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Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

jayd.ml

441–450 of 728 posts

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#441
post #198
post #19

I noticed this morning there was a new version of the YouTube app on my Apple TV. I can’t wait to find out how they screwed this one up. My personal long-term complaint is the length of video titles. Lots of people like to make really long video titles. So right now there is one on my screen titled “The Best Decisions Every Video Game Console Developer Made”. Now if you didn’t know, that is not the whole title. But t…

There are two apps called "DeArrow" and SponsorBlock that basically everyone should be using. DeArrow replaces thumbnails and titles with crowd sourced versions. I can't use youtube without it anymore. Usually the titles get replaced with stuff like "How to build a table" instead of "Watch the world explode as I try to make a table!!!!!!!!!!!!". Same with thumbnails. No longer are they over-saturated close up AI gene…

Hey, Only 50% of one of my thumbnails are AI generated Garbage!

I do agree it is annoying. Some people do it quite a lot with car work videos to make the car look in far worse than it is.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use... rumble and tiktok.

Youtube's censorship is one reason I won't pay for it. Rumble is a legitimate site even as people decry its existence (it would be less necessary if Youtube didn't decide on being the world's opinion police)

Which opinions are you trying to access?

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#443
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is piracy. Most advertising supported content is made freely available to you with the expectation that you will view the advertising. That expectation is not a contract and was a decision made without your involvement. You have no obligation to perform to someone else's expectations. If the content is made freely available you are free to watch it whichever way you choose. Choosing not to view the a…

Morally, it is piracy IMO. If you applied the rule universally, the site would go out of business and then there would be no video to see.

In most cases of adblocking, that would be a good thing.

99% of internet content is complete crap, the equivalent of email spam, that only exists because each piece makes a few dollars a month from ads. On the old internet, without ads, there was plenty of useful content and much less spam.

And the spam crowds out good content, as seen in recipe sites for example.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#444
post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And auto repeat, sadly.

Auto-repeat is the thing that most mystifies me about shorts. I understand the idea behind auto-play, although I disable it; but who on earth wants to watch the exact thing they just watched by default ? Given the success of TikTok, the answer is apparently, "billions of people", but I just don't get it.

My theory is that it is a way of forcefully grabbing people’s attention.

Without autoplay there is no engagement once the video is over. With autoplay there is the risk someone leaves the player on the background and ignores it. With looping videos people get annoyed and (if they’re like me) close the tab or skip to the next video just to get something different

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#445
post #175

Low _usable_ information density is one of the main things I made Control Panel for YouTube [^0] to tackle, especially in Subscriptions. On a 1080p monitor, my unmodified Subscriptions page currently has 6 fully-visible thumbnails, consisting of 3 livestreams from people I only subscribe to for videos, 1 watched video, 1 stream VOD (which I'll never watch), and 1 unwatched video, so that's a score of 1/6. Scroll down…

> On a 1080p monitor… There’s your problem. You have normal hardware. The rich SV folks at google are probably all using 6k monitors. (only half joking)

It's the same issue on big screens. I have a ultra wide 2k, and in full screen I only have 3 videos on the homepage.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#446
post #439

There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did: Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time. Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it. It’s been exactly 3 mon…

I did that as well and also removed all the subscriptions form YouTube itself and instead have all the channels I like in my RSS reader

I tried to make a custom Subscriptions view for YouTube but they kept blocking me for trying to scrape hundreds of RSS feeds.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that those two things are fantastic indicators for videos / channels you should be avoiding. Hiding their foolishness and then watching them anyway rewards their behavior.

LTT specifically AB tested the stupid thumbnail vs relevant + titles. The idiotic clickbait images and titles WORK. People don't use them because they want to, they use them because they have to. Thus -> DeArrow. (Or follow the channels via an RSS feed and filter there)

I've heard this argument before as someone with a small number of subscribers, In use relevant titles and thumbnails (I do partially use AI but that is "make me a Tux image with a builders hat on"). When I post a video I get a decent number of viewers for my channel size.

So I don't believe someone like LTT needs to resort to clickbait. LTT has 16 millions subscribers and half a million views per video. They make plenty of ad-revenue from those videos. If he stopped making videos today, he would still be getting a sizeable income by doing nothing for at least a decade. Even some washed up YouTubers from the past get a low five figure income from their Channels.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#448

There are 0 videos on my YouTube homepage, just a screen asking me to turn on history. Just the way I like it. Here’s what I did: Go into the YouTube app, settings, manage all history, under the history tab hit Delete -> delete all time. Then go to controls (still in the manage all history dialog box under settings), under YouTube history hit Turn off. It says “pausing…” Hit Pause, and Got it. It’s been exactly 3 mon…

Weirdly I've had history turned off for just over 10 years (I can tell from the date on the most recent entry), but my YouTube homepage shows me videos related to things I've watched recently anyway.

I just deleted the all-time history and now the homepage is blank as you say.

I don't think they're really deleting your viewing history, else the homepage wouldn't have looked the way it did before I deleted "all time".

I have clicked "stop showing me Shorts" several times but they keep coming back, so I don't think the homepage works properly anyway.

EDIT:

On further consideration, I think what was happening with the homepage was that it was showing me videos related to channels that I subscribe to. (But not always videos from channels that I subscribe to).

However I don't see why they can't still do that even after I delete my all-time watch history? Not that I want them to.

But if you did want them to, you could probably turn watch history back on, click on any single video, and then turn it off again, and you'd probably have a home screen dictated by your subscriptions.

Or else they just ignore the setting and it's all a lie anyway.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no need to use uBOL on Firefox, just use the normal version. EDIT: But yeah, the Mozilla reviewers are very hostile, also had to fight with them for one of my add-ons. It's ridiculous that spam and malware add-ons get a pass but privacy-conscious add-ons get rejected.

It's almost like ad monopoly company Google pays them millions of dollars.

Not everything is a conspiracy theory. Mozilla's reviewers were already infamous in the XUL era. Mozilla's dumbness is not due to Google it's due to them themselves.

Re: Someone at YouTube Needs Glasses: The Prophecy Has Been Fulfilled

#450

I used to pay for YouTube premium. I stopped doing that, uninstalled the apps, and now use it through the browser with adblockers. (Yes, on my phone and iPad.) It works so well I’ve gotten at least half a dozen neighbours to do the same. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a definitive step up in UX.

>I used to pay for YouTube premium

It would have been amazing value had Youtube Music, which came with YouTube Premium were half decent. But it is not. We got Spotify which isn't perfect, and then Apple Music, which for years didn't know what they were doing, and then Youtube Music, which is basically a company doesn't give a damn about Music.

We now have three Giant companies over the history of the past 30 - 40 years, once they grow big that make junk.

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