cross-posted from: https://lemdro.id/post/2883134 (!android@lemdro.id)
After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It’s terrible now.
Yeah, I hate how crappy search now is.
It’ll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I’m looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I’m looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don’t even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:
- Three or four videos that are actually from your search.
- Some recommended playlists.
- The shorts tray that vaguely has some content related to your search.
- Maybe two or three more videos from the actual search.
- “People also watch” recommendations.
- “Shorts for you” recommendations.
If you want to get just your search results, cutting away shorts, playlists, and the recommendations that take up the majority of the search page, you’ll have to open up the filters and click on “videos” on the cl tent type list. Then you actually get to see the search results.
First thing I did when the shorts spam apocalypse started, was create custom ublock filters to strip them out of youtube as much as I could. Too bad I didn’t back them up before my system decided to go poof.
I just copied them over from here. Works for me.
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It’s also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn’t tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don’t even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It’s an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
So, no thanks.
For what it’s worth you can replace the “short” in the url with “watch” to get the old interface back.
I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select ‘my filters’, you can enter the following to do the same thing:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scope
Personally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you’re going to youtube, you’re computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
