YouTube Is Killing Stories
theverge.com
theverge.com
If a creator wants to make a short video, they can just make a short video. If the audience wants short videos, they'll preferentially watch them. That will show up in the creator analytics, and then they'll make shorter videos.
Instead this artificial construct some product manager at YouTube came up with is showing up all over the place where it isn't wanted. It takes up valuable real estate and infests search results.
What I would prefer seeing YouTube do is improve their search. You may get 15-20 relevant search results before they start mixing in shorts, other videos I've already seen, "suggested videos", etc.
They also recently removed the ability to order a channel's videos from oldest to newest. Now there's just "popular".
Give us back the dislike counts.
At least on mobile web, say you scroll down a bit and go to a video. Most of the time when you go back the entire page reloads and you get an entirely new set of videos. This is incredibly frustrating in that you both lose your scroll position but also any other videos you might want to see that may never be surfaced to you again.
And please oh please stop recommending videos I've already watched. That's what watch history is for.
I'm sure some PM made that so that they can increase "next view" viewership, but all it does is insult me.
Yes, I know Shorts can be viewed with the regular video viewer by changing the URL, but that's a pain to do that on every video. Just give me my regular UI controls back and stop enforcing this silly vertical video format on a desktop.
Again, I understand why vertical videos are being promoted; mobile is indeed king, content is now made for mobile. Fine. But desktop is not mobile so give me my standard 16:9 controls back.
It actively is messing up video content.
There is a Chrome extension to do that automatically [1]. Here’s one for Firefox [2].
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-short...
1. Subscriptions are essentially useless. The UI focuses entirely on recommendations and doesn't show me videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I actually dig into the `library/subscriptions` UI.
2. Shorts. Shorts are everywhere and I don't want to see them, ever.
In summary, the platform is turning into a way to force-feed me content that I am not interested in. If I wanted that, I'd sign up for tiktok.
(EDIT: Fixed formatting)
I don't think Subscriptions are useless, the Subscription feed only show the published videos from your subscriptions, and in reverse chronological order, with no algorithmic shenanigans.
> Shorts. Shorts are everywhere and I don't want to see them, ever.
Me too, you can remove Shorts (on a browser) using this uBlock Origin filter https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
Worse yet, the other content mixed into search results isn't even visually distinct from the rest! If you overlook the header, there's no way to tell why it isn't showing you what you searched for.
Happily, it's possible to fix this with a CSS rule:
.ytd-search ytd-shelf-renderer {
background: lightgrey !important;
padding-left: 20px;
}
I imagine they just shipped it and if someone raised the Chromecast issue they said "fuck it". How hard can it be to just send the URL to the Chromecast if you don't want to work on this stupid Shorts UX for Chromecast?
It tries to routinely recommend low quality, low effort, small YouTube channels. I routinely get YouTube channels that have 5-10 subscribers, bot comments, and uploaded videos of uninteresting gameplay clip, and a mic with audio clipping. The more I watch, the more these low effort channels are recommended to me because I've already "watched" so many of them, even if it was only for 1 or 2 seconds.
I make a point of hitting "Do not recommend channel" and not interacting with the channel, because I don't want that to count as a metric of "interaction", but the view itself seems to increase the problem. There are way too many low effort, terrible content channels out there for me to block them all.
So, the more I use Shorts, the worse the quality becomes.
One might think, "Okay, so remove it from your view history." Not a bad idea! But the problem is that these are shorts. Videos have to be under 60 seconds. Most are around 15-30 seconds. In 10 minutes I could probably watch 20 videos, give or take. This means, unless I break out of the loop of watching shorts - remove myself from the interface they want me to be using - I cannot keep any sort of handle over these low effort channels clogging up my viewing habits.
It's incredibly bad and I really despise it.
Most of the channels I actually subscribe to or care about will apologize for having to include a link for a "real" video because of the stupid 60 second limit. Some of them might be able to get by with 90 to 120 seconds, but 60 seconds is just such a tiny amount of time. It actively discourages any sort of meaningful content. It's just quips, nonsense, and poorly cut video clips. It's just bad.
YouTube is so bloated and Vanced made it tolerable, so of course they killed it.
Why???
Even if it was a good product I refuse to use it because of how hard they were pushing it.
P.S. if you use Signal, you can turn of Stories from the settings
I'm pretty confident it will.
