I thought 15 unskippable ads were bad, but that was the tip of the iceberg. Now they’re 30-45 seconds unskippable, and they aren’t even ads anymore. I’m getting full on hour long podcasts spliced into the middle of videos now.
The Search is damn near useless now because when you look something up, you get a wall of unrelated YT shorts and “People also searched” reccs instead of what you asked for.
Israel ads are of course unskippable and even if they were, they’re quite frequent and just blasting nonsense right into your face. None of this is even getting into the use of AI to decide whether or not you’re even allowed to have an account
This is both not fucking sustainable and the soulless capitalist model isn’t going anywhere because it’s so profitable. I have no idea how this is going to end but I hope a new platform comes along soon that actually works and isn’t immediately set upon by right wing losers.
Recommendations can work well if you are aware not to click or (potentially) even linger the cursor on one that you don’t want to watch. For a while I had cool science and engineering videos, the kind from smaller channels where you feel like you’ve learned something even if you don’t understand all of it. They seem to have gone as quickly as they came though.
This seems to be a general trend (it’s good if you are careful, then goes the other way). I think their algorithm probably goes haywire trying to fine-tune what it believes you like and presents you with things you dislike, to see how much you dislike it, and what can it get away with. These algorithm issues and these kinds of advice (be careful what you click) have existed for at least a good 10-12 years now. They never work. Things just get shittier. Now that they probably handed their algorithm to AI, it’ll probably get even worse.
The idea with bookmarks is to refuse to play with it, and just use Youtube the way you want.
This is how the Youtube sidebar used to work by the way. You could make custom folders and put all your subscribed channels in there, then navigate where you want to go. They would also let you sort them any way you want, and wouldn’t sent “new uploads” to the top of the list. Instead each channel got a number next ro it to show you how many videos they’ve uploaded since last visited. It was a great way to sort out who you wanted to be subscribed to and who to unsubscribe from.
When they started pushing their “new” recommendations algorithm they did away with this feature to force you to rely on your Home Page for channel updates.
So use Youtube the way they originally designed and was unarguably the best functional version we got of it.
If you are interested:
The old algorithm was really effective too compared to what we got now. This is how all the big channels became the big channels. You watched a gaming review video for example? You would get recommended DIFFERENT game reviewers each time. You watched let’s plays instead? You would get recommended let’s players. Etc. If you stuck to a topic for a while, you’d eventually be recommended most creators with the kind of content you wanted at least once, and then it was up to you to pick who to keep watching. Occassionally, certain videos would get recommended out of the blue, but this was usually a result of the daily trends.
Following these recommendations was still fun. Doing a “youtube recommendations dive” was a fun way to kill time. It was what they tried to do with shorts, but less brainrotty. You would end up going through wildly different videos, sometimes really weird personal vlogs with 0 views too. And you usually ended up somewhere that was interesting enough to gain a subscription.
Oh yeah in 2014 or so facebook was found to be toying with their users like this. They were running psychology experiments on them by showing a portion of users mostly negative news for 2 weeks in their feed, then recording the results on these users. Another subset of users got positive news.
All done without the users’ consent or even telling them they were in an experiment of course.
It was not illegal because since they are a private company they don’t have to have an ethics board. Or at least at the time they didn’t. In any other setting this would have been shut down for gross ethical violations before it even got drafted.
I find that yeah we basically have to consciously decide not to play by their rules. I notice for example when I link tweets to discord or telegram I get more of that topic on my feed later. Even with the plugins I have the website tracks URL clipboard copy events. Even just lingering the viewport on a certain tweet even if you never click on it is probably tracked.