Comment by pier25
7 months ago
Same.
I HATE youtube shorts. Not their content (I've never watched one) but how they've infected the whole youtube experience.
You search for something and half the results are irrelevant... which includes a ton of shorts.
They are fucking up the product that they are dominating a market with in order to be an also-ran in another market that's hot. It's Windows 8 all over again.
Google is the Microsoft of today.
My fave is where something clearly has been cropped from a 16:9 source to fit the portrait mode.
As a recommendations engineer I've never been that impressed with YouTube, I think they cribbed the YouTube interface from
http://www.sebastianmihai.com/idiocracy.html
and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.
There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.
> half the results are irrelevant
Better than the results on google these days, so YT is at least doing better.
On the other hand to find something in youtube I'll write the phase "$my_query youtube" and works ways better than youtube's own search.
>I HATE youtube shorts.
This guys posts only shorts: https://www.youtube.com/@hydronyc and he's got the best/funniest plumbing video you YouTube.
The bad shorts are when you scroll to the next short after watching one - never do that, only watch shorts from subscriptions.
Did I really just see him charge someone $1800 for shower mixer install?
Possibly. It's NY it's way more expensive than anywhere else.
That's a delta mixer valve which is $100, plus $100 for the trim. A plumber would charge double for that, so $400 for parts. Usually labor is about the same as parts so I would expect that job to cost $800.
Maybe there was a lot of labor involved, or maybe he's embellishing the story a bit (or leaving out some of the work involved).
All the comments in the video have the same question as you.