What I'm going to say is purely from the user experience perspective and will - for the moment - completely ignore that YT Shorts, as well as TikTok, are basically drugs and should be treated like that. Also, I have no inside knowledge of any of the products working and algorithms, it is just my personal experience as a user trying out both products in parallel.
With that out of the way: YT shorts is terrible compared to TikTok for the following reasons:
1. In my experience the TikTok algorithm adapts very fast.
I usually watch tech but occasionally dabble into music. When I watch piano videos for like 20 minutes TikTok treats me like I was a musician. Back to tech, also very quick. YT seems to adapt much slower.
2. The TikTok algorithm doesn't mess around.
My daughter likes to watch dance videos. As she has no TikTok herself we watch together on my account. Again TikTok adapts to that very fast and treats us like a teenager. But even before the algo is tuned in it never showed me anything inappropriate.
My armchair suspicion is that while TikTok finds a local maximum of what I want and reliably sits there until I nudge it out, YT has the idea to probe me from time to time if another local maximum might be better. This might be good in theory but when it tries to figure out if a latest dance craze video watcher would also like to see some naked raunchy twerking ladies it has failed miserably.
3. The TikTok algo is fine-grained.
Apart from tech and music I watch the occasional extreme sports video and I have my own taste there. I like physical skill but not so much strength. I like bicycle tricks but no motocross. Cars are generally not my thing except for Gymkhana. This is no problem for TikTok. It is like the sports I don't like would not exist. YT on the other is all over the place with its suggested videos.
The worst thing on YT is that it occasionally shows me videos where people got hurt badly. One of these videos is enough to kill all the fun for me because I can never be sure not to see gore the next time. TikTok never let me down there.
4. YT moderation is terrible, TikTok's decent
My general impression is that TikTok's limits are wider but fairly well-defined harsh lines. YT 's limits are narrow, fuzzy and inconsequential.
5. YT is basically a TikTok rip-off when it comes to content.
Many of the videos on YT shorts are either copies or recreations from TikTok. I believe for videos that use content from the TikTok library it is infringement, but YT seems to look the other way.
Finally, if all of this sounds like TikTok advertising: It's not. I think both TikTok and YT Shorts are harmful products. The later is just lame too.
There's a difference between YouTube Stories and YouTube Shorts!? What's the difference? I legit thought they're the same thing.
I exclusively use YT on a desktop computer so it's really annoying watching vertical video, not to mention the constant attempts to get me to start doomscrolling random content
i've upvoted this article and encourage it
2) Viewers understand that the video is only temporarily available, without your having to tell them.
I remember few years back when it was genuinely cool to make fun of and take moral high ground over people taking vertical videos. How times have changed indeed! Even back then I felt vertical videos were the future (on a mobile device it was the natural filming pose, and the videos looked more immersive and personal). The UI just had to catch up (and we have to credit tik tik for discovering that).
If I want to take a picture of my desk I need to shoot in landscape. If I really want to do it in portrait I'm gonna have to either use a fish-eye lens to warp the shot, or take several steps back, leaving a bunch of useless space on the top/bottom.
It's not just a concern of device form factor.
I think the issue is just in capturing the content. There's more useful things in the real world you can capture with a wide view than a vertical one.
(Hopefully, Shorts will go next)
YouTube seems really dedicated to Community Posts and pushing creators to use them, except that they don't seem to plan on ever making them viewable in the iPad app where a huge portion of the audience is. Virtually every other feature, including Stories, was added on iPad at about the same time as iPhone, except Community Posts are years behind. Weird.
This joke only makes sense if you understand UK-type English.
Edit: But the post is about Stories, huh... A thing I hardly remember it existed. So much for a first comment.
An app is past its peak once a stories feature has been added. After that point, it has become overly bloated and will shift towards no longer be worth using.
Over time, I have watched stories be added to multiple apps that make no sense such as Uber Eats. Whenever an app has added a stories feature unnecessarily, I have uninstalled the app because it has lost focus and no longer delivers a quality experience for me. I wonder if this means that YouTube will now increase in quality. We shall have to wait and see!
YouTube and YouTube shorts should be two separate apps/sites sevibg two distinct types of content not one where shorts in crammed into a format it isn't suited for.
Original link: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/217640760
> YouTube is getting rid of Stories, a feature for temporary posts, beginning in June. Users won’t be able to post Stories starting June 26th, and existing posts will expire after seven days.