Oh the irony…
Not sure what you’re making a stab at.
Apple software is obviously ad free and I have no problem with paying for YouTube Premium due to value it provides. Some good soul on Lemmy also recommended me a way to block sponsored content via isponsorblocktv which is a script that runs on my server and skips sponsored segments by reading YouTube app state and sending fast forward commands like a remote would.
It’s amazing how much social credit you possibly have. Xi Jinping is proud of you.
Are you alright there mate?
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What if we fucked over all of the people that like our website to try and cater to people that don’t like it?
Seems to be the current trend in social media this year…
This is to perfectly put.
Mind you those are (at least some of) the guys that killed animation and comedy sketches on youtube because they made it necessary for videos to be 10+ minutes long to be relevant.
Using revanced. Disabled shorts. Watching these YT shorts & recommendations decays my brain cells
I blocked shorts with ublock origin.
Ive used blocktube.
It can also prevent auto pause. Hide the movies you can rent, hide specific channels, or videos with specific words in their title, etc
You should be able to remove Shorts from your feed. I never watch them and yet they fill my feed up making it jore difficult to find real content. I’m specifically talking about the smart TV app which throws them all in together.
I’m using some custom ublock origin filters that I found somewhere to block shorts across all of youtube:
!Youtube Shorts www.youtube.com###guide-content #endpoint[title="Shorts"]:upward(ytd-guide-entry-renderer) www.youtube.com###items #endpoint[title="Shorts"]:upward(ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer) www.youtube.com##ytd-browse #dismissible ytd-rich-grid-slim-media[is-short]:upward(ytd-rich-section-renderer) www.youtube.com##ytd-browse ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"]) www.youtube.com##ytd-browse ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"]) www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"]) www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer ytd-compact-video-renderer:has(span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"]) www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-video-renderer span.ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[aria-label="Shorts"]:upward(ytd-item-section-renderer) m.youtube.com##ytm-reel-shelf-renderer m.youtube.com##ytm-pivot-bar-renderer div.pivot-shorts:upward(ytm-pivot-bar-item-renderer) m.youtube.com##ytm-browse ytm-item-section-renderer ytm-video-with-context-renderer:has(ytm-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[data-style="SHORTS"]) m.youtube.com##ytm-browse ytm-item-section-renderer ytm-compact-video-renderer:has(ytm-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[data-style="SHORTS"]) m.youtube.com##ytm-search ytm-compact-video-renderer:has(ytm-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[data-style="SHORTS"])Also separately, for blocking videos that don’t exist yet, which I also dislike:
!Youtube upcoming videos www.youtube.com##ytd-browse ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[overlay-style="UPCOMING"]) www.youtube.com##ytd-browse ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[overlay-style="UPCOMING"]) www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-video-renderer ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[overlay-style="UPCOMING"]:upward(ytd-item-section-renderer)He’s talking about smart tv app. If those “shorts” are being pulled from some other subdomain then perhaps a block rule on that domain set on the router would help. But best just not to use youtube.
I’m pretty sure shorts are just Youtube videos but with a different UI.
You can take the video ID from the URL of a Shorts clip and put it in a normal Youtube URL and the shorts video plays with the normal Youtube player.
Basically.
Surprising no one jumped onto you with thw revanced suggestions.
SmartTubeNext is what you want on TV platforms. You can turn shorts off. It blocks ads. And it has sponsorblock so it is configurable to additionally skip sponsor segments, self-promotion, intros, outros.
And as others have pointed out, you can also block them in browser with Ublock Origins and with Revanced which covers the desktop and mobile platforms.
I might have to look into that. I do wonder how it could know when a segment is sponsored.
I don’t care that much about the ads since we already have Premium so we don’t see the ads anyways.
What I want is a YouTube viewer that cuts out ads that I can use on my Mac or my iPhone to use on my TV with a Chromecast.
Chromecast is how I view all my TV content.
You’ll have to take that up with Apple. They’re the ones dictating that you can’t use any of the wonderful apps we have on Android.
As for Chromecast, SmartTube Next is what you want
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Check out https://ghcr.io/nichobi/sponsorblockcast - run it on your LAN, and it’ll use SponsorBlock to clean up any YouTube-Chromecast stream you want.
And of course the thing I mentioned has now been superseded by https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip
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I watch YouTube mostly on my TV (using a Shield) so I don’t think that would work for me.
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But the Shield was specifically bought to stream.
As a viewer I agree with their assessment.
Shorts is (for me) a worse viewing experience and it’s just more useless junk tha clutter up my youtube main page.
That’s why I have a Firefox extension that automatically redirects from shorts. Although, if Google’s new Web Environment Integrity goes through I guess I could kiss stuff like that goodbye.
I don’t disagree but there are some channels that do great shorts. For example check out squat university shorts.
Guys, I think I found The Algorithm’s Lemmy account!!!
Advertising ruined YouTube years ago.
