These are all products that I legitimately like and want to engage with, but linking them all to a single account and more importantly a shared recommendation engine feels very flawed.
My music playlists from Youtube Music keep showing up on my Youtube homepage. Likewise, engaging with Youtube Shorts (especially subscribing) also subscribes to their youtube channel. I don’t know about anyone else, but what I find interesting in a 30 second video is not what I find interesting in a 10-30 minute video.
I feel like Google would be better served separating these recommendation engines. Even looking at this from a monetization lens, it feels inefficient. How do you guys feel? If you have any hacks or recommendations I’d love to hear them. I’m personally ready to create a TikTok account just to avoid contaminating my youtube feed.
I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.
This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.
I’ve had to add something like
#infinite_scroll_content > div:nth-of-type(1):others()for a few sites in uBlock Origin because every site wants you to just scroll the site forever now and attaches a bunch of other random articles to the bottom of any page you open.I also block a lot of sidebars, sticky title bars that follow you as you scroll, widgets prompting me to chat with a salesweasel and so, so many cookie notice bars because sites still think they’re a get out of jail free card by EU law.
I’ve actually got quite a few Youtube lines in my filters file, because it’s my computer and it still does what I want despite the best efforts of big tech companies:
www.youtube.com##.yt-formatted-string.style-scope.yt-simple-endpoint:has-text(YouTube Music):nth-ancestor(13) www.youtube.com###video-title-link:has-text(Mix – ):nth-ancestor(7) www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)
Sorry I can’t really contribute to your question, but would anyway like to take the opportunity to air my grievances: I hate Youtube shorts and TikToks with fierce passion. The format of short videos makes sense and is a good idea to some extent, but who the hell decided we’re not allowed to rewind our videos anymore? I want to hunt down that person, go to their house at night and tell them that they are not very good at their job so loud that their whole family can hear it.
I personally despise yotuube shorts. I use rules in my ublock origin to block them so I don’t see them on my youtube page.
What are you using? I recently came up with these that remove shorts and community posts and the 50% of search results that have nothing to do with your search. They might get rid of a little too much. I’ve noticed channel landing pages are coming up blank.
www.youtube.com###dismissible.ytd-rich-shelf-renderer www.youtube.com###dismissible.ytd-shelf-renderer www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer
Personally I like the YT/YTMusic cross. I listen to the same music in the car or at work that I do at home in YT fairly often. I just hate shorts and wish they’d get the fuck off my homepage. That “hide for 30 days” button is so aggravating.
I’m fine with music content in Youtube recommendations, but videos in Music recommendations is absolute cancer.
Honestly I’ve used both every day since Google Play Music shut down and I can’t say I’ve ever had video stuff come up on YT Music.
My kids get annoyed when YTmusic plays the video version of a song. I get annoyed that my kids choices influence what the algorithm recommends to me. (Play Music let kids under 13 have their own profile, but not YTmusic.)
Shorts are quite annoying and I want to disable them permanently.
uBlock Origin doesn’t have a 30 day limit:
www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)Haha I did that a while back but the premise of it still annoys me.
The feeling of “You’ve clearly indicated you don’t want this, but this is how long we’re willing to wait before we try to force it on you again” of the 30 days is annoying, yes.
I think I used to use a brand account just to separate my music subscriptions and regular subscriptions. I’m not sure if it affected suggestions though.
It does affect suggestions, as far as I can tell.
My main gripe is with movies. After a while, the simlar video recomentaions are filled with “Free with Ads” movies. I don’t even watch movies on Youtube. Its annoying.
I usually have to clear cookies to get rid of them.
I hate shorts and I hate seeing them in my subscription feed.
I don’t have a google account. You can find the RSS feed of channels you like in their accounts sites source code and just use a feedreader (I can recommend feedbro) to follow them. Also: Use sponsorblock in addition to your normal adblocker. Shorts I skip, music I listen to from other sources.
The enshittyfication is getting strong over at yt
Sorry. You lost me at “YouTube Music” 😄
Glad you called it out. Hate this forced crossed contamination.
I make it a point to not engage with any of the shorts content - especially since they deliberately made it difficult to add to watch later list. My time is held hostage in that moment and FUCK if that isn’t a great way to get me to not engage with that bullshit, even if I was interested in the content.
I don’t do much except reading on mobile so can’t comment from that perspective. On desktop youtube shorts is just toxic. I keep clicking the X to get rid of them but that only works for 30 days. I often just close my browser tab now if I scroll and see a row of shorts.
I want nothing to do with shorts. If a video isn’t long just have it play in the regular video player. There’s also no valid reason to encourage people to shoot vertical video, it hurts my brain. The absolute worst though is there being no volume control. Love having my ear drums wrecked if a short opens up.
I really don’t know why they even have it on the desktop website. When did these places decide that they have to have their content on every platform they support? Is Amazon going to bring ebooks to my roku next? It’s just dumb. The content has a place for those interested, but it’s not on a desktop or TV.
Youtube shorts being visually hard to tell the difference but being in my sub lists AND breaking the queuing is obnoxious. I have been cutting myself off from google products as much as I can, they are just so shitty now.
What I find irritating is seeing the long-form video channels that I watch repeatedly pushing new shorts videos to keep up with the algorithm and draw traffic, but because they don’t do a lot of quick daily vids they break up old videos into multiple shorts. So now my feed is full of snippets of videos from months ago, and it makes it harder to know when there’s actual new content to see.
That’s one of the most significant reasons I stopped using YouTube Music.
I switched from Spotify to YouTube Music because I was under the impression I could use YouTube Music to play any song that is currently on YouTube. Apparently, that’s not how it works and it was actually much harder to find not only music I had on Spotify, but there are many songs from YouTube that you couldn’t even get on YouTube music, making it a shittier version of listening to songs from YouTube. The service is pretty pathetic.
I really really liked Google play music. When they killed it I tried YouTube music, liked a few artists, then went to my normal YouTube subscriptions saw it was flooded by dumps from those artists and unsubbed and never looked back.
Spotify isn’t nearly as good as gpm but ytm is a non starter for me for exactly this reason.
YouTube doesn’t care though, they very much want everyone to stop using subscriptions it seems.
