Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction

https://rakhim.exotext.com/thank-you-google-for-breaking-my-youtube-addiction

by ambigious7777 • 1 year ago

116 96 1 year ago

rakhim.exotext.com

Xss3• 1 year ago

I question whether or not they AB tested the new YouTube search full of crap vs the old one full of relevant videos.

meetingthrower• 1 year ago

Totally! Why does it show the same damn videos I've skipped over 20 times? I don't want to watch them obviously!

johnisgood• 1 year ago

They have ruined recommendations, too, a long time ago. They ruined search, too. If you search for something, it will give you maybe 5 results at best, and as you scroll down, the rest is totally unrelated to the searched term. YouTube has been ruined a long time ago.

Euphorbium• 1 year ago

Because you have not pressed “do not recommend channel”. That is the best youtube feature.

57FkMytWjyFu• 1 year ago

You should know that do not recommend channel has never really worked. Especially if there are any videos from that channel in your history.... ever.

mvdtnz3• 1 year ago

It's very annoying if I do want to see that channel, just not THAT video. You also have to be careful with that button because there's no way to selectively unblock channels. There's a feature to undo your entire Do Not Recommend / Not Interested history but not to undo it for an individual channel / video.

loloquwowndueo3• 1 year ago

The ridiculous amount of ads is what’s made me basically not use YouTube unless I really really need to.

On my computer I have an ad blocker which makes it more tolerable but then there’s the added friction of “ugh I have to go start the computer and sit down yadda yadda”.

I could pay for a mobile ad blocker so I could watch crap on my phone. But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life.

yodsanklai3• 1 year ago

Well, just pay for the subscription. It gives you youtube music as well, and you can share it with several other people. It just a few bucks a month, totally worth it.

openplatypus3• 1 year ago

I have YT Premium, still have to skip through ads (sponsored blocks in creators videos).

There are few great creators without them, but these ranks are shrinking fast.

usui• 1 year ago

There it is, the "Just pay for YouTube" person inevitably shows up like usual on HN YouTube threads.

OP addressed this already: "But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life."

gardnr2• 1 year ago

We must have different definitions of "a few bucks"...

eqvinox• 1 year ago

The problem isn't the ads, the problem is the (suggested) content. (And the ads.)

bgwalter• 1 year ago

Why would you want your credit card and real name connected to your consumption history?

Watch too much Daily Wire? Good luck with your Google interview.

Want to enter the US on a visa? Perhaps they'll demand your YouTube history next.

Jotalea2• 1 year ago

Youtube Premium -> NewPipe

Youtube Music (Premium too) -> RiMusic

13.99 -> free

rot256• 1 year ago

PipePipe? https://pipepipe.dev/

EDIT: also skips sponsor segments.

-__---____-ZXyw2• 1 year ago

Seconded, pipepipe is excellent

netsharc• 1 year ago

If it's Android, you can install NewPipe.

For my Kodi box that is connected to a 24" monitor in my bedroom, the Youtube plugin used to work, but it got slower and slower. I've now created a PHP wrapper to yt-dlp, I load the webpage (hosted on my NAS) on my phone, paste the video URL, click download, and a while later the video is an MP4 video stored on my NAS, ready to view on Kodi.

201984• 1 year ago

On Android, you can also use Firefox with uBlock Origin.

pbasista3• 1 year ago

You seem to suggest that you have a device which does not allow you to watch YouTube videos on it without ads. Is that the case?

The uBlock Origin browser extension removes all YouTube ads. It works fine on Firefox, even on mobile. With Chrome, it is possible to use the "lite" version of this extension that seems to block at least the YouTube ads without issue.

On Android, there are several apps which can do it, for example NewPipe or Grayjay. At least NewPipe works fine on Android TVs as well. Also on Android TVs, it is possible to use Kodi with YouTube and InputStream Adaptive add-ons which can also be used to watch YouTube without ads.

