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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Yup, I'm the same. I've totally given up on navigating anything except my home page, I'm actually astonished at how good it is.

The newest videos from my favorite channels are always listed first, and then it's a smattering of older popular ones from the topics and channels I watch the most, and a handful of things "adjacent" to those that are sometimes not for me but sometimes become my new favorite rabbit hole, so I'm very thankful they're there. (For me it's a lot of educational content like architecture tours and urban engineering and how-it's-made, plus content from certain comedians and sketch comedy groups.)

I know there's supposed to be a bunch of clickbait garbage on YouTube but I just wouldn't know, because I literally never see it.

(Plus there are new tabs at the top that actually list the topics it's learned I like, so if I want to see 20 architecture videos instead of just 2, it's a single tap to filter. It's remarkably clever.)

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I have had the YT algorithm "hunt me" for a weeks, keep recommending some what looks like a dumb-ass video, only when I finally cave in and watch it, I get it, I needed to see it. The thumbnail and the title didn't did it the opposite of justice. I even tried using the yt api to see if I could scrape the recommendations but they aren't in there. You would have to scrape the browser while logged in.

You need the extension "Clickbait Remover" - it just grabs a random frame from the video and sets it as the thumbnail, will change your youtube life:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clickbait-remover-...

Here's the Firefox version of the Clickbait Remover extension:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

This looks great. It's surprising how much mental energy is spent fighting these initial triggers like icons/clickbait.

Thank you for your recommendation. I'm tired in the world of marketing when everyone is trying to invest in click bait instead of making good contents.

I'd like this, but it doesn't work when using uBlock Origin. It does change case of video titles, though, so it's working: just not able to alter the thumbnails anymore. Would be great but I'm not disabling uBlock Origin for it…

working for me on firefox with uBlock Origin, maybe it's some other extension (or some custom rule)?

Russ Roberts (host of Econtalk podcast) says: take the teacher, not the class, meaning (at least in economics) you'll get more value from a great teacher of a boring topic than from a poor teacher of an exciting topic.

I feel that describes my YouTube preferences: I'd prefer to see amazingly intelligent/engaging content on any topic than just average content on topics I'm ostensibly very interested in.

I can vouch for that idea. I dreaded taking statistics in college, because I'm just not a mathy person. But the teacher was fantastic. I actually enjoyed the class - which was 100% due to his passion for the subject, and deep interest in teaching it to the next generation.

I still remember, all these years later, how my CC statistics teacher “taught” us that airplanes don’t indeed fly by the Bernoulli principle producing lift but because the wind hits the underside of the wings and pushes it up into the air.

Totally random I know.

I can't tell why you're putting "taught" in quotes...? Your teacher was correct. Or you mean because it was outside their official subject matter?

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explai...

A good follow up by NASA https://www1.grc.nasa.gov/beginners-guide-to-aeronautics/ber...

"So both “Bernoulli” and “Newton” are correct. Integrating the effects of either the pressure or the velocity determines the aerodynamic force on an object."

I had that experience with the Robert Sapolsky lectures on Human Behavioral Biology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PLtdr2qSB8H...

My take away is that everyone is probably interested in everything, only we let the messenger kill the message. By let, we seem to have a messed up pathology where we think they are the same, so much so that it is a huge cognitive flaw, easily used for sabotage.

Ah, that explains why teachers dislike students who are disinterested. Its not merely a disregard for the subject at hand, it tells them they're not the great teacher they'd like to believe they are. The best teachers I had, also had great humor. Great humor helps a lot.

btw I think there is a browser extension that replaces default thumbnail with a random image from the video

I am hooked as well.

(But, please, stop with the YouTube Shorts, I'm just not that into you.)

I'd double my premium subscription fee to remove this feature from the Android app.

ReVanced has that capability.

Watch YouTube through Firefox on Android. You can install an effective adblocker too.

You can use ReVanced and choose every "patch". For example only remove shorts and keep ads etc. That way the creator still get your premium compensation

On the website I just click the X next to that section and it disappears for a month.

Yes it is then honored on the AppleTV app too.

Unfortunately they still clog up the Subscriptions feed.

Strange. On the website, they disappear from everywhere. Your subscriptions feed, suggestions, etc. You just don't see them at all.

Random tip, can take short id and put it into ?watch form to view/add to playlist

I would love an option in the settings to disable youtube shorts. I don't want them.

If you use uBlock Origin, you can hide any element on any site. If not you could also write an extension. I remember someone saying they wrote one and called it "Eat My Shorts" (lol). Perhaps you could search for that.

its easy if you use the right extension, i demonstrate it here https://www.mattpengelly.com/posts/taming-youtube-2023

There's an unofficial filter list for uBlock Origin to hide shorts videos/links

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

It works very nicely without adding additional browser plugins.

At least on the Desktop you can YT Shorts Block extension:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...

