Comment by tambourine_man
7 months ago
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over
You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
That setting can be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe they fuck with me less because I have premium?
I don't have premium and it's sticky for me but only on a single computer, I have to reset it if I switch computers or browsers. Same with dark mode. So maybe it's stored as a cookie and they wipe their cookies?
Yes, it's stored client-side in a cookie.
Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.
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> It resets itself every 15 days or so
Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
Constantly. They also keep resetting the settings to not show shorts or video games in the feed.
I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
First it was "hide shorts".
Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).
Now it is "show fewer shorts".
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It seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.
If you turn off watch history it completely disables shorts as a whole (with no recommendations on the homepage as a side effect, but one I'm willing to live with). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
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Many websites do this. Facebook resets your feed sorting preferences, as does LinkedIn (sort by Recent, then refresh the page, it will be Top again).
I used to have a cronjob to change them to what I want daily. Only worked for sites with an API, but was better than the user hostile "we know your preferences better than you" garbage.
With Facebook, you can get around this by bookmarking https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr and going there instead. It's worked reliably for years - though there's now so little of value there it hardly matters, I suppose.
> Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
My preferences change all the time, regardless of Youtube. For example, when I was a kid, I hated mustard.
On the other hand, my Youtube configuration may change independent of my actions.
not op, but have seen the same.
this is quite bad behaviour.
they should not sneakily change our preferences behind the backs. similarly, all notifications, advertisements, et cetera, should be opt in, not opt out.
many of these cos. do this sort of thing, of course.
they excuse it under the protect of company policy.
Google the ant letter as an example.
>they excuse it under the protect of company policy.
sorry, pretext, not protect. an autocorrect error.
If you are not being sarcastic, yes, it happens all the time. Probably to maximize whatever metric they're measuring.
I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
> I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
Don't. Nowadays we can just re-introduce it, at least all who read this. iOS, macOS, Windows, Android... All have browser extensions, all can be modified.
See also: Spotify's "repeat" functionality. I turn it off whenever I see it on, but somehow it's always back on within a few days.
In addition to what others said, they gaslight users by regularly resetting blocked accounts from recommendations. They also lose your play history after a while and start showing old videos you've watched as never been viewed.
You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
> You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter.
Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result.
They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.
Firefox: open about:config and add ui.prefersReducedMotion as a Number and set it to 0 (no) or 1 (yes) to override the OS setting.
Chrome: command line switch:
--force-prefers-reduced-motion --force-prefers-no-reduced-motion
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> It resets itself every 15 days or so
This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?
> I pay for YouTube Premium
That's your mistake. Never pay someone to remove the same obstacles they've been putting in front of you. It's the definition of racketeering.
> It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.
I set that a long time ago and it never disabled. Maybe something with your browser?
I too found that my auto play setting was ignored. this is in the YT app.