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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

I would happily pay for youtube premium if:

- They removed the useless "shorts"

- They removed the "mix" things that keep coming back like a bad smell

- They let me remove youtube music

- Their suggestions were less terrible. Like seriously they run the biggest data centers in the world, have some of the best ML researchers and know what I actually watch. How do they manage to be so consistently bad at this?

- Their search was less terrible. They figured out search of the whole internet 20 years ago, how is search in YT worse than searching YT from duckduckgo?

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I don’t understand. You would pay for YouTube premium if youtube had less features?

I don’t use shorts and for a long time I didn’t use YouTube music either (despite paying for premium). I now use it because it’s rather good.

And YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is crazy good, but you have to tune it. It’s a tool. You tune it by not watching shitty videos you don’t like; if you do, remove them from your history afterwards and hit thumbs down on them. Subscribe to channels you like and thumbs up videos you really like. All these things are strong signals and the recommendation algorithm will vastly improve if you do this.

I mean it when I say it’s the absolute most useful tool there is in terms of discovery on the web.

But yes their search sucks more ass than a donkey vacuum.

Yes it would be better if it didn't have those features in the same way that I would pay more for a Burrito if someone had not taken a shit in it.

I might be a weird edge case. I do all the things you say but the recommendations totally suck for me. I only watch videos I like. I watch a lot of videos. If I ever watch something I didn't like I remove it and thumbs down and yet all the recommendations are total garbage.

Edit to add: i get that shorts, mix and music are things some people like. I really don’t and I hate that mix I can’t remove at all and shorts I can remove for 30 days and then it comes back. It feels like google is doing this sort of dark pattern bs more and more.

That said: I have been convinced by people pointing out how much more valuable premium views are to people who make the stuff I watch so have subscribed. Makes me puke just a little bit to say that.

> that I would pay more for a Burrito if someone had not taken a shit in it.

It sounds more like you’re unhappy to be getting 2 burritos and you’d rather get only 1 for the exact same price.

Just don’t watch the shorts. All they are is a line on the homepage. I ignore it.

They take up real estate that I need for more suggestions because only about 1 in 50 suggestion is good.

No, it sounds more like you are being served your burrito with a cocktail, even though you are trying to quit cold turkey.

On another note, I find it highly offending that somebody tries to shove something down my throat, even though I explicitly refused it. No, I do not want shorts on the home screen, or anywhere else. Let me own my screen real estate, after all, this is supposed to be a premium service?

What is up with the entitlement?

I mean I don’t like shorts either and I don’t like how YouTube is “shoving” them as you say, but how are you under the impression that just because you pay fifteen bucks a month you get full control over how the homepage looks? Your logic applies to every single pixel on their website.

Shorts are a feature of YouTube. You don’t have to use it or look at it, and it only shows up on the homepage or when you’re looking at other shorts. It’s really not unreasonable.

If you want to pay and not get shorts but still get good content just subscribe to nebula, it’s also fantastic value, just as YouTube is.

I'd personally pay for a lot of services if they allow you to toggle certain features off.

uBlock's great but it doesn't work in Safari.

- if they weren't a platform

- if they weren't owned by Google

I have been burned, yet again, by YouTube just deciding that my comments were spam and removing at least the last half dozen of them. At least they haven't shadowbanned them this time.

And of course I got no warnings whatsoever about this, and trying to contact Google about this issue is likely to be a waste of time.

This is an enormous abuse of moderation (and a violation of netiquette) that I have only ever seen on platforms.

You can hide all shorts with uBlock Origin

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