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Comment by dmix

10 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.

33 comments

dmix

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randysalami  9 hours ago

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).

  • datsci_est_2015  8 hours ago

    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

    • AreShoesFeet000  8 hours ago

      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.

      19 replies →

    • xp84  8 hours ago

      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.

beAbU  6 hours ago

Facebook does the same. The longer I dwell on an image post, the more likely the next batch of posts would be similar

  • coliveira  5 hours ago

    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.

  • touristtam  4 hours ago

    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.

BoxOfRain  6 hours ago

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.

  • sidharthv  6 hours ago

    I naively searched in the mobile app settings for a way to turn off shorts, before realising there will not be one.

    • ffsm8  4 hours ago

      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...