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Comment by _hyn3 | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that TikTok is a formidable competitor that focused on a different experience and a slightly different format (short form). Tiktok seems to work by choosing for you and only showing a single video at a time (esp on mobile, which is where it's really most at home), but allowing you to quickly reject that choice and learning from your rejections.

Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format? If so, what would that experience even look like, especially on mobile?

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And the reason they are able to do so is because by rejecting a video, you don't see it anymore. On the other hand, if you are given a view of 5 videos on YouTube and you click next, what YouTube should be doing is rejecting all 5 and showing you a new 5. For some reason this doesn't happen on YouTube. When you come back to the frontpage, you see the same videos over and over and over again unless you manually tell YouTube you're not interested.

So it's not the auto-play that's crucial, it's realizing that the user is giving you a signal. YouTube has been ignoring that signal. Perhaps it's a performance issue that makes them unable to?

I often want to see some of those 5 later, but just not now. I suspect that’s common enough that YT’s algorithms have learned that.

I think that, on average, you are probably correct. More people prefer the current behavior over the opposite behavior, where instead of 'Not Interested' one would be forced to select 'Interested', or perhaps 'Add to Watch List -> Chill Music'.

But I'm not interested in an average case, and if given the opportunity to switch between a blocklist and an allowlist approach, I would do so frequently. Unfortunately we're not given that opportunity whereas I am given that opportunity in many other different cases, the 'Mark as Unread' button on e-mails and RSS readers being one such example.

Yes, same. EXCEPT there is new content all the time, and if you're like me, you'll probably never watch 4 of those videos because a new top pick emerged since.

> Is it possible to beat YouTube itself with a different experience but the same, longer-form, format?

Maybe focus on content longer than the YouTube average , like courses and documentaries and in depth video podcasts?

Youtube has plenty of that content already.

YT seems to think so, they've basically made a mini-TT experience with the shorts.

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