These are all products that I legitimately like and want to engage with, but linking them all to a single account and more importantly a shared recommendation engine feels very flawed.
My music playlists from Youtube Music keep showing up on my Youtube homepage. Likewise, engaging with Youtube Shorts (especially subscribing) also subscribes to their youtube channel. I don’t know about anyone else, but what I find interesting in a 30 second video is not what I find interesting in a 10-30 minute video.
I feel like Google would be better served separating these recommendation engines. Even looking at this from a monetization lens, it feels inefficient. How do you guys feel? If you have any hacks or recommendations I’d love to hear them. I’m personally ready to create a TikTok account just to avoid contaminating my youtube feed.
I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.
This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.
I’ve had to add something like
#infinite_scroll_content > div:nth-of-type(1):others()for a few sites in uBlock Origin because every site wants you to just scroll the site forever now and attaches a bunch of other random articles to the bottom of any page you open.I also block a lot of sidebars, sticky title bars that follow you as you scroll, widgets prompting me to chat with a salesweasel and so, so many cookie notice bars because sites still think they’re a get out of jail free card by EU law.
I’ve actually got quite a few Youtube lines in my filters file, because it’s my computer and it still does what I want despite the best efforts of big tech companies:
www.youtube.com##.yt-formatted-string.style-scope.yt-simple-endpoint:has-text(YouTube Music):nth-ancestor(13) www.youtube.com###video-title-link:has-text(Mix – ):nth-ancestor(7) www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)I also block a lot of sidebars, sticky title bars that follow you as you scroll, widgets prompting me to chat with a salesweasel and so, so many cookie notice bars because sites still think they’re a get out of jail free card by EU law.
Never occurred to me that that was an option. I’ll need to look up how to do that. Although I imagine it makes your footprint more noticeable.
As a note, the cookie notices are required by EU law for any tracking of the user via cookies. I just went into this with my lemmy instance. Lemmy isn’t required to have a cookie notice because it doesn’t track you with cookies.
According to gdpr.eu:
To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:
- Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
- Provide accurate and specific information about the data each cookie tracks and its purpose in plain language before consent is received.
- Document and store consent received from users.
- Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies
- Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a site with a revoke consent button.
Many of them start dropping cookies as soon as you load the page and mostly you get a link to their privacy policy rather than cookie explanations. So they aren’t even meeting GDPR requirements anyway. Sites just treat the cookie notice popup as a complete GDPR solution.
It looks like Lemmy sets a cookie when you log in to an account, so it might actually need a paragraph explaining the login cookie. Or maybe it has one and I’ve forgotten.
So, from what I understand, the login cookie is considered “Strictly necessary” as it is involved with the necessary functions of the site. As far as privacy policy and cookie explanations, lemmy has none, and I’ve been campaigning in Github to get the necessary changes made to make the Lemmy UI compliant, which to my understanding it is not currently. This has nothing to do with cookie banners and everything to do with privacy policy.
Sorry I can’t really contribute to your question, but would anyway like to take the opportunity to air my grievances: I hate Youtube shorts and TikToks with fierce passion. The format of short videos makes sense and is a good idea to some extent, but who the hell decided we’re not allowed to rewind our videos anymore? I want to hunt down that person, go to their house at night and tell them that they are not very good at their job so loud that their whole family can hear it.
Tiktoks are mostly rewindable. The creator can set a setting I think to disable that, but I’ve only ever seen that on dumb thirst traps, on shorter videos you have to pause before the scrubber appears, which isn’t a great ui choice imo but it’s not a deal breaker.
I don’t use shorts but I just tried out like 5 and they all had scrubbers?
I actually don’t use TikTok, I just assumed this BS comes from there since it got popular around the same time.
Maybe I’m falling behind in technology, since I can’t make the scrubber appear on Youtube shorts no matter how I try. Even if it’s there somewhere, the design is pretty terrible since it’s not accommodating for old people like me who get easily angry, scared and confused.
You can rewind shorts
How? I just see a progress bar that cannot be interacted with.
Edit: did a google search and found this https://7labs.io/tips-tricks/fast-forward-youtube-shorts.html - now that’s a shit design if I’ve ever seen one.
Youtube shorts being visually hard to tell the difference but being in my sub lists AND breaking the queuing is obnoxious. I have been cutting myself off from google products as much as I can, they are just so shitty now.