I would avoid buying devices which claim to support YouTube but do not allow watching it without ads, for whatever reason.

loloquwowndueo3• 1 year ago

I have the YouTube app on iOS. I never found a way to remove ads other than paying (lol). Then again - I didn’t look too hard as by then I’d already realized 99% of YouTube content is crap anyway. Sure I could install a combination of apps that would let me watch ad-free. But at this point I’m weaned off - better off without the damn thing.

1317• 1 year ago

laughing at all the sibling replies completely missing the point

yodsanklai3• 1 year ago

I'm pretty sure Google knows what they're doing regarding addiction. They have all the engagement metrics and train their AI to optimize for that.

Maybe this doesn't correlate to a satisfying user experience though. For me, the biggest drop in quality was when they stopped showing the dislike counts. I know there's a Chrome plugin that works as a substitute, not sure if it's good.

KeplerBoy• 1 year ago

I do believe they send you some notification or mail if you watch over 50 hours a week.

perching_aix2• 1 year ago

Works fine (read: addictively) here. Have you ever tried marking videos and channels as not of interest? Maybe you're doing something that effectively prevents Google from profiling you "properly" to then "properly" hook you in with recomms?

mvdtnz3• 1 year ago

Have you ever tried marking videos and channels as not of interest?

Other than hiding that one video I am absolutely convinced that this button does nothing at all. It says "we'll tweak your preferences" but I don't think it does.

perching_aix2• 1 year ago

Hiding an entire channel should at least work, that much I was able to directly confirm.

Although it was not without a twist. Originally, I blocked asmongold and his shorts channel - so far so good. But then he made a second shorts channel. Okay, blocked that too. But then unrelated third parties made another "fan" shorts channel, so I had to block that too. I'm not sure how many further iterations there will be, but most of the time and for the most part, I did manage to get rid of him from my feeds, so that's something.

openplatypus3• 1 year ago

Ha! So I am not alone. I thought it was just me as I have search history off and all privacy toggles switched to maximum off.

I was under impression that this was the reason all follow-ups/recommendations are just irrelevant rubbish.

But the sound of it, it is just a feature of modern YouTube.

Also side note: 3-4 years ago watching hardware reviews was fine on YT. Today it is a pulp of sponsored/biased reviews (disclosed or not). I give youtube 0 trust, on par with Amazon reviews.

Most of trusted creators already moved or double publish to Nebula.

saretup• 1 year ago

From my experience, YouTube recommendations on Apple TV suck compared to the home feed you get when you open YT on iOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I opened YouTube on mobile after a long time, it actually felt like what YouTube used to be with a wide variety of new and interesting videos (plus added shorts and posts).

I think Google needs to look into optimizing it better for those of us who prefer watching YouTube on TV.

typeofhuman• 1 year ago

More time is spent watching YouTube on TV than on mobile

https://www.thewrap.com/youtube-more-people-watch-tv-vs-mobi...

api2• 1 year ago

What’s funny and sad is that the evolution of YouTube toward a chum feed that pulls people toward rubbish may have broken some peoples addiction but overall it has probably increased it.

One of the things that flabbergasts me about YouTube and TikTok is the utter bilge that people will watch. TV had some of this: trash daytime TV, late night infomercials, soaps to some extent. But the stuff social media runs on today is a whole other level.

If you went back in time and told me that millions would spend endless hours watching other people play video games while monologuing about nothing and randomly doing the same juvenile reactions over and over, I would not have believed you. Same goes for obvious zero effort AI slop, machine voices reading Reddit posts to a slide show background, incoherent rambling, or for kids videos of people unboxing toys for eight hours… it’s just astounding.

There seem to be these “hooks” that if mastered can take the place of plot, aesthetics, information, and everything else, and mesmerize people.

Sometimes it seems like the banality and bizarre nonsensical nature of it is the hook, like people just want to stare at nothing.

exsomet• 1 year ago

A slightly different perspective for your consideration:

I watch videos of people playing through games and talking about or alongside it. There are two main reasons, both of which I (obviously) think are valid.

1. I enjoy gaming and use these videos as background noise when I’m doing things for work that don’t have a high cognitive load. If I’m going to have something on TV or streaming, I’d prefer it be associated with one of my interests.

