Comment by dmix
18 hours ago
I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.
18 hours ago
I noticed Youtube shorts also seems to update the feed based on how long the last video you watched. If you're scrolling quickly then stop to watch a dog video long enough the next one is likely to be another dog video.
I’ve noticed the same thing and this creates such a negative user experience. Every short is a reaction test and if I fail, I get slop. Makes the whole experience very jarring (for better or for worse).
For better or worse with regards to my addiction, my subscriptions are all either science channels or high effort / high production comedy skits (e.g. DropoutTV). I still get slop, but I never subscribe and it mostly remains background noise
That’s the point though. It may seem as if you’re not in control when scrolling, but you can adjust your behavior to get the content you’re looking for almost intuitively. That’s actually something good in my honest opinion.
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I try to react as “violently” as possible to any slop and low-quality crap (e.g. stupid “life hacks” purposely bad to ragebait the comments). On YouTube it’s called “Don’t recommend this channel” and on Facebook it’s multiple taps but you can “Hide All From…” Basically, I don’t trust that thumbs down is sufficient. It is of course silly, since there are no doubt millions of bad channels and I probably can’t mute them all.
They built a slop machine, not something tuned for positive UX.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
At the risk of going off on a tangent about that maxim; I feel like it's just misusing the word "purpose".
Maybe it would be cleaner to state that a system has no purpose (at least not until it is sentient), instead it has behaviors. Then one can observe that the purpose of the designers or maintainers of a system simply happens to be at odds (or as AI safety researchers would say, are "out of alignment with") the behavior of the system.
That all of course presupposes that one can accurately deduce the purposes of the designers/maintainers.. In the case of TikTok, I'd bet that we are all in agreement that their purpose is nothing more nor less than maximal value-extraction from people wishing to express themselves with videos multiplied against an audience of people who wish to view videos multiplied again against advertisers who want to insert propaganda into eyeballs.
Facebook does the same. The longer I dwell on an image post, the more likely the next batch of posts would be similar
The right way to look at these networks is that people are being trained by the algorithm, not the other way around. The ultimate goal is to elicit behaviors in humans, normally to spend more time and spend more money in the platform, but also for other goals that may be designed by the owners of the network.
Is amazon using the same thing??? I can't count the number of times I am getting recommended the EXACT same type of product I just purchased.
One of my gripes with youtube at the moment is that they break my adblock filters to remove shorts more often than they break the filters stopping the actual ads.
I naively searched in the mobile app settings for a way to turn off shorts, before realising there will not be one.
You can use NewPipe or YouTube ReVanced, or set up a “child” account and disable Shorts in the parental restrictions settings.
You can't turn it off entirely, but if you keep using "show less shorts" from the 3 dot menu it eventually goes away, mostly...
If you're on android it's better to just use revanced or something
I use an addon for firefox called "Hide shorts for Youtube™". Works just fine.
I've been insta-skipping tennis video's for months now. Still getting Federer on a daily basis.