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Someone at YouTube needs glasses

jayd.ml

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Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#561

Post by dcchambers »

homefree wrote: post #220
dcchambers wrote: post #58

I am BEGGING someone, anyone at Google/YouTube to let me permanently disable YouTube Shorts. I HATE Short form video content and no matter how many times I select "show me less of this" I still get them front and center when I open the app or website.

The annoying bit is similar to reels, shorts are good for engagement. It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house. Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with You…

The Oreo analogy is perfect. I don't buy Oreos because I can't help myself from eating the whole container in a few sittings.

I don't even touch short form video because I'll get sucked in and suddenly hours go by. Short form video on YouTube makes me want to never open YouTube because I know how easily I can get sucked in.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#562

Post by xmprt »

crtasm wrote: post #291
xmprt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've been doing is using high audience extensions (like Tampermonkey) and getting ChatGPT to write a script for it which does what I need it to. Much more effective and trustworthy than relying on another extension developer. If Tampermonkey can't do it then I'll just write the entire extension on my own and load it as a developer extension.

There's also lots of userscripts available on https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=youtube+shorts Greasyfork restricts what 3rd party libraries can be pulled in + you have the option of disabling automatic updates in your userscript manager.

The whole point is that I don't want to run other people's code on my machine so I use an LLM to generate code (that I verify) which does the job I need it to. For small, well contained requirements, it works quite well.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#563

Post by godelski »

behringer wrote: post #519
kevincox wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They took quite the effort to do and were made with good intention, but ultimately I don't want them.

Careful there are programmers here watching. Pretend to like the bird.

  > Careful there are programmers here watching
Why would you be on HN if you weren't a programmer?

And good! Fix your shit. Take some god damn pride in your work! Just because all code is shit doesn't mean it can be infinitely shitty.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#564

Post by godelski »

abirch wrote: post #556
temac wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an admission that you accept to implement complete garbage?

If I don’t, there are 100 other people who would do it

I'm sorry, but this cop-out really pisses me off. It is far too common and frankly, unacceptable. It really is insulting that you'd expect others to accept this as a justification. It's a lazy dismissal and not even a proper excuse.

You're excuse for doing something shitty is... that someone else will? What does another person even have to do with it?! Seriously, let them have the blood on their hands. You can't even assume that someone else will! If you do it, you guarantee that it happens. Even if it is likely that someone else will, there's a big difference between a certainty. This is literally what creates enshitification.

Plus, the logic is pretty slippery. Certainly you're not going to commit crimes or acts of genocide! You were "just following orders"[0], right? Or parents often say to their children "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?" Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, but frankly, it is the same "excuse" given when that extreme shit happened, so no, I won't accept it.

You have autonomy[1], that makes you accountable. You aren't just some mindless automata. You may not be the root cause, but at best you enable it. You can't ignore that you play a role.

And consider the dual: if you don't make it better, who will?

I believe you have the power to make change, do you? Maybe not big, but hey, every big thing is composed of many smaller things, right? So the question is which big thing you want to contribute to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders

[1] https://talyarkoni.org/blog/2018/10/02/no-its-not-the-incent...

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#565

Post by encrypted_bird »

eastbound wrote: post #445
krisoft wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can’t scroll with my cursor on the page without crap happening that I don’t want to happen. Same stuff with the mobile youtube app. If you so much as graze the screen anywhere while watching a video the replay speed doubles. This is so sensitive that even a tiny unintentional finger touch, or a water droplet landing on the screen triggers it. Whoever thought that is a good idea as a feature, i can’t comprehend. P…

Couple this with the no-bezel iPhones, and there is no way to hold your phone without touching the screen and accelerating the video (or clicking on ads).

Serious question as I use an Android device, but do people not purchase cases for iphones? I use an Otterbox case for my phone and it gives it a bezel (though the phone might have had one to begin with—I don't remember).

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#566

Post by knome »

wpm wrote: post #446
lolinder wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have premium and it's sticky for me but only on a single computer, I have to reset it if I switch computers or browsers. Same with dark mode. So maybe it's stored as a cookie and they wipe their cookies?

Yes, it's stored client-side in a cookie. Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.

On the bright side, you could probably write something to just always reset that cookie before loading the site.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#568

Post by bromuro »

bluGill wrote: post #115
segphault wrote: post #81

The quality of the content on YouTube has declined so aggressively that the terrible UX almost doesn’t even matter anymore. They optimize to promote the most cancerous, low-effort, viral clickbait trash and the algorithm makes it incredibly difficult for anything else to survive or be discoverable. The culture of YouTube is absolutely vile.

Turn off watch history. That disables the homepage. Which in turn means you only see things you directly link to, or things you have subscribed to (after going to the subscriptions page).

Yet the app is so bad that after switching to the iOS home screen, it forgets the video you were watching and goes back to the home page. History at least allows you to find it again and continue watching. I don’t care about their “imposed” suggestions either , so it’s about choosing the less shitty experience.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#569

Post by naikrovek »

abirch wrote: post #556
temac wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this an admission that you accept to implement complete garbage?

If I don’t, there are 100 other people who would do it

Tell your product owners that they should actually use the product they’re owning. And not just use it, but be a power user of that tool. Not a professional user, not a casual user; use the tool at least six hours a day.

I use YouTube 6+ hours a day and I have for probably 10 years, and I don’t even work there. (I have a few annoying personality limitations which make it so that I usually work better with YouTube on in the background, and NOT on autoplay, autoplay always chooses something I don’t want to see/hear; I know that because I use the tool a lot.)

I can tell you that it has steadily and continually gotten worse in that 10 year time. “I have to come up with stories or I won’t have a job” no you don’t, but even if you did, there are so many things YouTube needs more that enlarged thumbnails with visible compression artifacts.

Re: Someone at YouTube needs glasses

#570

Post by chewbacha »

kevincox wrote: post #463
matsemann wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kills me with the autoplay (at least on mobile), is that the video continues from where it was when you click it. But the autoplay had no sound, and I probably didn't watch it closely. So I always have to scroll back to the beginning, as I've just now been put in the middle of a sentence a bit into the video. Especially for channels which actually gets straight to the point (like Numberphile) it's annoying. Such…

I call these features "dead birds" because they remind me of gifts that an outdoor cat will leave on your doorstep. They took quite the effort to do and were made with good intention, but ultimately I don't want them.

  were made with good intention
Not always true.
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