How to do it: Click on uBlock Origin Lite extension -> Settings (cog icon) -> Filter lists -> Custom filters -> Import / Export (bottom of page) -> Paste in the list
The people managing youtube and similar services are doing lots of harm to humanity. Not sure if more than those who push drugs or cigarettes, but in the same league for sure. An entire generation of kids is growing up that can't read a book or do anything that requires focus and attention.
I think its only a matter of time where legislation, lawsuits and fines will follow.
> I think its only a matter of time where legislation, lawsuits and fines will follow.
That depends where you are. In the US and anywhere where it can exert political force that won't happen. The US administration acts as a de facto lobbying arm for big tech giants like Google, and any attempt to regulate is met with threats of embargo.
>Not sure if more than those who push drugs or cigarettes, but in the same league for sure. An entire generation of kids is growing up that can't read a book or do anything that requires focus and attention.
Just yesterday my wife was asking me if there is a way she can disable YouTube Shorts on the YouTube iOS app. I was surprised to learn there is no (simple) way!
YouTube shorts baffle me, in a way. "We've spent 20 years developing the perfect user interface for watching videos...now let's throw it all away and remove almost every feature so that it's more like TikTok."
I wish there was something for the app. I haven't tried it recently but you could kind of stop the shorts being displayed for a brief period of time before it re-asserted itself. And I already pay for ad-free youtube wish it was at least a premium feature but obviously makes no sense from corporate point of view.
I wish there was something for the app on the AppleTV.
I’m a Premium subscriber as well. In theory, they have nothing to gain from pushing shorts on me or increasing my engagement. It should be all about making the user happy. Yet paying users seem to have to deal with these decisions that are driven by ad-funded users.
I tend to want videos that are about 4 minutes long (what used to be the norm). Now it seems like most of the videos recommended to me are 10-60 minutes long, with the average one being 15-20 minutes. When I’m looking for something shorter it seems like Shorts are the only option. However those are usually either too short, or too long to be in the Shorts format without having control over the video on the TV.
Their perverted incentive structures created this mess. They should just have the one normal format for videos, have auto-play that people can opt-in to if they’re into that, and let people making videos of whatever length is best for the content without forcing videos to either be artificially long or short in an effort to optimize for the monetization algorithm.
YouTube has gotten so bad recently, I started to watch it in Firefox mobile instead. On Android, I have Tampermonkey with GoodTube installed, and it not only blocks ads, but also removes Shorts, and a few other annoyances.
seriously. there is nothing more infuriating then an app (which you pay a subscription for) gaslighting you into feeding you more slop even if you click "i dont want to see this" a thousand times. nice placebo button.
i can imagine the smug face on some manager at google that gets himself off to engagement metrics at night because his life is so miserable. i wish these people could be named and shamed, but they hide behind a faceless corporation
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
No, they're worse. Nothing like doing a search for a serious topic related to a class I'm teaching and having unrelated garbage shorts come up over and over, each taking up six times the space of a real video. I'm sure YT has someone analyzing data saying this is better. That person should be fired because they have no idea how to analyze data.
I find it slightly ironic that that statements ends with "YouTube Shorts" and not just "YouTube". What in particular makes the shorts so much worse compared to regular videos? If life is short, shouldn't one try to avoid spending too much time on YouTube overall?
attention required: 10 minute video > 10 second short
When the written word took over with the printing press, the same concern was levied. The amount of attention required to listen and memorize a story/poem is a lot more than just reading it.
The change with smart phones is just one of access/time spent on these things. There are people who are spending ~5 hours/day watching this content. There is a big difference between someone listening to 5 hours of a single poem, to reading 5 hours of a single book, to reading 5 hours of blog posts, to watching 5 hours of a youtube video, to watching 5 hours of random videos, to 5 hours of <10s videos.
Short form content always leaves me wondering whether what I just watched is true or factual, I can’t bring myself to not be skeptical of every short form video I watch because there is never enough context to tell otherwise.
