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Comment by gverrilla

7 months ago

YT Shorts recommendations are a joke. I'm an atheist and very rarely watch anything related to religion, and even so Shorts put me in 3 or 4 live prayers/scams (not sure) the last few months.

26 comments

gverrilla

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dekhn  7 months ago

Similarly, Google News. The "For You" section shows me articles about astrology because I'm interested in astronomy. I get suggestions for articles about I-80 because I search for I-80 traffic cams to get traffic cam info for Tahoe, but it shows me I-80 news all the way across the country, suggestions about MOuntain View because I worked there (for google!) over 3 years ago, commanders being fired from the Navy (because I read a couple articles once), it goes on and on. From what I can tell, there are no News Quality people actually paying attention to their recommendations (and "Show Fewer" doesn't actually work. I filed a bug and was told that while the desktop version of the site shows Show Fewer for Google News, it doesn't actually have an effect).

  • WWLink  7 months ago

    Part of the reason I switched from google to duckduckgo for searching was I didn't WANT "personalization" I want my search results to be deterministic. If I am in Seattle and search for "ducks" I want the exact fucking same search results as if I travel to Rio de Janeiro and search for "ducks".

    Honestly, I'd prefer my voice assistant (siri mostly) to be like that as well. It was at first, and I think everyone hated that lol.

AlexCoventry  7 months ago

YT Shorts itself is kind of a mystery to me. It's an objective degradation of the interface; why on earth would I want to use it? It doesn't even allow adjustment of the playback speed or scrubbing!

  • kmeisthax  7 months ago

    So, there's a few ways to explain it. From a business strategy level, TikTok exists, and is a threat to YouTube, so we need to compete with it.

    From a user perspective, Shorts highlights a specific format of YouTube that happened to have been around for a lot longer than people realize. TikTok isn't anything new, Vine was doing exactly the same thing TikTok was a decade prior. It was shut down for what I can only assume was really dumb reasons. A lot of Viners moved to YouTube, but they had to change their creative process to fit what the YouTube algorithm valued at the time: longer videos.

    Pre-Shorts, there really wasn't a good place on YouTube for short videos. Animators were getting screwed by the algorithm because you really can't do daily uploads of animation[0] and whatever you upload is going to be a few minutes max. A video essayist can rack up hundreds of thousands of hours of watch time while you get maybe a thousand.

    (Fun fact: YouTube Shorts status was applied retroactively to old short videos, so there's actually Shorts that are decades old. AFAIK, some of the Petscop creator's old videos are Shorts now.)

    But that's why users or creators would want to use Shorts. A lot of the UX problems with Shorts boils down to YouTube building TikTok inside of YouTube out of sheer corporate envy. To be clear, they could have used the existing player and added short-video features on top (e.g. swipe-to-skip). In fact, any Short can be opened in the standard player by just changing the URL! There's literally no difference other than a worse UI because SOMEONE wanted "launched a new YouTube vertical" on their promo packet!

    FWIW the Shorts player is gradually getting its missing features back but it's still got several pain points for me. One in particular that I think exemplifies Shorts: if I watch Shorts on a portrait 1080p monitor - i.e. the perfect thing to watch vertical video on - you can't see comments. When you open the comments drawer it doesn't move over enough and the comments get cut off. The desktop experience is also really bad; occasionally scrolling just stops working, or it skips two videos per mousewheel event, or one video will just never play no matter how much I scroll back and forth.

    [0] Vtubers don't count

  • barnabyjones  7 months ago

    I think there is a large demo of people now who actually prefer to watch videos in portrait.

    • skydhash  7 months ago

      If you’re watching a single subject of interest video on your phone (TikTok type of content), it’s great. But landscape videos is more pleasant and there’s a reason we move from 4:3 for media. But that actually means watching the videos, but what I see is a lot of skipping.

      1 reply →

delfinom  7 months ago

I imagine my blocked channels list is stress testing YouTube at this point from the amount of shit Shorts results it's fed me after 2 years. Lol

Besides the religious crap, ill randomly get shit in India in hindu, having had not watched anything Indian and not even remotely Indian.

alovelace  7 months ago

Just because you're an atheist doesn't mean you won't engage with religious content though. YT rewards all kinds of engagement not just positive ones. I.e. if you leave a snide remark or just a dislike on a religious short that still counts as engagement.

  • gverrilla  7 months ago

    Yes I know, not the case, and before you ask, I also don't engage with atheist videos. But that's only one example: the recommendations are really bad in a lot of ways for me.

epcoa  7 months ago

Prayers for the unbelievers makes some sense.

But I associate YouTube promotions with garbage any how. The few things I might buy like Tide laundry detergent are entirely despite occasional YouTube promotion.

  • gverrilla  7 months ago

    Lmao. I'm very positive that the conversion rate for placing an atheist in a live mass out of the blue is very very very low. Because I never stayed for more than 3 seconds, I'm not sure if it's real religious content or a scam, though - and they don't even let me report live shorts :(