YouTube rolls out new tools to help you stop watching

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/11/youtube-rolls-out-new-tools-to-help-you-stop-watching/

111 129 8 years ago

montrose• 8 years ago

Noprocrast comes to YouTube!

runevault3• 8 years ago

First the new tools coming in Android P, now this. Interesting to see how serious Google appears to be about helping people better understand how they use their time.

jacquesm4• 8 years ago

It's the problem generator that helps you deal with the symptom. Strangest thing, they could just stop being the problem.

runevault3• 8 years ago

Can they do it without someone else simply filling the vacuum left in their wake? Or do you mean something other than stopping creating things that steal attention/etc?

kolpa3• 8 years ago

You want everyone to stop making computers, because some people overuse them?

rbongers• 8 years ago

I really hope Google keeps moving in this direction. I think it will be great for the company's long term reception and I'm excited to apply this to my own life.

sw007• 8 years ago

Wonder if other companies will follow suit?

AndrewUnmuted3• 8 years ago

Rather than giving people an exit strategy from a predatory and addictive UX, did it ever occur to Google that they may instead try to improve the UX itself so that “tools” like this don’t need to be made in the first place?

ralusek• 8 years ago

"Predatory and addictive UX" in this case just refers to the fact that they have a good algorithm and setup that correctly shows me additional related content that I actually want to see. This is like getting mad at the restaurant by your house for having food that is so good that it's making you fat and poor.

Personal lack of self control is the problem, not good UX. A tool like this is attempting to assist with the problem, not bring the functionality of the site to a point that services the shortcomings of the lowest common denominator.

mrguyorama• 8 years ago

Interesting that google now has a "design ethicist", but in my opinion, the fact that he's not allowed to shut down the company means he has already failed

ionforce• 8 years ago

Correct. Anyone that's in these positions of moderating are only as effective as they are granted the power to potentially stop everything. If that person doesn't have the power, then it's just lip service.

dyarosla2• 8 years ago

Is your remark witty? Sure. Does it add to the conversation? Not so much.

Semirhage3• 8 years ago

As a baseline it adds more than yours, right? He is for example, using humor to make the point that a toothless gesture doesn’t address the core issue. By contrast you’re just being pissy and reactive.

dageshi• 8 years ago

Given the utility of Google Search, I would really rather they not shut it down...

Semirhage3• 8 years ago

While these changes to YouTube are opt-in, it’s an interesting – and arguably responsible – position to take in terms of helping people manage their sometimes addictive behaviors around technology.

It would be easier to make that argument if they weren’t opt-in, and layered on top of an attention-monetizing economy.

ReidZB• 8 years ago

Related: as far as I know, there's no way to permanently disable the "Up Next" autoplay on the desktop site for an account, which drives me crazy every day pretty much. I hope this new design philosophy will end up with a way to disable autoplay... but I'm not holding my breath.

runevault3• 8 years ago

Are you talking playlists or period? On directly going to a video mine is disabled on the desktop site unless I load in incog window where I lose my settings. Playlists, however, I know of no way to fix it.

c54• 8 years ago

I’m pretty sure this option exists in the youtube settings, I found it and disabled autoplay at one point. Poke around, you’ll find it.

trumped3• 8 years ago

but you have to be logged in for that setting to be effective and most of the time I'm not logged in when browsing YouTube...

Sometimes I just let it play in the background to eat up their bandwidth for no reason because i don't like stupid default settings. I get it that google is trying to turn the Internet into a TV, but soon you won't even have to type anything in Google Search... the results will come to you.

LeoPanthera• 8 years ago

In the top right of any video page, above the "Up next" slot, is an "Autoplay" switch. Turn it off.

Disappointingly, the setting is per-device, and not saved into your account. But it's there.

Swizec• 8 years ago

I actually use the autoplay a lot to fake curated playlists when listening to music. Works pretty well. You start with a good song and it keeps getting good related songs.

Until it trips up and you go from Foo Fighters to Taylor Swift but tht only happens rarely.

