Hacker News Reader

Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

And youtube. YT shorts is essentially turning into TikTok.

Short of whitelisting and pre-approving content I don't see how we can allow this to go on. This is quite frankly destroying peoples brains.

View on HN

I was telling my SO today that I think social media should be regulated like cigarettes and booze.

None of those things should be regulated by the government. Families/communities should be capable of that.

Any ideas how I can turn off this cancer yt shorts? I'm not using it and yt keeps shoving it up my ass in every update..

If you change /shorts/ in the URL to /watch/, it'll load the same video in the normal YouTube UI. I like that better because it allows for such advanced features as... changing the fucking volume.

(Shorts will keep the volume set as whatever you last changed it to in the normal UI, with no way to change it without going to a different ("normal") video.)

I used a Firefox add-on called "Stylus" and wrote a custom css rule to hide the relevant divs/elements. It's not perfect, but it's okay. https://github.com/openstyles/stylus

However, after the recent ad-blocker targeting by Youtube I pretty much just stopped watching Youtube entirely. I added my regular subscriptions to the NewPipe app on my phone and just watch what they put out.

The add-on I mentioned above is super useful to personalize my experience with other websites. Particularly online-shopping and other marketplaces that have huge amounts of whitespace for no reason. You'd be surprised how much nicer the web experience is after you add a few "margin: 0px;" css styles to strategic areas.

On Android you could patch using Revanced, there's a checkbox for shorts in the feed.

https://github.com/ReVanced/revanced-manager

Use alternative YT front-end like Piped, Newpipe etc.

I could be wrong, but i thought i saw shorts on newpipe the other day.

I guess you are talking about mobile. There a several ytshorts blocker extensions for desktop browsers.

Do not use their app, then set ad block rules to block whatever you want.

I was wondering the other day what the alternative world would be like where every publicly posted video had to be reviewed by the BBFC censor board and assigned a rating. Like if you want to post your kid's first steps on Facebook, that would be a U rating, while car park fights would be R15.

(and of course how unworkable it would be to have the censor board be several percent of the population so they could keep up with the posting rate)

Maybe that's a good thing, and would cause the balance / dynamic to be different and thus requiring a rework in some form

Perhaps it costs real money to submit each video to these platforms as a means to offset the moderation and rating efforts. Similar to what others have suggested to reduce spam emails.

Off the top of my head, requiring money to post videos to these platforms would immediately reduce the sheer huge volume of spam and automated/auto-generated videos. It would also reduce spam from LCOL regions that weaponize their low-value of time in order to game the system.

Not only that, but it would solve identity and age verification (as it'd require a credit card).

>have the censor board be several percent of the population

Easy to scale up nannying to infinite proportions with AGI. (We don't have that yet, but it may arrive very soon. Well, we have a shitty approximation right now, but AI != AGI.)

On the other hand, that (coupled with the NSA thing) also makes the "my FBI agent" meme come true. One Federal Agent Per Child.

I'm pretty libertarian, but I agree something needs to change. I don't know what sane regulation would look like, but I suspect the politician's answer would be regulatory capture of some kind. I personally don't want some kind of government censor managing my internet connection, but at the same time I think this shit is detrimental to society. I think it's a conversation we should be having.

Maybe some way of making addiction-inducing products less profitable instead of censorship? Or going further, lessening the role of profit in how society is organized?

I'm also heavily leaning towards Libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist. My thought on the matter is that whatever solution we come up with to resolve this particular issue is the same one we need to do to resolve the greater societal issues we are seeing, because I think the root cause is the same.

Beyond that, part of the Libertarian line of thought is that we have to "let go" and let things fall where they may because we have no moral claim over it. The area of effect we have as individuals is quite small so it makes sense to focus in that direction rather. So that would mean things like family, neighborhood, community, shared culture/religion, and the institutions that build on those.

I myself try to be involved with and sit on the boards of HoAs, to add some sanity and fairness to it. I've also been helping pay for close family friends to go through college. I'm also planning on doing charity work for the groups I feel closest to in my local context (South Africa).

The root cause is a desire for unconsciousness. The solution is a higher level of consciousness. Take a small dose of LSD (not endorsing this, just making a point) and the entire modern internet becomes unbearable. It becomes physically painful to procrastinate because you are just painfully aware that you are trying to distract yourself, defeating the purpose.

It's like when you reset your tastebuds and the level of sugar and salt in everything becomes physically revolting.

I don't expect a mass enlightenment any time soon though (regardless of legalization/normalization of psychedelics), so we'll need one or two (or three...) "stopgap" solutions before that point. (Just for the next thousand years or so ;)

A somewhat related phenomenon is the desire for someone else to take care of everything. It simplifies the infinite chaos and complexity of life. To some degree this is necessary to maintain sanity, but if this is the "default" approach, except for a small percentage of people who seek power due to genetic hardwiring... well then you end up with what we have now. In this case, the solution is also maturation (though in this case, emotional rather than... whatever you want to call consciousness being aware of itself), and also not expected to "arrive" within the next few centuries.

I wish I had some more practical suggestions, but I at least hope that pointing out the root causes (as I see them) may lead someone else to helpful ideas.

Interesting to watch people confront themselves like this. Everyone's libertarian until they see a real harm that actually upsets them and they can't victim-blame.

Nah man there are a lot of harms that upset me where I still think regulation would cause more harm. Anything related to the latest craze over CSAM and encryption is a good example.

On the other hand, if anyone wants to try making advertisement contracts unenforceable (illegal, essentially), I'll be the first in line.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com