I hate shorts and I hate seeing them in my subscription feed.
That’s one of the most significant reasons I stopped using YouTube Music.
I switched from Spotify to YouTube Music because I was under the impression I could use YouTube Music to play any song that is currently on YouTube. Apparently, that’s not how it works and it was actually much harder to find not only music I had on Spotify, but there are many songs from YouTube that you couldn’t even get on YouTube music, making it a shittier version of listening to songs from YouTube. The service is pretty pathetic.
I haven’t noticed this. I have noticed that a playlist of songs on YouTube will not translate to YouTube Music cleanly. It’s odd and I don’t care enough to look at what’s happening. I just want to not think about playing the music I’ve already identified as music I want to play.
I think I used to use a brand account just to separate my music subscriptions and regular subscriptions. I’m not sure if it affected suggestions though.
It does affect suggestions, as far as I can tell.
This is exactly how I’ve done it. My original youtube account from before google accounts existed will stay my youtube account. My personal account is only used for music. I do share a favorite music playlist between to two though so it’s super easy to add music I like on the youtube account that will then show up in my youtube music app.
Same, I have a brand account that I use for YouTube music and use my main account in regular YouTube.
I never engage with YouTube Shorts, so I’m mostly just skipping right past those. While I tried out YouTube Music after Google Play Music got shut down, I ultimately did not enjoy it as a service and started using Pandora instead. With that said, I still occasionally see recommendations of playlists on YouTube due to my YouTube Music data. It’s marginally annoying.
All of this to say, it would probably bother me more if they were all services that I interacted with on a regular basis.
I originally had a Google Play Music subscription. This came with free youtube premium when that launched. My wife gets an incredible amount of value out of youtube premium as she almost exclusively watches youtube content (Game Grumps, Good Mythical Morning, etc). Youtube premium is equivalent to a netflix subscription in our household. Given that I could not drop Premium at this point, it just makes sense to stick with Youtube music vs Spotify or something. I personally don’t mind Youtube music, it works well enough for my casual music listening needs. I just hate the cross contamination of it.
A wife that watches Game Grumps!?
Phew, i need one of those. :D
Yeah, that’s where we are too. I definitely agree though that google play music was waaay better.
Personally I like the YT/YTMusic cross. I listen to the same music in the car or at work that I do at home in YT fairly often. I just hate shorts and wish they’d get the fuck off my homepage. That “hide for 30 days” button is so aggravating.
uBlock Origin doesn’t have a 30 day limit:
www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)Haha I did that a while back but the premise of it still annoys me.
The feeling of “You’ve clearly indicated you don’t want this, but this is how long we’re willing to wait before we try to force it on you again” of the 30 days is annoying, yes.
undefined> www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)
I love you, thank you for this! I’ve been bitching about it every 30 days when they come back but ultimately lose the momentum as soon as I hide them, thinking I’ll do it tomorrow. But, hey there’s a squrrel outside!
What was I saying?
I’d love to see that option in the lbry client.
There are browser extensions that hide shorts for you. I haven’t seen one in a long time.
I’m fine with music content in Youtube recommendations, but videos in Music recommendations is absolute cancer.
Honestly I’ve used both every day since Google Play Music shut down and I can’t say I’ve ever had video stuff come up on YT Music.
My kids get annoyed when YTmusic plays the video version of a song. I get annoyed that my kids choices influence what the algorithm recommends to me. (Play Music let kids under 13 have their own profile, but not YTmusic.)
Shorts are quite annoying and I want to disable them permanently.
I actually Really like the crossover. I love mashup music and tons of it is only on places line YouTube and other “less official”/record company controlled places.
So YouTube music being able to integrate those sources is 10/10 for me.
I really really liked Google play music. When they killed it I tried YouTube music, liked a few artists, then went to my normal YouTube subscriptions saw it was flooded by dumps from those artists and unsubbed and never looked back.
Spotify isn’t nearly as good as gpm but ytm is a non starter for me for exactly this reason.
YouTube doesn’t care though, they very much want everyone to stop using subscriptions it seems.