Not only on desktop. I was entirely addicted to shorts and hated that and my little monkey brain would at some point just click on them despite knowing it was entirely stupid. So I did not only block shorts on chrome but also on safari and safari iOS. You can do this by installing AdGuard and setting custom blocking filters so on the youtube website the shorts navigation button disappears and for subscriptions and suggestions I just set it up so it will show a black page. I couldn't get it stop playing audio but at least I am not seeing anything so I became unhooked. This only works in the browser of course so I uninstalled the YouTube app and I can only open YouTube in safari. I _really_ wish YouTube would just natively allow disabling shorts alltogether in their app and on their website.

I don't exactly know where this Shorts trend came from (I guess Tiktok?) but it really destroys the generation / has bad impact. My attention span is encouraged to shrink to only 15 seconds.

And "our" generation has already had its attention span reduced, not even on purpose but from e.g. having access to fast internet & multiple tabs. I can't read a book on programming back to back (I don't think I ever could btw), it's good enough for me to google it to find a solution for the one problem I'm trying to solve at this time.

But I do miss out on in-depth knowledge of a library or language that way. But there is no value in gaining said in-depth knowledge when the stack & libraries I work with changes every couple of months or years.

In the 8 bit days there were programming books meant to be read back to back. I loved them as a kid - though I'm not sure that I learned much from that exercse. Even K&R "the C programming language" (first edition, the second edition wasn't as readable from what I remember, though that might be just because it was too repetitive for someone who had read the first edition) could be read that way.

These days that isn't a good use of paper books. There is rarely any reason to start with any one construct, and if you are not a novice programmer you know there must be something that does what you need and don't want the book to assume you understand the syntax of the while loop when you look up the do-while loop.

It comes from YouTube wanting to compete with TikTok, yes. And it's become so ridiculously common on YouTube because the platform pushes the hell out of shorts compared to normal videos; as a creator, I can get 10/100/1000 times more views from a short than a normal video covering the same topic. So a lot of creators ended up jumping on the shorts train as a gold rush.

Of course, it's probably not great in the long term since shorts viewers and longform content viewers are not the same and your CTR can be destroyed thanks to shorts subs not watching your longer videos, but the easy views and subs are still enticing nonetheless.

hey ive got a short guide for removing shorts and other addictive stuff. Check it out https://www.mattpengelly.com/posts/taming-youtube-2023

Agreed, pretty annoying when I’m trying to upload a unlisted screen cast or something under one minute to send to a specific person, and then, when I send it to him, they don’t have the ability to seek or easily restart the video.

I know it’s possible to change the URL manually, but I’ve seen it not work, depending on the type of client that views the video - YouTube should allow the viewer to switch off shorts even for a specific video

> I know there's supposed to be a bunch of clickbait garbage on YouTube but I just wouldn't know, because I literally never see it.

Just sort by view count for any common english word and filter out the music videos.

Well, even including music videos there appear to be several dozen or hundred accounts dedicated to reposting the exact same Indian music videos, film trailers, clips, etc...

Not even small variations of the same content, the exact same video.

Some of the accounts look like plausible media distributors/producers in India but quite a large fraction seem to be bots or individuals spamming.

Why is anything with India content so... spammy? Endless cheap reposts with low res text and memes (or the India flag) pasted on top. Page after page of what I can only call video garbage. I have the feeling it is a cultural difference I am ignorant of.

Perhaps there is a way to game the youtube algorithm such that they still pay out on what seems like obvious spam.

But considering there are literally thousands of such videos with millions of views each, this could not possibly have escaped the attention of youtube engineers.

Though maybe there is a fix in the pipeline?

probably lower quality recording and playback devices on average, plus a big incentive to make money off the videos.

How are you coming across this content? I'm in India and when I see Indian content recommended it's generally one of: a. Movie clips and songs b. Religious stuff like prayer songs c. Local channels that mostly do comedy (kinda like CollegeHumor used to) d. Nerdy channels like solving math puzzles or doing Geoguessr

I can't really visualize what you're describing, though a sibling reply says there's "literally thousands of such videos with millions of views each" so there must be a lot of these out there. Do you get these recommended to you, or how are you searching them up?

I always laugh when I see a chess tournament recap video with the most clickbait title and thumbnail ever. Like, did they add explosions? And then it’s just a normal video, and very enjoyable. So, no harm, no foul.

Also a gothamchess viewer I see :) Levy's indeed always making a sport of it to have the most clickbaity titles and thumbnails, but the chess content is really really top notch. (especially for low ELO players like myself)

And of course he directly addressed it mere hours after my post. Haha

https://youtu.be/nTocrbqGCWs

I assume there has to be some degree of survivor bias here. You get good content, which is good, but there might be great content that is never shown. But I do agree that “the algorithm” often finds content that, at least, I’m interested in seeing which I would probably not have found otherwise.

Is this because we have a tech background and some understanding of how the algorithm works? I like to think I have curated my results to a degree by exercising this knowledge. ie: I noticed all of my news results were leaning starboard and things started to sound like an echo chamber. So I started seeking news content from the port side as well. Now I receive a mixture of both. I know my grandfather is not able to grasp this concept and I have seen his landing page.. I still have nightmares about what he is being fed in his echo chamber.

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