51Cards• 8 years ago

I have Auto Play disabled on my YouTube account for regular channels. The control is above the Up Next list and I've had it off for well over a year now.

https://i.imgur.com/qaK6W8W.jpg

Playlists though keep going which is annoying.

sp332• 8 years ago

Right, but you have to set that on each individual browser. It doesn't apply to your account.

rsachoc• 8 years ago

Try Magic Actions [1] if you're a Chrome user - it allows setting of several useful options (night mode, yay) and more importantly disabling autoplay.

(long time lurker, previously registered, but forgotten password and email account no longer in my control)

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magic-actions-for-...

majewsky3• 8 years ago

My personal solution is to play everything with mpv instead: From YouTube's SERP, I copy the link to the video and run `mpv "$(xsel -b)"`, which downloads the video with youtube-dl and plays it in mpv, i.e. in a desktop app. No bullshit, no autoplay, just plain video and audio. As a bonus, this works with almost any website containing video, so the player works the same regardless of website.

lozf• 8 years ago

Yes! Added advantages that it skips ads, and has keyboard control for all sorts of things that are sometimes useful depending on what you're watching or listening to: playback speed, A-B loop repeat, adjust brightness / hue, pause, frame advance, take screenshot etc.

gulperxcx• 8 years ago

So does this method strip out ads?

Giorgi• 8 years ago

Yeah, well they are not earning any money after the ad is played so might as well suggest to stop playing.

bahmboo• 8 years ago

I wonder if this phenomenon is age related. I chose not to regulate my game playing hours to something "healthy" in my teens and my early twenties. As I aged it wasn't an issue. I guess this is a thing now? How about you've been working 10 hours time to take a break? You've been married 20 years time to move on? Somewhat facetious but I was genuinely surprised they actually built these tools because that implies it's not a trivial issue in the population.

artur_makly• 8 years ago

youtube kids should have better addiction and content controls

tomc1985• 8 years ago

By night, YouTube and Facebook secretly take baseball bats to the windshields of our minds.

By day, YouTube and Facebook sell us glass repair services, at a special price no less!

YT and FB could fix these social issues overnight, if they wanted to: turn off autoplay, turn off recommendations, restore chronological timelines, and dial down the ads. But they won't because that is the core of their business model.

Instead they offer bullshit mind-repair services to fix the damage they continue to do.

JumpCrisscross• 8 years ago

Or: auto logout. It's how I effectively dampered by Facebook usage. No apps on the phone, log out when done on the desktop. Adds a picosecond for considering whether you're tabbing over out of addiction or free will.

lallysingh• 8 years ago

Have you considered not using fb anymore? Try the delete account feature - they give you a few weeks before it's actually deleted. I found that I didn't actually miss it.

jacquesm4• 8 years ago

turn off autoplay, turn off recommendations, restore chronological timelines, and dial down the ads

I suspect it wouldn't even cost them all that much but no amount of discomfort of the users can balance out a few bucks of extra income.

quotemstr3• 8 years ago

Any strategy for the betterment of society that depends on for-profit companies voluntarily forgoing legal ways to earn a profit is doomed to failure. It's elaborate do-gooder fan fiction. The world does not work that way.

The world shouldn't work that way either: if companies stopped providing the goods and services people needed because a few self-appointed guardians of the public good scream about it on social media, we'd never have been able to make progress at all, since these activists have no special power to distinguish change from regression, and so err toward stasis.

If you want high-engagement features disabled, fine. Propose a law. Let's duke it out in the process of government. You will lose, badly, because your position is wildly unpopular with the vast body of the population.

exergy• 8 years ago

What a myopic comment, and dripping with unwarranted vitriol.

The world absolutely _should_ work that way. Companies _should_ have half a brain to realise that selling bottled water is bad for the environment, that fracking causes earthquakes, that sugar is the root of all dietary evil, that tobacco is carcinogenic, that overfishing causes unspeakable damage to ocean life, that SUVs are colossal wastes of space and fuel...

All the companies doing the above are providing wildly popular goods and services. And a lot of them are perfectly legal too.

Your suggestion implies that all this is just dandy, thank you very much, so take your hemp clothing and your vegan sandals and your do-gooderness off of my property and gtfo acting as a "self appointed guardian".

What kind of extreme libertarian hard-on does a man have to possess to believe that all of this is how society SHOULD work?