2. For games with some sort of planning or problem solving element, I watch videos of people who are better at them than me so that I can learn different ways to do things. A classic example is Factorio, which has a thousand ways to organize a production line. It’s useful to see different people do this in different ways and optimize for different things, and yes - talk through it while they do. That translates into me being more informed and coming up with better ideas myself, which means more fun playing the game.

It’s very much fine for this to not be for everyone and all, but that doesn’t always make it trash/bilge.

ryandrake• 1 year ago

What I can't understand are those videos of 20-something year old nobodies, who apparently got plastic surgery to look like waxy, sticky 40 year old ladies with huge lips, sitting in their car, talking about nothing. No matter what history and features I turn off, no matter how many times I click "No, I don't want this" they end up in my feed. These videos must make a fortune to these companies somehow.

scoofy• 1 year ago

+1 from me too

unyttigfjelltol• 1 year ago

My feed is blank every day and I love it.

When I choose to watch, it's stuff I truly enjoy, not algorithmic sludge.

throwaway519• 1 year ago

I can't even watch anything anymore. It tells me to sign in, but I don't want to sign in. The great YouTube uubiquitous video host of the web appears to be dying.

pbasista3• 1 year ago

With uBlock Origin browser extension it works just fine even without logging in.

danielbln2• 1 year ago

Unless you fall into the bottomless rabbit hole that is Shorts. That's waaaaay more addictive than your regular long form YT content.

Fun fact: disabling watch history also disables Shorts.

magicalhippo• 1 year ago

I find shorts actively annoying.

Every once in a while I click on one because it's not just a small tidbit from a longer video, and every time I get annoyed the feature exists and don't want to see another one for a long time.

pbasista3• 1 year ago

disabling watch history also disables Shorts.

I have YouTube watch history disabled and when I search for something I usually get a few "lines" of search results filled with "Shorts".

danielbln2• 1 year ago

Yeah but the endless customized one-more-time mechanism won't work anymore, which is the addictive part.

kaashif2• 1 year ago

I don't understand Shorts. My primary use case for YouTube is putting some 20-30 min video on the TV while I eat. I barely watch YouTube in any other context.

I may be unusual but there's an entire subreddit for "mealtime videos" so this use case must be common.

trwhite2• 1 year ago

What did it for me was disabling my history (a setting). Consequently your YT homepage is blank and it doesn’t suggest any shorts. You can maintain a kind of history by liking videos or just via the browser itself.

openplatypus3• 1 year ago

You still get shorts in search results :(

qoez• 1 year ago

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youtube-shorts-bloc...

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...

jadamson• 1 year ago

Their changes are so bad that someone made a browser extension to jump straight to your subscriptions so you never see the homepage (my watch history was off already and I didn't like the homepage telling me to turn it on).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ytmysubs/

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lfoephndcoilebphhdb...

raydev3• 1 year ago

Why would you disable history?

trwhite2• 1 year ago

Without history Youtube doesn't know what you like and therefore can't suggest videos to watch on the homepage.

cejast• 1 year ago

What's even more interesting is that if you turn off watch history, they disable the home feed altogether. They just give up trying to show you anything, which has been great for keeping me off YouTube.

cbondurant• 1 year ago

I relate to this entirely, finding anything I want to watch has just kept getting harder and harder.

jowea• 1 year ago

The oddest part to me is among the popular videos and videos from channels I watched, there's the odd 300 views video that is somewhat distantly related to my watch history on the frontpage. Is the algorithm trying to give a chance to small channels?

fzzzy• 1 year ago

Yes, that has been happening to me for a few months as well.

patchymcnoodles• 1 year ago

I have a very different experience. For me the algorithm works pretty well. And I use youtube a lot since many years. Also have the paid subscription so no ads anymore (beside sponsor ads of course).

I get a lot of content I want and interested in, but I also have a long list of subscriptions. Sometimes I run into a rabbit hole, where I watch some completely different content and youtube then shows that for me for a while, even after I'm not interested anymore. But that is just for some days and then it stops showing it on my home feed.

So for me it does exactly what I want it to do.