@saigot @greenskye oh man I used to use Google Play Music ALL the time back when I was a kid. That was my go to and back when I used to use Android my way of pirating and getting free music is that I would download/screen record all of the music videos from YouTube and convert them to mp3 files and they would show up. Those were the days. Nothing else is as good or convenient, also google play musics song recognition was better than Shazam. I miss it :(
Google random song generator is the best song suggester I’ve ever used. Spotify’s new dj thing is starting to get close but it’s radio was super far off what gpm had. I also like gpm because it was really good for obscure small bands.
Out if all the dead Google products the two that really left me sad was gpm and inbox.
GPM was the best. If they didn’t have what you wanted you could always upload it yourself. Reminds me of the Grooveshark days.
I don’t have a google account. You can find the RSS feed of channels you like in their accounts sites source code and just use a feedreader (I can recommend feedbro) to follow them. Also: Use sponsorblock in addition to your normal adblocker. Shorts I skip, music I listen to from other sources.
The enshittyfication is getting strong over at yt
Glad you called it out. Hate this forced crossed contamination.
I make it a point to not engage with any of the shorts content - especially since they deliberately made it difficult to add to watch later list. My time is held hostage in that moment and FUCK if that isn’t a great way to get me to not engage with that bullshit, even if I was interested in the content.
I can’t stand Shorts. I don’t even mind the aspect ratio so much, but the lack of a scrubber or even time information is a dealbreaker for me. I wrote an adblock rule to remove them from the website UI, but it is a bit of a bummer how much content is only in Shorts.
Edit: And the looping!!! Ugh
And why are all the shorts by Squidinkidink? Who the fuck even is Squidinkidink?
I personally despise yotuube shorts. I use rules in my ublock origin to block them so I don’t see them on my youtube page.
Care to share? I dislike all the shorts showing up in my subscription feed and home pages. IMO they are a worse version of TikToks. I imagine it would feel similar to going to a movie theater that only plays trailers…forever.
I shared it here https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/460943 however the recent ui update on youtube has made it worthless. It also broke enhancer for youtube, so I’m hoping for an update to both.
I just started using ublock and didn’t know it could that. How did you set that up?
Right click on what you want to no longer see, click “Block element.” You can click again to change the target until it covers what you’re looking for. It can be a game of Whac-a-Mole … I usually have to do it again every week or so. Those more adept at crafting filters than I am probably have it solved.
What are you using? I recently came up with these that remove shorts and community posts and the 50% of search results that have nothing to do with your search. They might get rid of a little too much. I’ve noticed channel landing pages are coming up blank.
www.youtube.com###dismissible.ytd-rich-shelf-renderer www.youtube.com###dismissible.ytd-shelf-renderer www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-rendererThis is what I have currently
! Block Youtube Shorts on front page youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer > .ytd-rich-section-renderer > .ytd-rich-section-renderer[is-shorts=""] youtube.com##yt-formatted-string:has-text(/#shorts/):upward(ytd-rich-item-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-row) ! Block Youtube Shorts on the subscriptions page youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[overlay-style=SHORTS]:upward(ytd-grid-video-renderer.ytd-grid-renderer) ! Block Youtube Shorts on the search page youtube.com##ytd-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[overlay-style=SHORTS]:upward(ytd-video-renderer.ytd-item-section-renderer) ! Remove Shorts on sidebar menu youtube.com##a.yt-simple-endpoint.ytd-guide-entry-renderer[title=Shorts]:upward(ytd-guide-entry-renderer.ytd-guide-section-renderer)
I don’t do much except reading on mobile so can’t comment from that perspective. On desktop youtube shorts is just toxic. I keep clicking the X to get rid of them but that only works for 30 days. I often just close my browser tab now if I scroll and see a row of shorts.
I want nothing to do with shorts. If a video isn’t long just have it play in the regular video player. There’s also no valid reason to encourage people to shoot vertical video, it hurts my brain. The absolute worst though is there being no volume control. Love having my ear drums wrecked if a short opens up.
I really don’t know why they even have it on the desktop website. When did these places decide that they have to have their content on every platform they support? Is Amazon going to bring ebooks to my roku next? It’s just dumb. The content has a place for those interested, but it’s not on a desktop or TV.
I cannot imagine what goes on in the product department of Youtube. “So we got this mammoth video library that is barely profitable, if at all, we don’t know, we have too much money to count. Lets enshitify it!”