YouTube rolls out new tools to help you stop watching
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
By day, YouTube and Facebook sell us glass repair services, at a special price no less!
YT and FB could fix these social issues overnight, if they wanted to: turn off autoplay, turn off recommendations, restore chronological timelines, and dial down the ads. But they won't because that is the core of their business model.
Instead they offer bullshit mind-repair services to fix the damage they continue to do.
I suspect it wouldn't even cost them all that much but no amount of discomfort of the users can balance out a few bucks of extra income.
The world shouldn't work that way either: if companies stopped providing the goods and services people needed because a few self-appointed guardians of the public good scream about it on social media, we'd never have been able to make progress at all, since these activists have no special power to distinguish change from regression, and so err toward stasis.
If you want high-engagement features disabled, fine. Propose a law. Let's duke it out in the process of government. You will lose, badly, because your position is wildly unpopular with the vast body of the population.
The world absolutely _should_ work that way. Companies _should_ have half a brain to realise that selling bottled water is bad for the environment, that fracking causes earthquakes, that sugar is the root of all dietary evil, that tobacco is carcinogenic, that overfishing causes unspeakable damage to ocean life, that SUVs are colossal wastes of space and fuel...
All the companies doing the above are providing wildly popular goods and services. And a lot of them are perfectly legal too.
Your suggestion implies that all this is just dandy, thank you very much, so take your hemp clothing and your vegan sandals and your do-gooderness off of my property and gtfo acting as a "self appointed guardian".
What kind of extreme libertarian hard-on does a man have to possess to believe that all of this is how society SHOULD work?
I deeply resent this sentiment that you have to take the good with the bad of a free market society because there is no alternative. Of course there is! Regulate these idiots into the ground! While this is clearly a pipe dream, that's a long way away from the statement that this is how society _should_ be.
For those who are vocabulary stunted (like me apparently):
myopic: nearsighted.
vitriol: cruel and bitter criticism.
That firms are able to dismantle, oppose, co-opt, or avoid such frameworks is very much part of the problem.
I'd like to see vast changes in liability and increased veil-piercing abilities.
OK. That may be true. but demand is also a poor signal of distinguishing progress from regression.
So let's work on that. On a better method for doing so. It seems possible to do so, using the knowledge we gained in the many sciences dealing with human/eco welfare.
>> Let's duke it out in the process of government. ... You will lose, badly, because your position is wildly unpopular with the vast body of the population.
Leaving aside the many failures of democracy, people not always know or prefer the thing that is good for them in the long term. I'm not saying that totalitarinsm is OK, but most people do benefit from living in an environment that guides them well, surrounds them with good things, and makes it hard for them to choose the wrong choices.
And "knowledge"? What knowledge? The social sciences largely do not reproduce. For the past few decades, the social sciences have been a mystic cult with political aspirations. We knew more in 1990 than we "know" now.
In the grand parent post, we talked about "YT and FB could fix these social issues overnight, if they wanted to: turn off autoplay, turn off recommendations, restore chronological timelines, and dial down the ads.". It is quite different from the great evils of history.
And sure, we should work on reproducing social sciences. it's a big problem.
But i would guess that if you'd describe something like the internet that is today in very general terms(possible to predict once you know that attention/engagement is the lead driver) to psychologists, a decade ago, they would have told you that it may hold some serious potential problems.
Does it mean we need to stop progress ? maybe not, but slowing "progress" in the name of caution may not be a bad trade-off. and once we see the dangers, rolling it back(even against the addicted population's wishes) may also be a decent option.
So mild totalitarianism is be okay?
No, there is no acceptable "middle ground" in which a bunch of Twitter gets in the way of consenting business and consumers and tells people how to run their lives.
The idea of a republic is not that different. Acoording to its tenets, the masses are still not to be trusted to make the decisions because they dont know whats good for them. Instead, they are supposed to choose a small fraction of people who not only are supposed to know whats good for them but would also make decisions that is good for them.
It is not a whole lot less patronizing than 'masses don't know what's good for them'
Citation needed.
And it's funny that you're challenging people to fight Facebook & co in the process of government, which has been subverted by lobbyist money from... Facebook & co. Why do you think that the US government is asleep at the wheel when it comes to privacy? Because they're paid a lot of money to not worry about it. And with enough money changing hands, it becomes easy to think that in fact those services are needed by the public and they represent progress.
So no thanks. The self-appointed guardians of the public are smart to use different tactics.
If the future is passive consumption of propaganda and marketing content masquerading as "entertainment", you can count me out. I'll go chop wood and raise chickens while I watch for the system to collapse under its own weight.
Idiocracy portrais that kind of future very well.
It's immensely useful to me and just because you don't like it doesn't make it some evil plot to control our minds. Remember that TV has had autoplay since its inception. It's just a natural way to consume media passively.