Now I wonder, why is there such a massive difference in the experience?

TrianguloY• 1 year ago

I was going to comment this. My experience matches yours, the home page shows videos I may be interested on watch, and the subscriptions page shows videos from my subscriptions. Watch something new and you get related videos for a couple days, but ignore those and they disappear. I also like the occasional videos from old subscriptions or old watched videos, reminders from time to time.

I do not have the paid subscription though, but I do use only android (never web).

pknerd• 1 year ago

The inclusion of shorts on the home page or search is the biggest irritative feature

stwrzn2• 1 year ago

Youtube doesn't even want me to watch videos anymore!

Every video is just this now:

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loloquwowndueo3• 1 year ago

This seems to be ip-address-based. Change your ip if feasible, possibly using a vpn, and you can likely bypass that.

Or you could just do the healthy thing and walk away from YouTube. Plenty of better things to do with one’s time!

stwrzn2• 1 year ago

It is IP based, and my whole range is banned. I welcome it though, as you said it stops the Youtube time-wasting.

octo888• 1 year ago

Even better, get a VPN and you'll not be able to watch anything without logging in! :)

Even though Google has I imagine 10+ ways to determine you're not a bot, they choose to require a login. I'm mostly de-Googled, so I rarely sign in and have no incentive to do so.

mrdw• 1 year ago

Thank you Google for breaking my YT addiction by introducing YT shorts, now its deleted

troupo• 1 year ago

Worst part? Youtube Premium's entire proposition is "you won't get ads". Otherwise it's the same enshittified experience

Squeeeez• 1 year ago

The same here...

What alternatives are there?

microflash• 1 year ago

Well, you could subscribe to YouTube channels using RSS and watch videos at your own pace. A decent content can strip ads and sponsored sections out for you.

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

I still watch a lot of youtube. I'm subscribed to lots of youtubers providing me with more interesting stuff than I can manage to watch. I'm not aware of a better platform for watching stuff like that.

The trick with youtube (if you are not paying, like me):

- Use Firefox and a decent ad blocker to skip the ads. I never see any. It think Google just gave up on doing anything about that and just focuses on making life miserable for Chrome users only. Whatever it is, if ads are the reason you are no longer watching Youtube, Firefox is the fix.

- Ignore recommendations and the glorified more of the same shit algorithm that produces them. It's just not very good. And you can't really potty train it to better. The controls are there but they don't do anything useful or productive. I just bookmarked the /subscriptions page and only bother with the front page if I'm really bored.

- Ignore shorts. They are easily recognized because they are portrait mode instead of landscape mode. So, just don't click them. I find them disappointing and bland. And stupid. I have no patience for that.

gardnr2• 1 year ago

Have you tried a filter list for shorts?

Something like this? https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

chneu• 1 year ago

Piggy backing.

I can't use YouTube without a handful of extensions. I use waterfox.

Ublock origin. Enhancer for Youtube. Sponsorblock. DeArrow. Privacy Badger.

Enhancer does the heavy lifting while DeArrow unshittifies all the titles/thumbnails. Ublock gets most the ads. Privacy Badger increases load time significantly. Sponsorblock skips those sponsor ads.

I support creators directly through patron or merch. I don't wanna see their ads and there isn't really a way to avoid them in most cases.

mosquitobiten• 1 year ago

this is what happens at the the bottom of the feed when you binge whatch a channel or a certain type of content for a few days: https://imgur.com/zHytexT

isodev• 1 year ago

YouTube has been showing me the same forced ad for more than a year now and it acts as a moment to reflect if I really, really want to watch the video or just close the page and move on with my day

timbit42• 1 year ago

Why not install uBlock Origin so you will see no ads at all?

seafoamteal• 1 year ago

I still find videos I like on YouTube from the people I subscribe to, and I've also noticed that YouTube sometimes shows me interesting videos for new or smaller creators, but that second one is very hit or miss.

