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Comment by nixcraft | Hacker News Reader

Now ask the same question for YouTube shorts ;) Hah. Google is pushing shorts hard these days. Honestly, they need to give an option not to show shorts. In most cases, shorts are either from TikTok from the same content creator or re-uploaded by some random person. Even if I liked topic X on shorts, it never suggests similar shorts. It is hard to believe that Google cannot crack the correct algo to show interesting related shorts. I think YouTube doesn't have enough original shorts content creators, and like many of Google's side projects, it will go to /dev/null someday.

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Personally I don't want shorts on YouTube.

I use and like you tube for longer content. If I wanted short content I would create an account with instatok and tikagram or whatever the next thing will be called.

Every week or so I have to go through and click not interested on all shorts suggestions.

I second they need an option to hide. I've sent feedback to YouTube numerous times and I know others have, but my guess is it will fall on deaf ears as they try to keep up with the current cool kid.

I hate how I can’t scrub through the video on Shorts. Counterintuitively, I feel like my time is being wasted when I’m forced to watch the whole clip, despite it being not that long to begin with.

Not being able to scrub video is an accessibility issue. If you don't catch something on the first watch, it's incredibly frustrating to re-watch the whole thing instead of going back a few seconds. Even if it's 'short' content. Looping the whole clip again isn't useful to someone who just wants to re-listen to one line so that they are sure they understood it correctly. In one case, a small nuisance; very frustrating in the general sense.

In the case of YouTube the extra pain is that I've trained 'double tap' a YT video for scrubbing. But what does that interaction do on a Short, in the YT app?! Like! It likes the video instead of scrubbing. On something that doesn't seem any different from a short normal YouTube video.

>it's incredibly frustrating to re-watch the whole thing instead of going back a few seconds.

Which shows up in their data as a positive and reinforces the design decision

I'd honestly prefer "Longs" put a list of 1+ hour content on my front page. That's what I'm here for.

Did you know that Youtube has a game streaming service like Twitch?

Neither did I.

They've hidden it so fucking well that even though they pay (tens of) millions for exclusive contracts, people can't find it.

But shorts they keep pushing on every UI.

They used to have a separate app called YT Gaming.

Per https://www.failory.com/google/youtube-gaming: "Out of the 11 million people that have downloaded the app on iOS and Android, and the more than 200 million watching gaming videos daily, only a small number used the app to do so. Most preferred the main YouTube app or the site."

>Did you know that Youtube has a game streaming service like Twitch?

Although org wise it's under YouTube Gaming livestreams can be about anything. The option to go live is shown when you click the upload button. Live streams show up in your video feed and the top of your subscriptions. In explore and on the sidebar of every page is a link to the live metachannel. On game metachannels there is a tab to see people streaming the game. Livestreams show up in search and you can filter for only livestreams.

I think it's pretty hard to avoid since streams are promoted more compared to videos. You must just not watch creators who stream on YouTube or are interested in topics that lend themselves to being streamed.

Shorts is really half baked. Almost all content i consume on Youtube is in english, but shorts surprisingly ignores that and show content native to my country (most of the time irrelevant). It boggles my mind how YouTube can screw up something as basic as that.

Tangentially related but when I have lived in countries where English isn't the first language I'm amazed how many big companies ignore the language set in my web requests (English) and serves me content in the county's native language. Google for example and they really hide the button to chsngethe language.

I suppose they assume a lot of people have devices incorrectly configured to English but its very frustrating for a tech literate person who travels a lot.

Google really sucks with this. It used to be a lot worse a couple years ago when you had to navigate the dumb GDPR thing before you could see the language selector. Believe it or not, its the main thing that pushed me to DuckDuckGo.

Anyway, a nice trick is to append ?hl=en to the query string of any Google site and it will force it to be in English.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I live in Japan, and Youtube has shown me ads for very local stuff in some remote parts of the US.

For years several large web properties have been pushing machine translated content.

Sometimes they push their own, other times they prefer others badly machine translated content over the original.

IIRC the worst I saw in impact was 3 or so years ago when I found pages of Microsoft documentation so badly translated I couldn't make sense of it and with no way I could see to request the original.

Yeah shorts are getting kinda annoying to me as a youtube consumer. Some of my favorite subscriptions have started uploading like 5 shorts in a row and that fills up my page of new content with trash.

The shorts recommendations are indeed awful. I get solely stuff I really would never watch; I get woke videos or teens being insecure about their lives, neither of which is relevant or interesting to me and YouTube knows that as the normal videos they recommend are usually not bad. And checking quickly now, most of them have the TikTok logo on them. So I agree: it will probably be removed or get worse instead of better.

I love shorts on YouTube. Between terrible content and horrible UI, shorts are effectively pissing off everybody. It's wonderful.

I never thought YouTube would do something this idiotic and actually drive away their users, but here we are ...

YouTube is plagued by unnecessarily padded content because I believe creators were rewarded depending on how much time they spent watching their videos (and hence number of ads that can be shown). Vast majority of YouTube videos I come across can be reduced by 90% in length without any loss in information you are seeking. YouTube needs to simply change incentives for the content creators and TikTok will have a massive competition.

I suspect that a big chunk of YouTube’s audience puts it on and lets it auto play, the same way one might turn on a tv channel and see whatever is on. This audience has more tolerance for ads, and so is more lucrative than people seeking short, information-dense videos. And so they are what gets optimised for.

It's buggy enough on my phone that anything which used to be just a short video now gets the static preview for it stuck over top of the video, obscuring it almost completely.

Most YouTube shorts are just repurposed TikToks, often not even published by the original creator.

Ah you do have the option to not show shorts but you need to be logged in

In the android App? Where? Could you please share.

When I am on the webpage on my desktop there is the x button that says something to the effect of "don't show shorts". I click that and the strip of shorts are removed.

For the app shorts is a different tab on the bottom of the screen. It goes Home, Shorts Subscription, Library. Shorts are never mixed him to my regular feed.

My Android app has shorts advertised in horizontal scrolling sections every so many videos.

You can click not interested on them all, it takes some time to get through them all, but after a week or two they are back and it's rimce and report.

Yes I do have a shorts tab at bottom as well. I never click it. It's the shorts in my feed that are a pain in the butt.

I dont think it's possible. I wish I could scroll in them.

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