I deeply resent this sentiment that you have to take the good with the bad of a free market society because there is no alternative. Of course there is! Regulate these idiots into the ground! While this is clearly a pipe dream, that's a long way away from the statement that this is how society _should_ be.

some_account• 8 years ago

Special power? It's easy for most to see if something has damaging consequences. When did we start needing experts to tell us basic things? If we don't trust our own judgment, we are not adults.

petra2• 8 years ago

> since these activists have no special power to distinguish change from regression

OK. That may be true. but demand is also a poor signal of distinguishing progress from regression.

So let's work on that. On a better method for doing so. It seems possible to do so, using the knowledge we gained in the many sciences dealing with human/eco welfare.

> Let's duke it out in the process of government. ... You will lose, badly, because your position is wildly unpopular with the vast body of the population.

Leaving aside the many failures of democracy, people not always know or prefer the thing that is good for them in the long term. I'm not saying that totalitarinsm is OK, but most people do benefit from living in an environment that guides them well, surrounds them with good things, and makes it hard for them to choose the wrong choices.

Karrot_Kream• 8 years ago

since these activists have no special power to distinguish change from regression, and so err toward stasis.

Citation needed.

blub• 8 years ago

"providing the good and services people needed"? Nobody needs to watch videos or like memes on Facebook. It's just a cheap type of stimulation that can easily become addictive (because it's designed to become addictive). Judging by how gushing you are about those services, and how they represent progress, one could be excused for thinking that you're referring to some essential scientific invention, instead of the internet based fast-food of the mind.

And it's funny that you're challenging people to fight Facebook & co in the process of government, which has been subverted by lobbyist money from... Facebook & co. Why do you think that the US government is asleep at the wheel when it comes to privacy? Because they're paid a lot of money to not worry about it. And with enough money changing hands, it becomes easy to think that in fact those services are needed by the public and they represent progress.

So no thanks. The self-appointed guardians of the public are smart to use different tactics.

douglaswlance• 8 years ago

Who's to say that the minds they're building aren't more suitable for a future environment? You're assuming the future is like the past, which is most assuredly won't be.

okmokmz• 8 years ago

I truly hope that being addicted to instant gratification via a dopamine response doesn't make one more suited for future environments. I can't see how that would be healthy or productive

iamnothere• 8 years ago

Building minds? They aren't building minds; evolution is what built minds, and it hasn't had time to adapt to this situation. Modern media is exploiting bugs in the mind's structure for profit, and these companies are leaving plenty of damage in their wake.

If the future is passive consumption of propaganda and marketing content masquerading as "entertainment", you can count me out. I'll go chop wood and raise chickens while I watch for the system to collapse under its own weight.

andrei_says_• 8 years ago

Unable to focus? Addicted to consumption of stimuli and trance-like states? Uncapable of postponing the impulse of instant gratification?

Idiocracy portrais that kind of future very well.

Sargos• 8 years ago

Besides the ads I really like all of those things. You make them sound so nefarious with no useful purpose. I find new channels all the time from my recommendations and if I didn't have autoplay then I wouldn't be able to coast on a topic I want to learn about passively.

It's immensely useful to me and just because you don't like it doesn't make it some evil plot to control our minds. Remember that TV has had autoplay since its inception. It's just a natural way to consume media passively.

plankers4• 8 years ago

Perhaps part of the problem is that exact "coasting" mentality that you mention. Autoplay disincentivizes users to seek out their own content, which would help build the skills which are useful for finding new, interesting information on the internet.

The deeper philosophical question seems to be whether it's more desirable for people to have the skills to control their own education or whether it's more desirable to optimize tools for bringing educational resources to people. You can go a bit deeper than that and ask whether it's more desirable to have a population of independent thinkers or like-minded thinkers. We'd probably be better off with a bit of both.

I prefer to frame these kinds of arguments in terms of educational materials, which you can kinda loosely call most forms of media.

hobofan• 8 years ago

Also on Youtube, you can easily toggle autoplay at any time, and in contrast to FB & Twitter there still _is_ a page for subscription videos in chronological order.

Yes, "bad" (who is to judge?) defaults might be slightly immoral, but they are at least giving users the option to not use them.

