It genuinely disgusts me that the world's largest media company shoves addictive, short form content down users throats (especially young people). Anyone working on it at Google should be ashamed of what they're doing.
I actually currently run youtube out of firefox in mobile and web, and its pretty much amazing in both and doesn't feel janky.
The upside of that is that if you add the correct script to the ad blocker extension, you'll never see a youtube reel for the rest of your life, which HEAVILY improves the experience on youtube.
The social media companies got so large because they optimized for engagement over all else. If they were any less addictive, they'd have way fewer users, and we wouldn't be talking about them now. This can probably only be addressed with regulation
Yes, you can be the guy at a social media company who says "perhaps earning a few extra billion in revenue this way is bad for children," but the executives are just going to replace you.
YouTube is actually the least engagement-driven/addition-maxing social video provider, by far. Meta and TikTok are famous for discouraging external linking, limiting reach to non-targetted users, heavily moderating content to match engagement metrics, disguising advertisement as content, etc...
YouTube for the most part just serves what you post, does minimal content moderation, stuff a dumb insurance ad on the front (of the long-form content) that looks like a dumb insurance ad, and then does it for everyone else. I mean, sure, they could do better. But really if the world of amateur video content was all YouTube it would be a better place.
Sure it is Sundar. When I go to youtube i see a few videos in the top half. The bottom half of screen is a row of Shorts that I don't want and have to scroll past. In a normal world there'd be a profile setting that lets you opt-out of Shorts being shown. In a normal world there wouldn't be a fake 'show fewer shorts' button that does absolutely nothing.
In a normal world people just scroll past the things they aren’t looking for without even processing the stuff they don’t want.
It’s extremely easy to never click on a Short. I don’t understand the emotional response to these things at all. I’m sure there’s tons of normal videos you don’t want to watch that’s you simply scroll past that don’t elicit emotion whatsoever.
Ehhhh not recently. They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now, and shorts are _heavily_ pushed on my home page feed despite me trying to dismiss them multiple times.
Like yes I can hide them all using ublock on desktop and morphe on Android, but that the fact I have to do it to avoid them is because they're pushing shorts harder as of late, it used to also be pushed but not as much from my personal experience.
>They have an entire shorts section on my subscription page now
Because the people you subscribe to are making those shorts.
Your subscription page shows you all the most recent videos from the channels you’re subscribed to.
That in no way is shoving anything down your throat. You’re just supposed to watch what you want to watch. You’re not expected to click and watch every video in your subscription feed.
Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shorts lol. It's near the very top too, so I literally could not avoid seeing it. If they treated it as a normal video I wouldn't care as much.
And unfortunately many YouTubers who do make normal, good content also make shorts because it's incredibly algorithm-friendly, so there's no avoiding it unless you blacklist every creator that dares make shorts.
It's also near the very top of the home feed too - it's even above videos for me, the only thing on top of it is ongoing livestreams. So if I want to use the feed, I have to scroll through a giant shorts section. Then its a row of videos, and then it's another row of just shorts. Again, I DO NOT WATCH SHORTS, but YT really wants me to watch them from the looks of it.
Of course, I then see one row of videos and then the damn "YouTube Playable" section so maybe the moral of the story is that the main page is unusable outright.
>Right but before they _didn't_ have an entire dang section for shorts
An “entire section” isn’t “shoving” something down your throat. You literally don’t even have to process that part of the site with your brain.
When you go to Amazon are you just completely overwhelmed by all the stuff they’re “shoving down your throat”? I mean they have tons of sections on the home page. Are you actually bothered by that or are do you simply search for what you want like everyone else?
