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Comment by flatiron | Hacker News Reader

At least for YouTube you can disable auto play.

Actually, my issue with YouTube isn't really the autoplay per se, it's how the recommended videos (including autoplayed videos) go very aggressively into rabbit holes.

I'll listen to an anime music playlist and my entire recommended video / front page becomes full of anime stuff. An in-law joins Youtube to watch bible study videos and now they're an avowed freedom fighter against the globalist satanist cabal running the world. That sort of thing.

This is a feature and I love it. I don't want to subscribe to football channels, for example, but if I'm in the mood I watch a couple of them and then it shows me related videos for a few more hours and then it switches when I decide to search for cooking videos, of which I don't want to subscribe to either. Works great.

They could easily let you accomplish this by just giving you an option to actively seek out this content by giving you a "What else is like this?" button that takes you to a 'related videos' page.

The problem when it just puts it all in a single recommendation feed is that that feed more-or-less presents itself as "here's what the world is talking about" rather than "here's a bunch of stuff that conforms to the biases and ideological filters of the stuff you've been watching lately." It creates a solipsistic worldview if you're not aware of what's going on.

There needs to be a plugin to wipe cookies on every YouTube page load. The recommended videos list for a given video on your first visit? Excellent. Every subsequent page load where they give recommendations pertaining to a video from 30 minutes ago? Absolute garbage.

Curiously, I don't have that experience at all. I'll play Backyardigans videos to watch with the baby ~4 times per week and nothing of the sort ever shows up in my recommended feed. I can't understand the reports of sub-par recommendation experience on YouTube. Maybe my behavior is somewhat different -- I tap "watch this later" a lot (and rarely do).

You can reject the recommended videos and purely exist either checking subscribed channels or using the search function for every video. I've found that their recommendations are usually pretty good but I use youtube on different devices for different "moods" so I've got my background lets-plays on one device - people talking about maps on another device - and my youtube-only music needs on a third device - this helps keep my stuff pretty siloed.

Sorta, kinda. Except it tends to turn itself back on at random. Except there IIRC are two auto-plays on YouTube: one for normal videos, one for playlists - and YouTube's search has a nasty habit of returning results that happen to be smack in the middle of some random playlist.

And speaking of YouTube, the other annoyance is the extremely idiotic anti-feature of pausing the playback and displaying "Are you still watching?" popup after you go a couple of minutes without moving your mouse or tapping on the screen. No YouTube, I'm not watching, I'm only listening on my wireless headset. But you already know that. What you don't know is that I'm in the middle of some household cleaning and my hands are covered with caustic chemicals, so I frikkin do not appreciate having to press a stupid button you introduced to get more "engagement".

To be fair, you can disable autoplay by using youtube-dl[0], and it's (effectively) physically incapable of turning itself back on. Also fixes "Are you still watching?" and other engagement 'features'^Wdefects.

0: http://youtube-dl.org/

...and yet it still manages to turn itself back on whenever you sign in again, when you cast to a new device...and you can't tell me the company that knows everything about me can't remember my preference for not wanting auto play. Other services seem to remember it just fine, I set it once on Netflix and have never needed to set it ever again.

I wish you could disable the free trial offers.

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