Tell HN: YouTube Shorts can no longer be dismissed from the front page | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: YouTube Shorts can no longer be dismissed from the front page

13 pointsclircle18 comments

You used to be able to click an [x] to dismiss it for 30 days.

Youtube shorts recommendations and ads are unbelievable. My Shorts tab is often recommending me semi-naked females doing random things (with millions of views). I never ever click those things, since I don't want Youtube to think I wanna see more of it, since a lot of times I use Youtube is to show something to my kids.

Also, since I turned off targeted advertising in Google settings, Youtube ads shifted from "random insurance company and macho soap brand" to "cheating dating apps, Mr. Beast click-to-win-$1000 scams, fake GTA6 for mobile and fake Kids gaming stuff". I'm even considering turning those privacy features off again due to this...

> I never ever click those things

> a lot of times I use Youtube is to show something to my kids.

Do your kids use to click on that lowball content maybe? My Shorts and all the recommendations are focused about what do I really use to watch. I do not want to watch Shorts at all, to be honest, but at least they seems to be really interesting. For achieving this level of quality of the recommendations, sometimes I use to "watch" in a background tab with no sound some videos from [1] for letting Youtube think about me as a little bit smarter than I actually am.

> Youtube ads

Why not to learn your kid about how to use adblockers and/or discuss why adwares from Internet are so bad?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=youtube.com

When I show them something on Youtube, the phone is always in my hands. They don't get to click on anything, I never give them unsupervised access to Youtube. Also, they're too young to even think about clicking those butts.

Regarding ads, yeah I use the Youtube app mostly because it's a better experience than watch on Firefox for Android or using Newpipe. I kinda wanted both to work, but the native app is so much better...

There are filters for Ublock Origin to remove this junk.

https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

Edit: I also recommend Unhook for Firefox. It lets you toggle off or on distracting features like recommendations and pointless features like comments.

Wow, thank you! Finally I can look through my subscriptions without needing to scan past all the Shorts junk.

I remember it was about 10 years ago when “recommended” tab became really better than subscriptions feed for me. Now it looks like it is moving in the opposite direction, I find myself cleaning up subscriptions and using it more and more. And almost none of the channels I’m subscribed to spam shorts. Anyone else does this?

Yes. I even use the chrome extension 'unhook' which allows you to hide the home tab altogether

It went to hell in 2019. I remember because it took a lot of search to tell that I'm not alone, and understand why.

Apparently, two kinds of rabbit holes caused suggestions to break: conspiracy theories and elsagate. I also read that it could guide pedophiles to accidentally "relevant" videos of children.

Basically, if you help people find videos the same way ants find food, some undesirable behaviour emerge. You can follow paths that are not intended to be followed, and it can get platforms in hot water.

Gross. At the risk of sounding like an old man yelling at a cloud, almost nothing of value can be communicated in so short a span. It’s like all the big players suddenly think that Vine was right all along, and blink-and-you-miss-it short form videos are the apex of the internet.

Apex of the Internet? No. Apex of engagement? Yes. The youth (kids, teens, young adults) essentially rule Internet trends.

The videos are great for those low on attention span, vain, endless time to scroll, low barrier to entry, etc.

> The videos are great for those low on attention span

I have kind of an opposite experience because I can open a long video and just do not care about it while doing my own business. But I can not not to pay attention while watching some short videos because in few seconds my computer will stop talking and I need to invest some attention into it for loading the next video.

It's a good way to unwind when you don't want to watch only 10 minute videos that may or may not be worth it. It's brainless and ridiculously addictive.

I don't think I've ever seen a recommended short that's even close to what I usually watch on YouTube, it's minimal effort garbage content that's excessively loud or with obnoxious music for no reason, actual sewage. I can't believe this is the world we live in, where less than mediocrity is championed.

Are they actually achieving anything for YouTube?

I'm not too bothered by Shorts, but I feel as though I'm much less likely to engage deeply with Shorts. Also, if they become a major part of the platform I'm much less likely to ever be able to justify upgrading to YouTube Premium.

I strongly recommend unhook.app to get rid of anything but the bits you need. It works far better than uBlock rules.

My YouTube is now just my subscriptions and the video I'm currently watching. Everything else is gone, and it's great.

Cant fullscreen shorts on a desktop web browser. Anyone else run into this same issue?

Youtube Enhancer can convert controls for shorts videos into regular controls. You can do it by hands, just replace in address line "shorts/" with "watch?v=".

Can't even scroll down either, or page down even, it's absolutely horrifically designed, nevermind the ultra low quality content.

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