Hacker News Reader

Comment by oxff | Hacker News Reader

Youtube wants to be much like Tiktok, barely any search capability, just a stream of ML generated OR recommended videos, anything else outside of a constant, continuous video stream generated based on your metadata and other PII is considered "overhead" by these cyborgs, search for relevant videos? overhead, sorting videos? overhead, let the algo do.

These changes also render the site nearly unusable if you have a triple digit iq.

p.s. Youtube's search, much like Gooogle's, is pure dog shit by the way. Neither of them fill the function of a search at this point, you'd have to remove SEO and ML optimizations from them to get them working again. I search for "X" in youtube, I get 2-3 videos vaguely related to it, and then like 50 "videos you watched", "videos others searching for X watched". It's so fucking bad its unreal, makes me think what kind of a brain dead adderall crack addict they have QA testing this there.

View on HN

At least TikTok lets you seek in any video. Youtube does not in their shorts. One huge reason people don't use it.

I gave a grease monkey script to redirect shorts to watch. The watch?v= player works with shorts and you have a sane UI.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33560024

I expect that in 5-10 years, the Internet will be unusable without scripts and browser extensions

It’s already heading in that direction. As an example I only use the Slack web interface and have many user scripts to modify my experience.

I think the increased adoption of WASM will be a net negative for users.

I’m heavily opinionated on communication centric UX, it should work for me not the other way around.

I disallow all notifications, for example. I refuse to be forced into engagement..

Yup - I just skip over youtube shorts if they come up. There is no indication how long they are, neither can I seek. I don't know if I'm about to watch a 5 second video, or a 2 minute one (or whatever the max length of shorts is). I'm not going to sit there like a drooling idiot and find out. If the content I'm looking for doesn't present itself within the first 2 seconds, I bail. and since it almost never does, I just skip shorts entirely.

Well, you can manually copy the video ID and open it in the regular watch view. Shorts use the same video ID space as regular content.

Well, consider what portion of population does not run ad blocker. Consider what portion of population is likely to click on ads. That's the audience YouTube is being built based on. There's really no reason to expect it to get any better.

It's not even that much of a senseless decision considering that half of the population has a double digit IQ (100 is the median by definition, half is below half is above)

> These changes also render the site nearly unusable if you have a triple digit iq.

Google PMs now investigating new ways to reduce users’ IQs.

Even tiktok search and recommendation engine is better than youtube... I don't know how low they can really go from now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com