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YT is desperate for me to engage with rage bait news, and I’m not biting.

It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.

All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!

Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.

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I only use YouTube with my watch history set to off. So there is no feed, and I only see updates from channels I actually subscribed to. If I want to see some random crap I go search for it but it’s a clean slate next time I open the app. I have found this method of using YouTube to be extremely useful.
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Turn off history. Completely disables the food. The only content you see is what you search for.
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Do not give them the satisfaction. Dont like videos and never comment on anything. The videos are the bait. The comments sections are the trap. Use youtube as a multi-channel TV. Keep it a one-way stream of data. Give them nothing beyond the unavoidable knowledge of what you watch.
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> I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.

This should be illegal..

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I'm amazed that they still haven't added any way to organise/categorise your subscribed channels, it's just a big flat list.
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YouTube is social media first, even if it also happens to be a repository of useful content. Social media does not want you to navigate with agency. They want to choose what you see because it lets them keep you on the platform longer, which is the entire goal.
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You can do it by using a feed reader and subscribing to the channels rss feeds. Keeps you better isolated from dark patterns as well.

edit: has the added benefit that there are different feeds for All/Videos/Shorts/Live/Specific Playlists, so this is another way to avoid shorts

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What's crazy is that their adtech definitely knows how to categorise stuff down to super specific topics, yet they only use that internally.
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Why are you still paying for Youtube? I run uBlock and haven't seen ads in years, don't see any cellphone format crap now thanks to this list, and VacuumTube on my TV defaults to 4K.
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i'm the same as you, but YT has started to place its content behind sign-in wall

Anon usage + uBlock and VPN, is a dead man walking

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Hacker News commenters: “I don’t like ads. They are evil”

Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”

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And how do I pay for a YouTube competitor that's libre or at least won't spy back without losing access to its monopolisticly large catalog?
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Yes I know that Google just reported YouTube’s revenue is larger than Netflix’s. But I really don’t find anything interesting on YouTube. Every time I try to find an interesting tutorial on for me AWS, if it isn’t produced by AWS itself, it’s usually subpar and I end up just paying for it on Udemy or using my company paid Pluralsight.
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I pay for plenty of other media (music, games, sports, comedy, books) and even do some Patreon for a few podcasts and YT channels, but I refuse to directly support a publishing monopoly that has had an actively user-hostile interface for over a decade.
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I do too. I don’t use YouTube with the one exception of official AWS videos. But those don’t have commercials.
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I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.
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I currently pay for YouTube premium but I'm strongly considering stopping again. For me it's a combination of prices creeping up (small part) and the worsening UX and engagement-bait (big part). It's the same reason I dropped Spotify a few years ago.
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I don’t know. But most of the time when I don’t like a service, I don’t use it. I know that’s a crazy idea. I find YouTube like everything Google does a piss poor user experience. I’m forced to only use it to watch official AWS videos and those don’t have ads.
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Does it make the sponsor sections of the videos go away too?
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It makes them less annoying. With premium if you hit the scrub forward button once it jumps directly to the end of the sponsor section
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No, but SponsorBlock[0] is fantastic for that. I even have it setup on my home server[1] so it skips sponsor segments on my Apple TV, which is where we watch most of our YouTube.

[0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ [1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

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Normies who can't figure out the 3 buttons it takes to use ublock pay for such things.

Its a tax on not being smart?

I'm mostly kidding, but I just use ublock and I've never considered buying youtube premium. Try harder google?

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With the change in culture here, especially in the last 2-3 years, HN might as well be called Reddit News now. So it's not surprising that most people aren't consistent with their principles.
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Was HN known for consistency of principles before? I don’t remember that.

Whenever an online community is anthropomorphized as an individual, it looks hypocritical. The only groups that don’t look hypocritical are monocultural backwaters of groupthink, permabans, and self-editing.

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doesn’t work on iPad or iOS? Also not worth my time given how cheap it is
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Pretty sure shorts disables if you turn off watch history: (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/youtube-update-homepage-wa...)
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I’ve had watch history off for years and it shows me shorts above my actual subscriptions.
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I hate that you can’t block specific channels from showing up in your feed. So much ai slop.
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This is not true. You can in fact block specific channels. From YouTube support[1]: > On certain pages, such as your Home and Watch Next pages, find a video from a channel that you don’t want recommended to you.

> Click More next to the video title.

> Select Don't recommend channel .

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en

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This is also not true and hasn't been so for years. One can set a preference to "not recommend", but one can not explicitly block any channel.

Depending on your particular "preference constellation's weights" (over which you have no direct control), you can, in fact, be shown videos from that channel again.

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And the community posts and polls from random communities you have no interest in and don’t give you the same “don’t show me content from this channel”
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If you pay for youtube, you are part of the problem
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Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it. Yes there is insane anounts of garbage and yes their history is getting spottier by the day, but nothing else comes close to all of the good stuff that is still on it.

Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.

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>Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it.

> Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here.

fantastic, an appeal to personal guilt to fund large corporate money making and national/corporate-soft-power efforts.

an acquired predatory advertiser, the worlds #1 inadequate and neglectful child nanny, and world wide cultural trend-setter is also bad at making money? and they need more? and you say they won't squander it?

I think i'll donate to PBS while aiding YT archival efforts.

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Don't pay for YouTube
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