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.
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.
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.
Sorry. You lost me at “YouTube Music” 😄
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 personally despise yotuube shorts. I use rules in my ublock origin to block them so I don’t see them on my youtube page.
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 hate shorts and I hate seeing them in my subscription feed.
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.
I don’t do much except reading on mobile so can’t comment from that perspective. On desktop youtube shorts is just toxic. I keep clicking the X to get rid of them but that only works for 30 days. I often just close my browser tab now if I scroll and see a row of shorts.
I want nothing to do with shorts. If a video isn’t long just have it play in the regular video player. There’s also no valid reason to encourage people to shoot vertical video, it hurts my brain. The absolute worst though is there being no volume control. Love having my ear drums wrecked if a short opens up.
I really don’t know why they even have it on the desktop website. When did these places decide that they have to have their content on every platform they support? Is Amazon going to bring ebooks to my roku next? It’s just dumb. The content has a place for those interested, but it’s not on a desktop or TV.
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.
I can’t stand Shorts. I don’t even mind the aspect ratio so much, but the lack of a scrubber or even time information is a dealbreaker for me. I wrote an adblock rule to remove them from the website UI, but it is a bit of a bummer how much content is only in Shorts.
Edit: And the looping!!! Ugh
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’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.
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.
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)
I wish I could at least separate my likes list by content type. I hit like/dislike on shorts way more frequently than long-form videos to train that algorithm, but when I go into that list, I’m usually trying to find a long-form video from a while back.