Reedx3• 8 years ago

It's actually in large part up to you what content they feed you. Twitter, fb, it's who you put in your feed. YouTube, it's based on what you watch. Consume garbage, get more garbage.

YouTube actually has a treasure trove of content and once you find it, you get more of it[1]. And their recommendations are really handy to see related content.

No ads with YouTube Red.

[1] e.g., I mostly see stuff from channels like CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, Veritasium, Vsauce, Every Frame a Painting, Vox, Jordan Peterson, Matthias Wandel, Nerdwriter1, AvE, TED Talks, SciShow, Engineer Guy, LastWeekTonight, SmarterEveryDay, etc...

slig2• 8 years ago

Matthias Wandel's channel was one of the first I subscribed on YouTube. Such brilliant and humble guy, and inspiring in multiple ways.

plankers4• 8 years ago

No ads with NewPipe either. And no fees ;)

tw1010• 8 years ago

You're right. "Help you stop watching" effectively shifts the blame from the corporation onto the consumer. It's an entirely self serving strategy made under the guise of ethics.

kolpa3• 8 years ago

at a special price no less!

the price is $0.

How do you feel about HN's implementation of the same feature (noprocrast)? https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomc1985

thankthunk• 8 years ago

YT and FB could fix these social issues overnight

What social issues? I remember old conservatives railing about gansta rap and south park causing social issues back i the day. Now it's old people whining about YT and FB. They aren't cause of social issues and they aren't the solution either. No more than smartphones or flat screen TVs.

if they wanted to: turn off autoplay, turn off recommendations,

Why should they?

But they won't because that is the core of their business model.

Sure. But what about the people who want recommendations or autoplay?

What's with select group of people on HN and their totalitarian mindset? Just because you don't have impulse control doesn't mean others don't have it.

I like recommendations because it helps me find relevant videos. For example, if I search for C# or Haskell tutorials, it's great to see other C# or haskell videos. Same thing for recipes or how-to videos or nature videos or anything else. Why should I and others be denied something because you don't like it?

It's crazy that some of the people on "hacker" news are so dedicated on censorship. Somehow hacker news turned from a very programmer/tech/free speech forum to old people whining about their lives and society.

How about personal responsibility? How about not blaming others for your own short coming?

Instead they offer bullshit mind-repair services to fix the damage they continue to do.

I agree, they shouldn't give in. Instead they should tell advertisers and people who whine to simply stop using youtube.

I don't understand why youtube and the rest of social media/tech industry simply put their foot down and say enough is enough.

What about hacker news? Do you think hacker news should be shut down? Is hacker news responsible for social issues?

plankers4• 8 years ago

What social issues? I remember old conservatives railing about gansta rap and south park causing social issues back i the day. Now it's old people whining about YT and FB. They aren't cause of social issues and they aren't the solution either. No more than smartphones or flat screen TVs.

Gangsta rap and South Park are content. This thread is about platforms and how the medium can shape the message. The analogy does not hold water.

The rest of your comment is kinda off-topic and ranty, but that wasn't a great way to start it. Friendly advice.

coastal-fiesta• 8 years ago

Youtube autoplay is quite easy to turn off, fwiw.

stochastic_monk• 8 years ago

If you’re like me and try to reduce being tracked by using a private browsing window, you have to do this every single time you go to Youtube. Same with annotations, which I see as pure intrusion.

It’s annoying at least.

vinayms• 8 years ago

Lately, I am reading about such product features a lot. I wonder if there is some kind of intelligence about class action suits in the making against tech sites like YouTube, Facebook etc for being addictive and dangerous to health, because I can't imagine these companies taking interest in these sort of things suo moto. Seems they are preempting a future legal hassle.

zrobotics• 8 years ago

AFAIK there's no legal threats in the pipeline, I think they are wanting to avoid the negative media attention Facebook has been receiving. There doesn't need to be a legal threat, enough negative press could be very detrimental to their business model, which revolves around YouTube being a de facto monopoly in the video space.

HNthrow22• 8 years ago

Share a similar cynical view of this, smells like a preemptive CYA move. Reminds me casinos with the help numbers for gambling addicts posted.

There's been high profile articles shining a light on the predatory design tactics in tech recently so the awareness of the issue is on the rise. The idea of a 'design ethicist' while novel seems fundamentally opposed to the attention-economy.

