Hacker News Reader

Comment by electriclove | Hacker News Reader

I can’t stand how they shove YouTube Shorts down our throats and don’t give us a way to disable that.

I am a huge fan of YouTube overall and have been happy to pay to have an ad-free experience

IMO what Instagram has done is worse. Reels every other post in the feed, reels in stories, reels specific tab.

On top of all that, yesterday I wanted to post a 5 second video post, just a regular video post, of my dog doing something, and no matter what I did it insisted on posting it as a reel, even though at one point I cancelled the new post, went back to the "new post" view, made sure "post" not "reel" was selected, and then it still made the video a reel.

Reels in the feed is what makes me hate modern IG. There’s already a Reels tab I never tap! I’m telling you something, please listen.

To post a video as a non-reel the standard workaround is also putting a picture in the same post. You’ll see some creators with an image that just says “anti-reels slide”.

It's very subjective, but Reels are actually the only way my close friends interact with Instagram now. As Facebook did, it's gone from a platform for sharing ourselves to a platform for sharing third-party 'content'[1]

[1] stolen pet tiktoks

this is what made me finally quit Instagram. I was only following friends and family. if it had been 3 friends posts for every 1 ad and zero other stuff pushed at me I'd have stayed but the signal to noise ratio got too high and I finally got fed up and deleted my account last month.

I often want to do the same to YouTube as it's recommendations are atrocious and it provides no good ways to turn off the noise. 4 easy things I'd like.

The obvious, let me disable shorts.

Next up, separate music from non-music. 30% to 50% of their recommendations are for music when I'm not looking for music. By separating them they can give me 100% music when I want music and 100% non-music when I don't.

Let me chosoe for it to never recommend videoes I've already watched. 5-10% of their recommendations are wasted on vidoes I've already seen. That should include videos I've manually marked as already watched

Don't recommend mixes. (maybe ok in music mode of they'd separate music from non-music)

If you go to the website, you can hide Shorts for 30 days. There is an X on the top right for the Shorts section.

I do that and don’t feel like it’s being forced into my face anymore.

> hide Shorts for 30 days

Is there a name for this fucked up dark pattern of giving users a "choice" only between accepting and accepting couple days or weeks later?

If I can only hide them and not remove them on a permanent basis, that is the very definition of being forced into my face.

"Oh wow, I can not eat the poop whilst I catch my breath. This will be an enjoyable break before I am forced to start eating the poop again"

I agree. But it’s better than nothing. I wish I could also just disable it everywhere.

Thanks for this tip. I want to be able to do this on the YouTube apps on my kids’ devices

Unfortunately it only removes the recommendation of shorts but not the short tab on the bottom.

Not from search results.

Shorts pollute everything because they’re so easy to make it’s basically spam.

There are extensions to hide the Shorts. I’ve been using one for a month now and it’s been great.

There's no way to disable them in their mobile apps unfortunately without jumping through a couple hoops with something like a PiHole or using an alternative app on Android.

The alternative apps are great though. No ads, no tracking, included sponsorblock etc. I use libretube. Grayjay is also nice but a bit too commercial for me.

I don't use YouTube very often as I don't like the video format but sometimes I can't avoid it. And this makes it a lot more palatable.

Don't use the mobile app. Use https://m.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions in a browser, with uBlock Origin installed.

If you are on android just use Newpipe.

There's even one featured on the chrome web store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/hide-youtube-shorts...

how much extra would you be willing to pay for a shorts-free experience? I'd probably be willing to throw them a dollar or two more for that.

You can get it for free by turning off your watch history.

I don't mind the short videos. What I do mind is that they co-opted the word "shorts" which means something else in the context of videos. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2024...

Perhaps not: I think your link is talking about "short movies" or "short films". YouTube's Shorts are "short videos". Movies (films) and videos are not the same thing: movies/films are a type of video, but there are many other types of video that are not movies, most notably TV shows, and also "music videos", but really anything that involves a moving picture. A "movie" (or to some, "film") these days is commonly meant to refer to a specific form of art, meaning a visualized stand-alone story that usually takes 1-4 hours to watch, and frequently gets played in a cinema.

Similarly, a "book" is a collection of bound paper pages, but a "novel" is a specific type of book that contains a story, and is usually a certain length (if it's too short, it's called a "short story").

So I think it's ok for YouTube to call their 60-second videos "shorts", as long as they don't call them "short films" or "short movies".

The term "shorts" is also part of that and is what YouTube was trying to co-opt. In the link you can clearly see the word "shorts" being used to refer to these. Here's one from 2010: https://thescorecardreview.com/tsr/review/film-reviews/2010/...

That's just context allowing for abbreviation. "Shorts" has always meant different things in different contexts.

The killer app for Shorts is the ability to view Tik Tok videos without having to directly engage with Tik Tok.

Just make a filter to remove the shorts insert.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com