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.
Tiktoks are mostly rewindable. The creator can set a setting I think to disable that, but I’ve only ever seen that on dumb thirst traps, on shorter videos you have to pause before the scrubber appears, which isn’t a great ui choice imo but it’s not a deal breaker.
I don’t use shorts but I just tried out like 5 and they all had scrubbers?
I actually don’t use TikTok, I just assumed this BS comes from there since it got popular around the same time.
Maybe I’m falling behind in technology, since I can’t make the scrubber appear on Youtube shorts no matter how I try. Even if it’s there somewhere, the design is pretty terrible since it’s not accommodating for old people like me who get easily angry, scared and confused.
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 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.
Sorry. You lost me at “YouTube Music” 😄
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.
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.
I hate shorts and I hate seeing them in my subscription feed.
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.
GPM was the best. If they didn’t have what you wanted you could always upload it yourself. Reminds me of the Grooveshark days.
@saigot @greenskye oh man I used to use Google Play Music ALL the time back when I was a kid. That was my go to and back when I used to use Android my way of pirating and getting free music is that I would download/screen record all of the music videos from YouTube and convert them to mp3 files and they would show up. Those were the days. Nothing else is as good or convenient, also google play musics song recognition was better than Shazam. I miss it :(
Google random song generator is the best song suggester I’ve ever used. Spotify’s new dj thing is starting to get close but it’s radio was super far off what gpm had. I also like gpm because it was really good for obscure small bands.
Out if all the dead Google products the two that really left me sad was gpm and inbox.
@saigot Indeed. Also Spotify Stations was a great app too, it was dedicated to radio like stations for specific artists or genres that was pretty great for finding indie bands as well. I miss that one a lot too, all the great apps have become defunct :(
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
I just browse music with a different account than I do regular youtube. The shorts dont bother me too much conceptually but I absolutely hate the player with how it doesnt have media controls and forces a portrait mode(especially when im watching youtube on my tv and laptop)
Yeah I have no interest in Shorts (or TikTok for that matter), but I’m probably aged out of their target demo anyway. I do think, as a general point, platforms shouldn’t be trend-chasing each other. YT does longer form video well. TikTok does vertical video shorts. I say stick to your core competencies.
They kinda have to chase each other, because if they don’t they risk that if other platform’s way of serving content becomes dominant, they’ll be left in the dust.
They’re already “behind” when they see a potential leader emerge, so they need feature parity so that they catch at least some people in their audience in the same trap as that competing platform.
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.
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.
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 actually Really like the crossover. I love mashup music and tons of it is only on places line YouTube and other “less official”/record company controlled places.
So YouTube music being able to integrate those sources is 10/10 for me.
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.
