I still don’t understand the appeal of YouTube shorts… It feels like the rational behind it is “hey, I can watch 10 meaningless shorts in the same amount of time it would take to watch one video that has an actual point”. I guess that’s why I’ve never gotten in to tiktok either lol
Is it even a dopamine hit though? I watched a handful of them and they all seemed to just be someone yelling at the camera for 5 seconds, then a 5 second shot of whatever the hell they were yelling about, then 10 to 15 seconds of them asking me to like and subscribe.
It’s funny because everyone shits on tiktok for it’s short videos yet I regularly watch videos that are 3-5 minutes long if not longer.
Your feed shows you what you interact with. Outside of ads I rarely see content that’s not related to my interests and most of the videos I see are much longer than a vine.
Which is especially ironic to me how vines weren’t considered attention span killing brain rot that everyone sees tiktok to be.
The appeal is to the creators, resulting from the differences in unit economics for monetisation structures related to youtube shorts, tiktok, reels, snapchat etc., vs. conventional youtube, facebook or instagram videos.
And also there’s appeal to Youtube as a platform, being a place logically suited to this new paradigm of shorter vertical videos where discovery is mostly algorithmically driven but having some issues with the organisational structure of their content that make it uncompetitive with platforms which popularised the format.
It’s not appealing to Youtube users because a choice to use Youtube has historically always included a deference to the conventional youtube video format. People that prefer tiktok format would organically become tiktok users not because tiktok is a better platform than Shorts for it, but because youtube already existed and established its own format, so it’s not the logical place to go for something that isn’t that.
I get the appeal, I just hate that I can’t cast them to my TV normally. I can watch shorts on the TV, but I have to disconnect the devices (phones). I can watch it on my phone, but I have to disconnect from the TV, ending the queue. BUT I can watch them on my phone the look into my history and cast them as a normal video. WHY IS THIS PROCESS EVEN THERE IF THERE CAN BE A NORMAL FUCKING VIDEO???
I’m just so tired of the stupid shit.
I need to update it.
Again.
It’s broken.
Again.
I’ve literally been watching YT on my mobile browser instead because it’s a PITA to update.
Strange, months-old versions work fine for me, and the update is not too difficult either. On an ARM64 device, you open RVX Manager, check for the recommended YouTube version, download it from APKMirror, optionally check its hash, pick it in RVX Manager, and patch it (takes 2-5 minutes). You can also press the 💾 icon to save the trusted APK you made so you can share it to other devices, including ARMv7 ones.
It’s now called tubular, by the same dev
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
The old repository got archived
So, un-jailbroken iPhones can run uYouPlus, or similar apps through AltStore. You can sign into your account, view/post comments, see dislikes, auto-skip ads, intros, outros, etc., completely disable Shorts, and so many more things…
The only problem is you have to re-sign the app by tethering it to a computer once every year (if you have an Apple Developer account) or every week for everyone else.
yeah i know about that, i had it but removed it since sideloading with linux is a bit of a mess. i don’t know if you can disable shorts and community posts there though, i never checked
Newpipe is also a solid choice
Ehh not really. I can’t even read comment replies, and as far as I know, you can’t make any comments yourself. Syncing your subscriptions is a giant mess. Tho I still use it for downloading purposes, best option for that on mobile imo.
Search on YouTube is truly terrible now. 8/10 results are sponsored ads, other things you may like, watch it again, etc. Like wtf I literally searched something else.
It’s actually really really shitty. A search result shouldn’t show just general recommendations and definitely shouldn’t ignore your query in favor of showing ads for bigger videos completely unrelated.
That actually makes the platform completely garbage.
YouTube is just public broadcast TV now anyways and needs to start being regulated as such.
Is this a power user problem somehow?
They had to’ve [A/B test] optimized it to the absolute stay-on-YouTube-as-long-as-possible max, if that’s not being too generous.
Does the general public disregard their original search intent often enough by clicking unrelated videos that it makes sense to spam us like that? Lemmings hate it for sure, but the data must show it’s beneficial… wondering if I’m missing something.
Oh absolutely I bet it works to distract people to click on a different video and fall into a whole of watching more. I think it’s easy to forget about the mass of lonely sad people who don’t talk to anyone or do much other than eat and then turn on YouTube till it’s time to sleep.
Easier to feed their addiction if you just make it easy to get the drug.
I fucking hate how they mix in “popular” videos with your search results.
Like, the first few results are related, then there’s a few that are completely unrelated but “popular”. Then they go back to showing related results.
They don’t even try to differentiate between the two. It’s scummy as hell and yet another nail in the coffin for youtube.
For some reason, the 4th video on my “home” feed is always a video with ~300 views from some small account I’ve never heard of on a topic I’m only passingly interested in.
For a while YouTube got weirdly fixated on showing me videos about steam trains. At the moment, it’s a video called “20 Random Yet Interesting Facts”; a 5 day old video with 220 views from a channel called “The Fact Files”
I actually watch those small accounts (they tend to be short and related to games I know), it feels a bit more comfy when the guy actually reads and replies to my comment.
I think I also came upon aftermath of some personal quarrel between the account and a commenter, they were talking about how sorry they were and the guy accepted the apology. It was wholesome, and probably as memorable as other videos I waste time on watch.
The algo is breaking down. They rested on their laurels and were caught sleeping. Lots of services are looking to poach viewers and are far more willing to take risks and innovate. Web indexed yellow pages are long in the tooth and tainted with people abusing that algo or buying rank. Maybe 2-3 more years left in that tank. I genuinely think Google is starting to panic.
It’s good they are suggesting smaller channels, they should do it more.
Fresh isn’t another carbon copy of one of the mega channels with the same content.
Fresh isn’t a sea full of reaction faces all trying to game the algorithm.
Fresh is someone having fun on camera, someone bearing their soul to whomever will watch, someone with passion for what they are doing and the desire to share it.
YouTube needs to start finding the people that made it interesting in the first place and lose the mindless drones gaming the system.
Pretty funny how YouTube gets stuck on topics for a while haha
Yours was steam trains, mine was Soviet nuclear accidents
Recently I got alot of videos about reindeer on ice, and how to remove ticks. I have no idea why YT suddenly recommended me these types of videos
My fellow train enthusiast!
I think it’s because I watched this good old viral video literally one time that YouTube decided I must be HUGE on trainspotting and suggested every trainspotting channel under the sun for months.
I’ll fully admit that seeing the UP Big Boy 4014 go through Altoona, PA back in 2010-2011 was absolutely one of my best experiences so far in life, and I’m 43. You could hear the thing for miles.
The worst thing about shorts is that they are just the videos you were already going to watch but cut up into 10 shorts devoid of relevant context. No thanks youtube I will watch the full video