I only get what the creator wants to communicate, which is almost always misleading or missing details.
It’s an awful medium for communicating and I feel like I’m being misled every time I see short form content, which is rarely since I avoid it at all costs. At least with a longer video there is more substance to evaluate to tell whether the creator is worth trusting.
Short form algorithmically curated content is an order magnitude more addictive than long form videos from creators you intentionally click subscribe to
Shorts and full length videos have similar attributes. Both have good, life enriching stuff (tutorials, performances) and both have the downside of being addictive and often hollow (or downright empty).
The difference is the Shorts format tips the scales. Somebody might want one and not the other.
I don't click on shorts, so removing them from the UI improves the recommendation feed for me. My recommendations are mostly good educational content, but shorts are never interesting.
For some others, shorts are too much of a temptation. You can find a lot of comments even on HN from people admitting that short-form video content on any platform (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) can pull them into a time warp where they've wasted more time than they wanted to spend on videos. I suppose there are some people who can manage long-form YouTube use but struggle with shorts, but I suspect a better solution for people with self-control challenges is to disable recommendations completely (which will also make YT shorts disappear)
Well, you’ve more or less described the issue yourself.
I don’t need YouTube shorts to exist, at all.
Youtube itself, is actually helpful for certain things, so I’m happy it exists. Even if it’s incentives don’t really align with my use of it as a sleep aid / radio station / university lectures and conference talk video portal.
I don't disagree, but they really are a different beast. Have you used the shorts feature? It's 95% brainrot. Where as you can use youtube intelligently to watch interesting things if you choose to. Obviously you could use regular youtube and watch brainrot/slop too, but there is no way to use shorts to watch good content.
They are infuriating. They hide the scrubbing controls for whatever reason, I’m not sure. I guess to make it look like instagram. Usually the shorts I am served are straight up widescreen videos cut to smartphone narrow width which is disgusting when all my youtube consumption happens on an actual computer.
Shorts are better than many long-form videos. The ones that start with some neckbeard with a big microphone blithering about something. Then there's a demand to "like my channel". Then filler historical material on the subject, probably involving zooming and panning over old public domain stills. Then an ad for NordVPN. Then a bit more historical material. Then, finally, about three minutes of new information. Then a recap of the history. Another "like my channel and ring my bell" demand. Then neckbeard fades out.
Interspersed with this are Google ads. The padded length allows for more ad time and increases revenue.
I can live with the shorts. They just show as stills for me unless I click them.
It seems like Shorts keep getting worse, at least the Shorts that I get presented with. For a while the most popular format was a clip from a movie or TV show with annoying royalty-free music slapped on top and a badly chosen title. Now I'm seeing clips shrunk down into a tiny content box within the Short while the background is some guy watching you watch the clip. Why is that popular?!
I watch a lot of YouTube, and I also recommend the extension UnTrap for YouTube (Firefox [1], Chrome [2], more [3]).
Besides hiding Shorts, it offers many options that give you more control over the YouTube interface. Specially clean up the search results page from unrelated suggestions, mixes, and more stuff, the current deafult search is horrible.
The other day, I was home with my kids, who then asked me to show them how Japanese schools look like, I fired up my YT app on my Android phone, turned incognito mode and searched "Japanese schools", and the results were beyond imagination: the first result was an ad, the following results were ten successive shorts, two per row for five columns!!
Serious question: why is watching YouTube shorts a worse way to spend your time than eg debugging CUDA problems?
The answer is "opportunity cost". But who really believes in that?
I call it the batman fallacy. Many people (young men in particular) say to themselves "if I was more disciplined, I could dedicate my whole life to martial arts (or programming, or art, or w/e) and become batman (or John Carmack, or Van Gogh)". But it's not true, of course.
And it's the same with many managers. "Instead of spending x% on task A and y% on task B, why dont you spend (x-z)% on A and (y+z)% on B?" It's absurd.