The deeper philosophical question seems to be whether it's more desirable for people to have the skills to control their own education or whether it's more desirable to optimize tools for bringing educational resources to people. You can go a bit deeper than that and ask whether it's more desirable to have a population of independent thinkers or like-minded thinkers. We'd probably be better off with a bit of both.
I prefer to frame these kinds of arguments in terms of educational materials, which you can kinda loosely call most forms of media.
Yes, "bad" (who is to judge?) defaults might be slightly immoral, but they are at least giving users the option to not use them.
YouTube actually has a treasure trove of content and once you find it, you get more of it[1]. And their recommendations are really handy to see related content.
No ads with YouTube Red.
[1] e.g., I mostly see stuff from channels like CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, Veritasium, Vsauce, Every Frame a Painting, Vox, Jordan Peterson, Matthias Wandel, Nerdwriter1, AvE, TED Talks, SciShow, Engineer Guy, LastWeekTonight, SmarterEveryDay, etc...
the price is $0.
How do you feel about HN's implementation of the same feature (noprocrast)? https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tomc1985
What social issues? I remember old conservatives railing about gansta rap and south park causing social issues back i the day. Now it's old people whining about YT and FB. They aren't cause of social issues and they aren't the solution either. No more than smartphones or flat screen TVs.
> if they wanted to: turn off autoplay, turn off recommendations,
Why should they?
> But they won't because that is the core of their business model.
Sure. But what about the people who want recommendations or autoplay?
What's with select group of people on HN and their totalitarian mindset? Just because you don't have impulse control doesn't mean others don't have it.
I like recommendations because it helps me find relevant videos. For example, if I search for C# or Haskell tutorials, it's great to see other C# or haskell videos. Same thing for recipes or how-to videos or nature videos or anything else. Why should I and others be denied something because you don't like it?
It's crazy that some of the people on "hacker" news are so dedicated on censorship. Somehow hacker news turned from a very programmer/tech/free speech forum to old people whining about their lives and society.
How about personal responsibility? How about not blaming others for your own short coming?
> Instead they offer bullshit mind-repair services to fix the damage they continue to do.
I agree, they shouldn't give in. Instead they should tell advertisers and people who whine to simply stop using youtube.
I don't understand why youtube and the rest of social media/tech industry simply put their foot down and say enough is enough.
What about hacker news? Do you think hacker news should be shut down? Is hacker news responsible for social issues?
Gangsta rap and South Park are content. This thread is about platforms and how the medium can shape the message. The analogy does not hold water.
The rest of your comment is kinda off-topic and ranty, but that wasn't a great way to start it. Friendly advice.
It’s annoying at least.
This can be disabled by appending disable_polymer=1 to the URL, but it can't be saved as a cookie or set per account. I have a greasemonkey script to it.
For me it's an annoyance, for my blind friend it means no working screenreader when polymer is enabled.
Firefox and Edge (on my Windows laptop) take about five seconds to replace a YouTube page's wireframe layout with text. But if I append "&disable_polymer=1" as joecool1029 recommends above, the text loads instantly in Firefox and Edge. Is YouTube's new Polymer UI sooo much better that is worth five second page loads in non-Chrome browsers?
I watch YouTube to watch a video or two I want to watch. that's it. Frankly, when someone sends me a video to watch, I resent it, because I hate spending 5 minutes of my life watching something that probably won't be funny.
Some nights I'll pull up YT on the TV and play a Wendover productions vid, or an AvE vid, or a car video or two, and that's it. I don't ever feel sucked in or addicted to it. If anything, I often want to watch something but can't find anything interesting to watch; nothing sounds that compelling, or I get 3 minutes in and am bored so I try to find something else.
Am I unique in that way? I've also never gotten into video games, they just don't hold any appeal or hold my attention. That's not to say I haven't spend 12 hours gaming at a LAN party once in a blue moon (actually far less frequently, maybe 4 or 5 times in my life).. but I don't get sucked in in the same way I get sucked into other internet distractions. I can go down HN rabbitholes or keep refreshing FB or some news site hoping to find something interesting, but YT doesn't do it for me.
Also I can’t imagine anything lamer than YouTube personalities.
Now that I think about it, it's usually when my eyes are kind of aching (long days at screens) that I start to prefer videos even for things that don't require a visual.
For example, imagine CinemaSins or Movies with Mikey as plaintext. That would take all of the fun out of it.
Or imagine reading transcripts of Stephen Colbert's monologues. Those would probably be quite tedious since a lot of Colbert's quality is his pantomimic object work.
Sometimes I just let it play in the background to eat up their bandwidth for no reason because i don't like stupid default settings. I get it that google is trying to turn the Internet into a TV, but soon you won't even have to type anything in Google Search... the results will come to you.
Disappointingly, the setting is per-device, and not saved into your account. But it's there.
Until it trips up and you go from Foo Fighters to Taylor Swift but tht only happens rarely.
https://i.imgur.com/qaK6W8W.jpg
Playlists though keep going which is annoying.