Overly cynical view is this is google angling to make the case to self-regulate vs. managing an intrusive regulatory body investigating/fining them for violations once more people are aware of the current shenanigans.

eric_h2• 8 years ago

Reminds me casinos with the help numbers for gambling addicts posted

At least one of the problem gambling hotlines has an IVR option to redirect you to a hotel reservation system.

wcunning• 8 years ago

YouTube did that at the beginning of April by enforcing new content standards that disallowed content I liked. Deciding to exercise editorial and "parental" control over the platform is going to kill it for me, and extrapolating from current trends, probably do so in the next 12 months or less.

joecool10292• 8 years ago

Surprised nobody brought it up when talking about terrible UX. The current YouTube UI is this shit called polymer. It's terrible, on most systems it delays loading any text around the player until the player is loaded. (Especially bad in Firefox/Edge)

This can be disabled by appending disable_polymer=1 to the URL, but it can't be saved as a cookie or set per account. I have a greasemonkey script to it.

For me it's an annoyance, for my blind friend it means no working screenreader when polymer is enabled.

sushid• 8 years ago

Really? This certainly can't be a limitation in the language, correct? I find it hard to believe that Google doesn't have accessibility support for one of their websites written in their own language.

cpeterso2• 8 years ago

YouTube's Polymer UI uses Web Components and Shadow DOM, which are natively implemented in Chrome but not Firefox or Edge yet. So YouTube serves slow JavaScript polyfills for JavaScript to non-Chrome browsers.

Firefox and Edge (on my Windows laptop) take about five seconds to replace a YouTube page's wireframe layout with text. But if I append "&disable_polymer=1" as joecool1029 recommends above, the text loads instantly in Firefox and Edge. Is YouTube's new Polymer UI sooo much better that is worth five second page loads in non-Chrome browsers?

jaflo• 8 years ago

You can also use UA faking: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/74j8r6/how_to_set_...

joecool10292• 8 years ago

Thanks for that. I can confirm that works better than the Greasemonkey Script.

trendia• 8 years ago

Is there any way to create a playlist of videos and then resume playback at the same point?

For instance, I have about 20 C++ videos I'd like to watch, and each is an hour long. I rarely have a whole hour, but maybe 20 minutes. I have yet to figure out how to resume playback where I left off, which would be a very useful feature!

nix0n• 8 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/feed/history will at least tell you which one you watched last

dredmorbius6• 8 years ago

mps-youtube

Killer feature.

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

chasing• 8 years ago

Stop promoting videos that are low-content, mindless listicles, or flat-out misleading. Or promote stupid behavior. I'm relatively savvy, but every time I go poking around YouTube it takes a fucking effort to avoid this garbage.

Those videos are designed to be as addicting and empty as eating piles and piles of candy and YouTube cannot be a mentally healthy place as long as they're constantly pushed to to forefront.

Reedx3• 8 years ago

I rarely see any of that, actually. The key is to be logged in, build up some history and subscribe to high quality channels. Most of what I see is related to things I've watched or new content from said channels.

Plus subscribe to Youtube Red, so don't have ads injecting garbage.

dredmorbius6• 8 years ago

I don't want to be logged in or spew my personal viewing interests to some cloud-hosted ads-and-marketing AI's behavioural manipulation engine.

Why not client-based tools that locally retain channel blocklists?

majewsky3• 8 years ago

Red

[ :/ ] This subscription is not available in your country.

lovehashbrowns• 8 years ago

YouTube is pretty accurate in how it does recommended content. Sometimes I do watch shitty content, but unlike Amazon, I'm not gonna be stuck with that decision for the next few months. And their revenue model is apparently really good, with YouTube red being more lucrative for a channel than ads. It's the kind of system I wish were available in other places more often.

hungerstrike• 8 years ago

I don't need a babysitter to tell me when to stop doing things, but I'd love to be able to login to YouTube without having to be logged into the rest of Google.

That's one reason I think Twitch is killing YouTube in live-streaming: Like Reddit, I'm able to create a new Twitch account without having it affect the rest of my life online and I can be completely anonymous - they don't ask for a phone number or anything.

rconti• 8 years ago

Am I the only one who has 0 youtube addiction? I find FB far more compelling, though I derive quite a bit of value from it.

