This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
I still don't understand the appeal of YouTube shorts... It feels like the rational behind it is "hey, I can watch 10 meaningless shorts in the same amount of time it would take to watch one video that has an actual point". I guess that's why I've never gotten in to tiktok either lol
Would it make more sense if they were labelled "YouTube Dopamine Hits" ?
Is it even a dopamine hit though? I watched a handful of them and they all seemed to just be someone yelling at the camera for 5 seconds, then a 5 second shot of whatever the hell they were yelling about, then 10 to 15 seconds of them asking me to like and subscribe.
There isnt any appeal. It is just them trying to carve into that tiktok market, but the people watching tiktok are already just watching tiktok, so it is basically just there to annoy the rest of us.
i hate it because I can't move through the timeline
It's funny because everyone shits on tiktok for it's short videos yet I regularly watch videos that are 3-5 minutes long if not longer.
Your feed shows you what you interact with. Outside of ads I rarely see content that's not related to my interests and most of the videos I see are much longer than a vine.
Which is especially ironic to me how vines weren't considered attention span killing brain rot that everyone sees tiktok to be.
Vines were never culturally ubiquitous enough for old people to know what they were and rant about it.
Tiktok just doesn't seem worth it to me. Why would I spend days scrolling past cringey dance videos until the algorithm figures me out, when I can just see all the best Tiktoks reposted on Lemmy and Reddit?
ReVanced literally solves every single one of these problems.
I need to update it.
Again.
It's broken.
Again.
I've literally been watching YT on my mobile browser instead because it's a PITA to update.
Strange, months-old versions work fine for me, and the update is not too difficult either. On an ARM64 device, you open RVX Manager, check for the recommended YouTube version, download it from APKMirror, optionally check its hash, pick it in RVX Manager, and patch it (takes 2-5 minutes). You can also press the 💾 icon to save the trusted APK you made so you can share it to other devices, including ARMv7 ones.
Can you block shorts? Those still come up in my recs
Yeah, there's a option to hide shorts in the feed as well as to hide the shorts button from the bottom bar. Can't even remember the last time I saw any shorts lol
Search on YouTube is truly terrible now. 8/10 results are sponsored ads, other things you may like, watch it again, etc. Like wtf I literally searched something else.
It's actually really really shitty. A search result shouldn't show just general recommendations and definitely shouldn't ignore your query in favor of showing ads for bigger videos completely unrelated.
That actually makes the platform completely garbage.
YouTube is just public broadcast TV now anyways and needs to start being regulated as such.
I fucking hate how they mix in "popular" videos with your search results.
Like, the first few results are related, then there's a few that are completely unrelated but "popular". Then they go back to showing related results.
They don't even try to differentiate between the two. It's scummy as hell and yet another nail in the coffin for youtube.
For some reason, the 4th video on my "home" feed is always a video with ~300 views from some small account I've never heard of on a topic I'm only passingly interested in.
For a while YouTube got weirdly fixated on showing me videos about steam trains. At the moment, it's a video called "20 Random Yet Interesting Facts"; a 5 day old video with 220 views from a channel called "The Fact Files"
I actually watch those small accounts (they tend to be short and related to games I know), it feels a bit more comfy when the guy actually reads and replies to my comment.
I think I also came upon aftermath of some personal quarrel between the account and a commenter, they were talking about how sorry they were and the guy accepted the apology. It was wholesome, and probably as memorable as other videos I ~~waste time on~~ watch.
The algo is breaking down. They rested on their laurels and were caught sleeping. Lots of services are looking to poach viewers and are far more willing to take risks and innovate. Web indexed yellow pages are long in the tooth and tainted with people abusing that algo or buying rank. Maybe 2-3 more years left in that tank. I genuinely think Google is starting to panic.
It's good they are suggesting smaller channels, they should do it more.
Fresh isn't another carbon copy of one of the mega channels with the same content.
Fresh isn't a sea full of reaction faces all trying to game the algorithm.
Fresh is someone having fun on camera, someone bearing their soul to whomever will watch, someone with passion for what they are doing and the desire to share it.