Brute attempts to capture opportunity costs are doomed to fail. You squeeze one end (block youtube shorts) and it comes out the other (eg you argue with coworker). It's really much easier to stop punishing yourself for lost time and find happiness in who and where you are.
There seems to be something about the "short" approach that makes it easier to actually spend more time than you would with "longer" videos. Too much of anything is bad though, one should try to avoid large amounts of passive entertainment (my reminder to get off HN for today).
I also don't think I could ever spend 2 hours watching shorts and feel like I left with something worth having spent the time on, but I can tell you some movies or long form videos which had enough impact to carry in my memory through today.
The plugin "Unhook" lets you granularly block many different features of YouTube. I'll often turn off recommendations when I know I don't want to get pulled down rabbitholes.
It has made YouTube much healthier in my life. Imagine if YouTube themselves let you turn these features on and off.
I don't think short videos are bad, per se. I am bugged mostly by the vertical format and the annoying player interface that loops and switches to other videos.
[+] [-] nomilk|4 months ago|reply
I haven't seen a short since :)
https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts/blob/master...
How to do it: Click on uBlock Origin Lite extension -> Settings (cog icon) -> Filter lists -> Custom filters -> Import / Export (bottom of page) -> Paste in the list
[+] [-] aenis|4 months ago|reply
I think its only a matter of time where legislation, lawsuits and fines will follow.
[+] [-] gabrielgio|4 months ago|reply
That depends where you are. In the US and anywhere where it can exert political force that won't happen. The US administration acts as a de facto lobbying arm for big tech giants like Google, and any attempt to regulate is met with threats of embargo.
Agree with everything else.
[+] [-] Ylpertnodi|4 months ago|reply
Parents/ guardians.
[+] [-] kevinfiol|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] LambdaComplex|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] siavosh|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] al_borland|4 months ago|reply
I’m a Premium subscriber as well. In theory, they have nothing to gain from pushing shorts on me or increasing my engagement. It should be all about making the user happy. Yet paying users seem to have to deal with these decisions that are driven by ad-funded users.
I tend to want videos that are about 4 minutes long (what used to be the norm). Now it seems like most of the videos recommended to me are 10-60 minutes long, with the average one being 15-20 minutes. When I’m looking for something shorter it seems like Shorts are the only option. However those are usually either too short, or too long to be in the Shorts format without having control over the video on the TV.
Their perverted incentive structures created this mess. They should just have the one normal format for videos, have auto-play that people can opt-in to if they’re into that, and let people making videos of whatever length is best for the content without forcing videos to either be artificially long or short in an effort to optimize for the monetization algorithm.
[+] [-] dotnet00|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] captainkrtek|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] amanzi|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zip8370|4 months ago|reply
https://scrollguard.app/
[+] [-] thousand_nights|4 months ago|reply
i can imagine the smug face on some manager at google that gets himself off to engagement metrics at night because his life is so miserable. i wish these people could be named and shamed, but they hide behind a faceless corporation
[+] [-] peacebeard|4 months ago|reply
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
[+] [-] kadoban|4 months ago|reply
Personally I live for the every day, I'm not worrying too much about what I will regret for a few hours on my last day(s) if I even make it there.
[+] [-] unknown|4 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paulcole|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] DoktorDelta|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arkensaw|4 months ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2zb7S2beKOE
[+] [-] bachmeier|4 months ago|reply
No, they're worse. Nothing like doing a search for a serious topic related to a class I'm teaching and having unrelated garbage shorts come up over and over, each taking up six times the space of a real video. I'm sure YT has someone analyzing data saying this is better. That person should be fired because they have no idea how to analyze data.
[+] [-] CaptainOfCoit|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] codemac|4 months ago|reply
When the written word took over with the printing press, the same concern was levied. The amount of attention required to listen and memorize a story/poem is a lot more than just reading it.