YouTube ruined YouTube
I swear to god these dumb social media sites are going to hell faster every day.
I used to like YouTube because I could watch all sorts of interesting things … funny things … informative things … things actually liked
Now my main YouTube recommended feed is filled with clickbait thumbnails of idiots making surprised or shocked faces to try to get your attention to get you to look at their dumb video of nonsense that has zero information and is not entertaining at all.
My take’s always been Monetization ruined YouTube.
Because if theres money to be made then theres a few million idiots that are happy to exploit the fuck out of the system and do essentially fuck all to earn cash.
But without money, the platform would have sunk.
It’s a harsh reality that all brilliant internet things have to face.
And i hate it.
Google ruined YouTube years ago.
not only is the shorts UI shitty but the shorts themselves are often shitty imo, or at least the “scroll through shorts one at a time” linear format means you see a lot more videos you wouldn’t click on intentionally.
“No YouTube I do not want to watch Jordon Fucking Peterson. I will NEVER want that. Fuck all the way off.”
I stopped watching shorts because of the unwanted boosts of fascist content.
Silver lining: It gave me the opportunity to “dislike” Jordan Peterson, which was not an opportunity I previously had.
I mean, I guess I always HAD the option, but there’s something to be said about having somebody serve it up on a platter like that.
Hey, boosts engagement, he’s happy all the same.
I watch shorts but I never swipe up. I pick which ones I want to watch.
I hate that I get such random shit in my feed when I really only look at art videos - like my scrolling should be nothing but people drawing but random shit like slime videos or some ass hat and his kid.
The interface isn’t consistent between videos and shorts.
You can rewind and fast forward videos on phones by double tapping the left or right hand side of the video, but doing that on shorts just likes it.
I literally could not understand what half the ones I saw were even supposed to be about last time I went on YouTube. Like they were just random people doing shit with no punchline or point.
God I hate shorts. Luckily you can disable them. But youtube is so riddled with ads in general, it makes watching without adblock impossible. If they’d go back to one 3 second ad at the very beginning, I might even tolerate it. But the current shitshow? Not on my system.
Doesn’t help that they have a whooping 113 trackers running simultaneously.
Wait how do you disable shorts this is the first I’m hearing of this
with uBlock Origin, right click on the shorts area > click on ublock’s “Block element” > select the Shorts section > Block
Modded apps and extensions. Revanced, Smarttubenext, shortsblock, etc.
I target the Shorts container row element with uBlock, so it’s removed permanently from the grid.
Details please!
For those wondering, I use the filters listed on this site to block shorts with Ublock Origin.
YouTube shorts was the dumbest fucking idea. They have a niche: long-form (as in >1min) video content. They are dominant in that niche. Then they saw TikTok was popular and dominating the short-form video scene, and their response was… “we should switch to making more short form”. WTF?! And on top of that, they’ve diverted resources away from their main product (longer videos) as the article says. It just seems like such a catastrophic unforced error.
YouTube have such a stranglehold on the >1m market, that’s why they can afford to stagnate in that area and look into other markets. They don’t have to fear a competitor threatening their core market any time soon.
might? Shorts are the main reason I found alternatives like Freetube, Newpipe and Invidious; and continue to look for actual alternative platforms.
if there was just a checkbox to turn them off forever I’d probably still be on the mainpage.
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I already have around 50 plugins to unfuck youtube specifically … which I should really uninstall now that I never visit the site
Thats how reddit got, too many plugins. Plus it’s bad faith to hide dark mode behind an account, and new reddit sucks so that doesnt count.
I wish I could watch shorts from only my subscribed channels.
This isn’t a bad format inherently, it’s just being abused. I like seeing short Blender clips, or short guitar tutorial on a riff, or stand up bits that sit well within the time frame.
In the app, you can just open your subscription tab and click on the Shorts section. That way you’ll only see Shorts only from your subscribed channels.
I my shorts feed is now only shows content from standup comedians. I discovered several that I really like Troy Bond, that guy is hilarious and just started doing comedy since COVID. If there’s no Shorts I might not discover him.
Yeah it’s great for comedy, I’ve found a lot of really funny content I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
You can watch the shorts for just one channel. But yeah it’s algorithm sludge
Might ruin YouTube? Brother. It’s already ruined.
having no proper competitor is the only thing that’s still keeping youtube on the boat.
YouTube is far from ruined. There’s a ton of educational and information channels making high quality content. These are some of my favorites:
- Throttle House (car reviews)
- Savagegeese (car reviews)
- Adam Ragusea (home chef)
- Coffeezilla (independent journalist)
- Dave2D (technology reviews)
- Donut (car news, humor)
- Food Wishes (pro chef)
- Johnny Harris (independent journalist)
- Louis Rossmann (tech repair and tech politics)
- Skill Up (video game reviews)
- SmarterEveryDay (science)
- Veritasium (science)
Are these channels perfect? No. Nothing is perfect. But these channels easily justify paying for YouTube premium.