What really got me using YouTube less was using uBlock to zap the shorts feeds. That alone improved my experience by orders of magnitude, along with disabling (not deleting, unfortunately) YouTube on my phone.

ednite• 1 year ago

I couldn’t agree more.I'm experiencing the same issue. I rarely watch TV or movies (still hoarding my binge list). My routine used to be a quick 30-min mind reset before bed.Usually it's some random, oddly fascinating YouTube rabbit hole. My wife still hasn’t recovered from the video about a remote tribe brewing beer with spit.

But lately? It’s like the algorithm gave up. Same thumbnails haunting me. I used to feel like YouTube knew me. Now we are stranger's.

Makes me wonder, either the algorithm broke, or we’re part of a marketing experiment.

h1fra• 1 year ago

At least they finally fixed the subscription tab by separating shorts and videos

donatj• 1 year ago

The search is absolutely infuriating!

You search for something you 100% know exists to show someone and it just gives up after a couple videos and starts showing recommendations.

Just the other day I was out at my parents house and I wanted to show them this channel my young daughter likes, a young woman who is herself learning to play banjo.

When we're home, to find her videos for my daughter I simply enter the girls name and "banjo" and her channel comes up. At my parents house however this just returned famous banjo players and completely ignored the name I had entered.

I was frustrated, shocked, and baffled as I scrolled through results where YouTube entirely buried this tiny creator behind giant creators, even when searched for explicitly by name. I then entered the exact same query into Google on my parent's computer and she was the top result.

My advice these days would be to just avoid YouTube search entirely and head straight to Google, as that still kind of works.

curiousguy• 1 year ago

When people say that Google Search is broken because the internet changed and it’s not google fault, I point them to YouTube search.

With YouTube, Google has full control of the platform and its data, there is no excuse for why the search is so useless.

I bet there is some product owner in Google that did some A/B test and took as “proof” that adding random recommendation in the search results increases engagement, and then got a promotion and a raise because of that.

kaashif2• 1 year ago

This is a universal experience as far as I know. What I don't know is whether it was an intentional decision or not.

I certainly hope it was intentional, because the level of corporate dysfunction necessary to produce an unintentional decline in quality of this magnitude would be something to behold...

mrtksn• 1 year ago

I'm not sure there's anything new under the sun except that they tried pushing decade ol videos. I have one fairly popular video on my channel that dropped to less than a hundred views a day and suddenly it was pushed to a lot of people for a week or two and I got people complaining in the comments about why they are seeing this 16 years old video. Then it went away.

Anyway, it's the reason why I pay extra for music streaming despite having Youtube Music for free together with my Subscription. YouTube for some reason thinks that I want to keep listening the same stuff over and over again.

It's also why I love TikTok. Most of my find on TikTok happen to have a YouTube channel too but for some reason YouTube never bothered to show me any of those. It was for TikTok to let me try something new and drill down from there.

I still like YouTube a lot, it has some very high quality content that shines brightly among the slop that the wider internet has become but YouTube really needs to up its content discovery game.

dalf• 1 year ago

Same experience here. It used to give me spot-on recommendations based on my watch history-often out of nowhere, but still accurate. That was one of the reasons I subscribed to YouTube Premium.

Now, I strongly feel it's based on a wrongly inferred social graph. It recommends videos according to what's happen in the group. It's really unsettling.

I wish there were a setting to disable this "feature." and to stick on my history.

arresin• 1 year ago

It broke our addiction but I don’t think it did for the broad market. People for example who click on the videos where a person has their mouth open wide in the thumbnail or “watch this before you buy ____”.

I think they just couldn’t get personalisation in line with other goals and just gave up at some point because to them it’s just a long tail with their volume.

dvfjsdhgfv• 1 year ago

I thought I "solved" this problem - I have a bookmark folder ("YouTube init") which i open in a private window after accepting their history tracking. It used to work. The bookmarks contains some programming like Fireship, some bass playing channels etc.

However. Now my YT hmepage includes shorts with females, some of them with big boobs. I never clicked on any of these. But they figured that since I'm a programmer and play bass, I must be into big boobs because well, a stereotype male, so the soulless machine is pushing all this empty BS that millions of people clicked on before. But not me. An I don't have the option to say "don't show this stuff to me".