I watch YouTube to watch a video or two I want to watch. that's it. Frankly, when someone sends me a video to watch, I resent it, because I hate spending 5 minutes of my life watching something that probably won't be funny.

Some nights I'll pull up YT on the TV and play a Wendover productions vid, or an AvE vid, or a car video or two, and that's it. I don't ever feel sucked in or addicted to it. If anything, I often want to watch something but can't find anything interesting to watch; nothing sounds that compelling, or I get 3 minutes in and am bored so I try to find something else.

Am I unique in that way? I've also never gotten into video games, they just don't hold any appeal or hold my attention. That's not to say I haven't spend 12 hours gaming at a LAN party once in a blue moon (actually far less frequently, maybe 4 or 5 times in my life).. but I don't get sucked in in the same way I get sucked into other internet distractions. I can go down HN rabbitholes or keep refreshing FB or some news site hoping to find something interesting, but YT doesn't do it for me.

ghba66• 8 years ago

I am exactly like you. I hate videos. Videos are a loss of time compared to text. They are slower, you can’t consume them at your own pace, you can’t go back easily or read a particular part slowly and then read the rest faster or skip sections or paragraphs or...

Also I can’t imagine anything lamer than YouTube personalities.

Jemmeh• 8 years ago

This. It kind of depends on my mood or what I'm doing, but reading is generally so much faster. Though I realized a while back that this is mostly true for people who read quickly. Some of my older family members prefer videos to having to put on reading glasses. And a lot of people just read slowly in general.

Now that I think about it, it's usually when my eyes are kind of aching (long days at screens) that I start to prefer videos even for things that don't require a visual.

majewsky3• 8 years ago

I think it depends on the type of content. I'm totally with you for content that should be text (e.g. most things related to programming), but some content lends itself to the video form factor and doesn't work as plaintext content.

For example, imagine CinemaSins or Movies with Mikey as plaintext. That would take all of the fun out of it.

Or imagine reading transcripts of Stephen Colbert's monologues. Those would probably be quite tedious since a lot of Colbert's quality is his pantomimic object work.

slig2• 8 years ago

I used to think exactly like yourself, until I found some really good channels of passionate people. It's clear when the author is doing videos because he enjoy in contrast when they're doing for the short term money.

aarbor989• 8 years ago

I go on YouTube like once a month, at most. So yea I’m with you. I’ve actually _tried_ to get “addicted” to it by forcing myself to search for interesting videos just to see what all the fuss about, but I just never end up going back to the site for more

sodosopa• 8 years ago

They added Logan Paul to every video didn't they?

pathseeker• 8 years ago

It's like a cigarette company offering a gum you chew that reduces your smoking from a pack a day to half a pack a day. Whoopee!

balls187• 8 years ago

Youtube, start by killing all content aimed at little kids.

twothamendment• 8 years ago

Potato chip company: "We tired to make you stop eating them." Customer: "Sell me more, I don't care if I'm fat." Potato chip company: "OK, but make sure you read the nutrition panel on the back." (Hey guys, increase production, we have them hooked now!)

As long as auto play lives on, they show they have no interest in helping anyone watch less - and why should they pretend they care?

watwut2• 8 years ago

My issue with youtube is not that I cant stop watching. I have two issues:

1.) I watched one historical nazi movie due to attempt to learn. Why is it suggestig so many "holocaust did not happened" pieces and genuine white supremacist bs? Real story.

2.) I started with metal search. Why is it reversion g to pop so fast? I want metal. Definitely not Peppa the Pig. Wtf, I started with metal, not Peppa.

sokoloff• 8 years ago

I find it amusing that one of the choices is 180 minutes.

Yes, please remind me every three HOURS of non-stop videos that I watch that it might be time to take a break...but don't offer me a choice of every two hours.

Aardwolf• 8 years ago

You set Wind Down when you’d like to go to bed, and Android P will shift into a gray-scale palette

Oh they should really make this red-scale (red on black, no white light), not grey-scale, red is the only color that does not disturb night vision, and grey contains blue so disturbs sleep.

YouTube rolls out new tools to help you stop watching

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