(long time lurker, previously registered, but forgotten password and email account no longer in my control)
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/magic-actions-for-...
Those videos are designed to be as addicting and empty as eating piles and piles of candy and YouTube cannot be a mentally healthy place as long as they're constantly pushed to to forefront.
Plus subscribe to Youtube Red, so don't have ads injecting garbage.
Why not client-based tools that locally retain channel blocklists?
There are browser add-ons that can block channels or certain keywords:
- Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/video-blocker/
- Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-blocker/jknk...
Absent that, the downside risk for offensive or abysmal content is minimal. Blocking puts skin in the game.
Though I usually just use the Video Blocker extension, so perhaps there's something I'm missed.
Here's my 2015 ask ... in ... emphatic language.
https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/JF68A2Tx...
[ :/ ] This subscription is not available in your country.
For instance, I have about 20 C++ videos I'd like to watch, and each is an hour long. I rarely have a whole hour, but maybe 20 minutes. I have yet to figure out how to resume playback where I left off, which would be a very useful feature!
Killer feature.
Personal lack of self control is the problem, not good UX. A tool like this is attempting to assist with the problem, not bring the functionality of the site to a point that services the shortcomings of the lowest common denominator.
You and I may understand the need to engage in self-control and personal responsibility for sites like YouTube, but that's because you and I have an insiders' perspective on the dangers of not doing so.
YouTube has precipitously catered to the lowest common denominator and took advantage of their mass gullability. It is overwhelmingly obvious that YouTube designed their site in a way that would get people addicted to the point of needing a tool like this. The fact that they auto-play videos when they know the viewer is a child is downright disgusting.
YouTube did this instead of taking a more sophisticated approach of catering to directors, actors, and producers. YouTube had the chance to elevate the conversation and make digital media higher-minded, but instead decided to cater to people making content for the lowest common denominator - stupid, shlocky trash. The fact that you refer to what YouTube provides as "content" shows that you are not at all concerned with the way that YouTube has cheapened our digital media in order to get people hopelessly hooked.
Just because one can do something effective to increase the immediate bottom line and revenues of their product, doesn't mean they should. I am all about personal responsibility and I do agree that the blame largely lands on the individual at the end of the day. But YouTube is obviously preying on these individuals' largesse and that is just as immoral as being a lazy slob that watches YouTube all day is. YouTube could have taken a proactive approach and showed the world how the web could enable much higher quality video, while limiting your digital footprint. But instead, they did the opposite, which is why I refuse to publish on their "platform."
I don't personally see a significant difference here versus something like cable TV. Do you think this issue carries over into that domain as well?
YouTube makes an effort to construct a unique and never-ending journey, filled with unpredictable outcomes. This constant "freshness" is something that they should have been a lot more careful introducing to the public. It not only makes viewing habits unpredictable, it also adds to the addictive nature of the platform.
EDIT: I'll also add, that it is not at all flattering to be considered on the same level as cable television. YouTube has simply taken their awful concepts and multiplied them to the Nth degree.
Weird. My experience is that their recommendation algorithm is absolutely god awful at picking videos I actually want to see. For instance, it very often recommends videos I've already fucking watched.
The same happens here in NL with casinos, only the government is supposed to run them because they are so concerned for our well being and the potential for gambling addiction, but I've never seen them refuse someone gambling the childrens college fund away in a single evening.
There's been high profile articles shining a light on the predatory design tactics in tech recently so the awareness of the issue is on the rise. The idea of a 'design ethicist' while novel seems fundamentally opposed to the attention-economy.
Overly cynical view is this is google angling to make the case to self-regulate vs. managing an intrusive regulatory body investigating/fining them for violations once more people are aware of the current shenanigans.
At least one of the problem gambling hotlines has an IVR option to redirect you to a hotel reservation system.
As long as auto play lives on, they show they have no interest in helping anyone watch less - and why should they pretend they care?
Oh they should really make this red-scale (red on black, no white light), not grey-scale, red is the only color that does not disturb night vision, and grey contains blue so disturbs sleep.
It would be easier to make that argument if they weren’t opt-in, and layered on top of an attention-monetizing economy.
Yes, please remind me every three HOURS of non-stop videos that I watch that it might be time to take a break...but don't offer me a choice of every two hours.
That's one reason I think Twitch is killing YouTube in live-streaming: Like Reddit, I'm able to create a new Twitch account without having it affect the rest of my life online and I can be completely anonymous - they don't ask for a phone number or anything.
1.) I watched one historical nazi movie due to attempt to learn. Why is it suggestig so many "holocaust did not happened" pieces and genuine white supremacist bs? Real story.
2.) I started with metal search. Why is it reversion g to pop so fast? I want metal. Definitely not Peppa the Pig. Wtf, I started with metal, not Peppa.