(These are not erotic per se, but let's say a female guitar player without a bra in the tumbnail, or a bass player with her boobs in the foreground... I understand why people do these, but I really don't want these on my YT hp. it's lowest quality clickbait stuff.)

nanook• 1 year ago

The thing that helped me tame YouTube was creating separate channels for my various interests. This keeps all my relevant subs in one place and really helps the algorithm. I turn off all the feeds on my main computer using https://socialfocus.app/. This prevents me from going down a YouTube hole when I don't want to but my searches and views still tune the respective algorithms. Occasionally, a stray recommendation will show up in the feed and I try to mark it "Not Interested".

Now its a real joy checking my channel feeds on the weekend and queueing things up to watch later. I have excellent stuff to chew through when I feel like it - in the gym, cooking, cleaning etc. I really look forward to doing these things now.

Switching profiles takes a few clicks but the upside has been totally worth it. It's a shame they don't make this workflow more obvious (You have to go to Account -> Switch accounts -> View all channels -> Create a channel) to set this up.

I wish more social media allowed you to bucket your feed into "interests". Maximizing clicks/views doesn't have to come at the cost of scattered attention.

Mefix• 1 year ago

I have YouTube premium and on chrome, because I have ublock installed, it doesn't even load videos. Just a big black screen. My regular habit of opening up a few videos in the background tabs is completely diminished into closing all my picks just because I cant be bothered to open the links in firefox. You'd think youtube wouldn't be that aggressive towards paying subscribers, but the feel is they REALLY don't want to load any content for you.

Another funny thing for premium subscribers is when their ultra low bitrate 1080p videos have an enchanted bitrate option available to subscribers, you have to enable it manually every time instead of being a convenient feature.

My thinking is that in their pursuance of optimization lead them to overserve locally cached videos as priority to save on bandwidth, it's like internet providers are demanding more of them and google's projections for growth show a total collapse of the platform in some not-too-distaint future.

mvdtnz3• 1 year ago

Uhh this is not a normal situation for Chrome / uBlock users. I use Chrome and uBlock as do hundreds of thousands of other people and Youtube videos load just fine.

Izkata• 1 year ago

They mentioned background tabs: I see it in Firefox (with uBlock) when it's a tab I've had sitting in the background for hours. Usually the only fix is to copy the URL and reopen it in a few tab, refreshing doesn't work when it gets into this state.

It feels like a weird combination of caching, some key expiring, and how YouTube doesn't finish loading the video until you view the tab.

raydev3• 1 year ago

Interesting. I've found YouTube to be so good at recommendations that I've kinda forgotten to subscribe to some channels I watch often, YT is good about promoting them when they release new videos. This applies to a few small channels as well, I don't think they're "partnered" in any way but they do have good engagement/long form content.

But reading through replies here, it looks like people are disabling features like history. Not sure why one would do that, I want to be able to quickly find something I passed by 3 months ago but can't remember the name of.

If I had to go through my browser history to dig up a YT video I'd probably be at a loss, there aren't thumbnails there.

Jotalea2• 1 year ago

I often load youtube, choose a few videos to add to Watch Later and refresh the page. Most of the times, 3 out of the 5 videos shown stay there when I refresh.

I have to lower the scale to see more videos in the homescreen and even then, they reverted that change; so now I'm stuck with 3 videos instead of the 8 that used to appear. Add that to the refresh problem, and youtube feels unresponsive.

tolluerion• 1 year ago

Although sarcastic there is something here. I was also thinking about ethical social media.

YouTube is the only place where timeline could be turned off when search history is off and guess what happened I am no longer addicted to YouTube.

Just imagine there is a way for users to opt out of algorithmic feeds in the other social media. Would Instagram still remain addictive? Would Facebook still remain addictive? I think this must be one day of the universal fundamental rights of a human in digital space. They are using our data to do all the crappy things they are doing. Imagine the problems this one small feature could resolve in this world. Remember we are here to improve ourselves spiritually. Using social media and it's algorithmic feeds we are most likely to transcend the baddest quality we have or are born with. So this is an important revolution to happen

Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction

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