YouTube needs to start finding the people that made it interesting in the first place and lose the mindless drones gaming the system.
Pretty funny how YouTube gets stuck on topics for a while haha
Yours was steam trains, mine was Soviet nuclear accidents
I think they added that to help smaller channels get a start. In principle it's actually a nice idea, but those small channels have no data to tell them what videos are similar to theirs, so they end up being recommended to people who don't care about their content
The worst thing about shorts is that they are just the videos you were already going to watch but cut up into 10 shorts devoid of relevant context. No thanks youtube I will watch the full video
As ProZD just pointed out, never use the home screen, just go straight to your Subscriptions feed. It helps the people you subscribed to and you get more videos.
Am I the only one who finds those stupid looping shorts annoying? It honestly makes me feel like I have amnesia... The second I hear the video transition into a loop I'm like nope, I'm out of here...
My wife will show me instagram nonsense and it's just annoying as fuck. There's text and video and speaking all at the same time immediately in the video, there's no possible way to get all of it on the first view, so you have to let it loop. I fucking hate it
It’s even worse if you refuse to download the app or make an account. My friend used to send me Instagram links fairly frequently (until they started allowing you to download the videos instead) and the instant you open the page the video starts playing muted, with the cookie shit covering half of it. By the time you’ve dismissed that and unmuted it you’ve missed the start of the clip, and for some reason it doesn’t let you replay without making an account (or refreshing the entire page but that muted the video again)
It's one of these things where i can't even imagine the target audience for.
If you disable watch history it refuses to show you anything unless you search.
suggestions are kinda the whole point of YouTube.
don't care if they're algorithm-based but they DO work (unlike for example example the twitter feed.) youtube suggests me some good shit and awesome new small channels all the time
On the website on a desktop, the shorts section has an X on the top right of its section. That should hide shorts for a few days. It says 30 days but I'm not convinced.
You can click the options on any video to say you aren't interested in that video or that channel.
You can delete videos from your watch history if your algorithm gets tainted. Like my nephew was watching a bunch of train videos on my TV. So algo started sending me all these train recommendations. I just deleted them from my watch history and haven't seen a train video since.
uBlock origin can block most annoying elements from the YouTube website.
This website has some useful filters for YouTube and other websites, for instance hiding already watched videos, shorts community posts etc. https://letsblock.it/filters
Honestly it’s annoying as fuck. Nobody asked for YouTube to become TikTok. In fact, I feel like we’d need to go in the opposite direction…
It’s sadly a fact that attention spans have gotten worse over the years. When it’s too much effort for people to watch a ten minute video or read more than a paragraph of text, we’re in serious trouble.
I’m doing my part by rewarding creators who put out actual quality content in longer videos. But I fear they’ve got a difficult time ahead if this trend continues.
It’s sadly a fact that attention spans have gotten worse over the years. When it’s too much effort for people to watch a ten minute video or read more than a paragraph of text, we’re in serious trouble.
Interesting to note that this isn't necessarily a fact, as at the very least there hasn't been any research to support this widely held notion.
Busting the Attention Span Myth offers a higher level overview concerning the subject.
There's also this video that covers some of that article but also digs through other sources, listed in the description.
I was at work the other day, where I can't install browser addons, watching a 25 Minute video. It got interrupted by 9 fucking ads! 9 FUCKING ADS!
What do you mean, they're right.... ohhhh. Thanks uBlock Origin!
LPT: Access youtube from a Swiss IP address. You will get a big "reject all" button up front. Reject all includes "watch history"
Youtube algorithm the same as the rest of them, based on your own history.
NewPipe. Problem solved. Now if only Google search results were worth a damn again.
Glad this isn't just my experience. I hardly ever use youtube except for mma clips and the why files; the absolute bullshit they think i want to watch, I have no idea why. Their algos are flat out wrong.
Pro tip though, you can use uBlock to zap the Shorts element right off your screen.
I think I'm too old, been using smart phones since they've been a thing. But I can't imagine watching videos on it, feel like it's annoy the people around me. And if it won't, it means I can watch YouTube on something better
