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Comment by danuker | Hacker News Reader

The AI is not the reason for the poor experience. The poor experience is caused by misguided policies excessively pushing for features (like Shorts). An AI would have toned it down long ago.

I also think Shorts is garbage, especially for a desktop/laptop. The reason I use YouTube is BECAUSE it's not TikTok. Not every service must emulate every other service.

Also, I am still bitter about the missing dislike stats. They were very useful for deciding among tutorials or courses, and avoiding misleading ones.

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Shorts is led by a former VP for Alexa Experiences. If Alexa's incessant "By the way ..." notifications are any guide, the pushing will probably continue indefinitely.

I actually like shorts. YouTube is the only platform with this form of video that isn't always a like for like repost of tiktok content.

What I don't like about shorts is how they've been integrated.

They either appear in the subscriptions page so they're treated the same way as normal creators content or they appear in the 'shorts' tab but alongside other creators so I can't just watch my subscriptions

What I would like:

- option to show just videos, just shorts or both in my /subscriptions views and playlists (and while we're at it hide premiers and lives!)

- When filtered to show just shorts it says click here to view all from just your subscriptions

- the option to view the algorithm recommended shorts as they currently have and the option to view just my subscriptions (as tiktok does) in the shorts tab

I've actually written my own crappy playlist manager that flags shorts and let's me treat them separately which is how I've been coping so far!

> Also, I am still bitter about the missing dislike stats. They were very useful for deciding among tutorials or courses, and avoiding misleading ones.

The Firefox plugin "Return Youtube Dislike" does exactly that.

Where does it get its data?

https://returnyoutubedislike.com/faq

"A combination of archived data from before the offical YouTube dislike API shut down, and extrapolated extension user behavior."

You're retrieving like/dislike data from that site's API. And when you set a dislike, it gets sent to Google AND returnyoutubedislike.com

Given I watch Youtube in a FF container not logged in, I'm not worried at all. But I could see how some people could be concerned .

A problem I see here is that it extrapolates the statistics of users users of the extension, onto all users of Youtube.

Fortunately the users of the extensions are most probably better informed than the average Youtube user. However, if the downvotes are more "accurate" (more deserved) because of that, it means they are also more accurate for new videos as opposed to old videos.

So I suspect new Youtube videos might have more downvotes than old Youtube videos. Perhaps we could find some reuploads of all Youtube videos and compare the downvotes…

You always have heads of products who feel they need to do something to make their name known or feel like they're doing their job. They did more and the product is clearly worse.

What they needed to do was nothing, but thats out of line with restless employees.

Shorts is becoming pretty addictive to me. They might actually be working for others. Also, I noticed that it actually autogenerated shorts out of old short videos I had posted.

There are a lot of reasons that I do not like Shorts on YT but the biggest one is that hotkey controls for Forward-scrub Back-scrub etc. are either different or simply not available.

Why on earth would they bifurcate the UX like this?!!?!

They're influencing user behavior and psychology. Just like instagram and tiktok do. In the name of convenience, of course! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31874846 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29768539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18429078 (and lots of others)

Strangely I vastly prefer youtube's short recommendations tiktok's. Guess they know more about me.

It seems to consist of a collection of recent channels you have visited. Sometimes I check out a new channel and the shorts for that channel start to appear in the mix until I watch enough other channels to get the original channel out of my "queue".

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