The change with smart phones is just one of access/time spent on these things. There are people who are spending ~5 hours/day watching this content. There is a big difference between someone listening to 5 hours of a single poem, to reading 5 hours of a single book, to reading 5 hours of blog posts, to watching 5 hours of a youtube video, to watching 5 hours of random videos, to 5 hours of <10s videos.
[+] [-] quickthrowman|4 months ago|reply
I only get what the creator wants to communicate, which is almost always misleading or missing details.
It’s an awful medium for communicating and I feel like I’m being misled every time I see short form content, which is rarely since I avoid it at all costs. At least with a longer video there is more substance to evaluate to tell whether the creator is worth trusting.
[+] [-] GodelNumbering|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] alecsm|4 months ago|reply
And what's worse is the infinite scroll.
[+] [-] mtoner23|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] travisjungroth|4 months ago|reply
The difference is the Shorts format tips the scales. Somebody might want one and not the other.
[+] [-] Aurornis|4 months ago|reply
For some others, shorts are too much of a temptation. You can find a lot of comments even on HN from people admitting that short-form video content on any platform (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) can pull them into a time warp where they've wasted more time than they wanted to spend on videos. I suppose there are some people who can manage long-form YouTube use but struggle with shorts, but I suspect a better solution for people with self-control challenges is to disable recommendations completely (which will also make YT shorts disappear)
[+] [-] FuckButtons|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] osn9363739|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] raincole|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 months ago|reply
Interspersed with this are Google ads. The padded length allows for more ad time and increases revenue.
I can live with the shorts. They just show as stills for me unless I click them.
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] aenis|4 months ago|reply
(Shorts are not completely gone - they are still visible on channels subscribed to - but the toxic homepage thing is empty. Big thanks!)
[+] [-] thedanbob|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] skaul|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pentagrama|4 months ago|reply
Besides hiding Shorts, it offers many options that give you more control over the YouTube interface. Specially clean up the search results page from unrelated suggestions, mixes, and more stuff, the current deafult search is horrible.
Here are some screenshots I took for you: https://imgur.com/a/UawBCG5
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/untrap-for-yo...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/untrap-for-youtube/...
[3] https://untrap.app/
[+] [-] kakwa_|4 months ago|reply
It's an awesome anti doom-scrolling antidote for Youtube, with a lot of customization possible.
I would definitely recommend it.
At least try it to see how much Youtube's design & recommendations actually trick our brain into passive watching and dooming scrolling.
[+] [-] redbell|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] acegod|4 months ago|reply
The answer is "opportunity cost". But who really believes in that?
I call it the batman fallacy. Many people (young men in particular) say to themselves "if I was more disciplined, I could dedicate my whole life to martial arts (or programming, or art, or w/e) and become batman (or John Carmack, or Van Gogh)". But it's not true, of course.
And it's the same with many managers. "Instead of spending x% on task A and y% on task B, why dont you spend (x-z)% on A and (y+z)% on B?" It's absurd.
Brute attempts to capture opportunity costs are doomed to fail. You squeeze one end (block youtube shorts) and it comes out the other (eg you argue with coworker). It's really much easier to stop punishing yourself for lost time and find happiness in who and where you are.
[+] [-] jfengel|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] zamadatix|4 months ago|reply
I also don't think I could ever spend 2 hours watching shorts and feel like I left with something worth having spent the time on, but I can tell you some movies or long form videos which had enough impact to carry in my memory through today.
[+] [-] noir_lord|4 months ago|reply
It’s all perspective.
[+] [-] soundworlds|4 months ago|reply
It has made YouTube much healthier in my life. Imagine if YouTube themselves let you turn these features on and off.
[+] [-] Insanity|4 months ago|reply
Never looked back, it’s such a waste of time
[+] [-] jackdoe|4 months ago|reply
home redirecting to /subscriptions, removing shorts, removing comments, removing autoplay suggestions
its super nice now
[+] [-] cubefox|4 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Findecanor|4 months ago|reply
For some time, I have been using a TamperMonkey script that at least redirects to the regular video player: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...