Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Algernon_ | Hacker News Reader

So at this point, to use YT you need:

- Ublock origin. - Sponsorblock. - DeArrow. - Youtube no translation

At what point do we collectively decide to no longer patch over enshittified bullshit?

I also use an extension to stop automatically playing a video when I open it and another to stop automatically opening the next recommended video when the current one ends.

Auto play should be configurable in the browser. In Firefox: Settings->Search "permissions". Autoplay is one of the options and can be controlled on a per-site basis (I have it disabled globally).

I have autoplay turned off in Safari, but the esteemed minds at YouTube have somehow found a way to circumvent that setting. Like the person you're replying to, I had to resort to an extension to get the site to stop auto playing videos.

It would be great if companies content creators ag least used PeerTube additionally.

we need a yt deshitter for (maybe one exists?): when mousing over the seek-bar, the time displayed goes from the time where im hovering over, to a huge-chunk of the bar displaying 'most replayed' in several areas (not just one, which "most" implies)

I pay for YouTube premium, and my experience is fairly smooth.

Is there a premium option to turn off the auto dubbing? It's incredibly jarring to hear a computer voice instead of a YouTubers

Also are you just skipping sponsor breaks manually? I use premium but it only covers adblocking really.

Sponsor breaks? Like creators having sponsored portions of videos? Yeah that is still there and obviously YT has no control over that.

Premium users still get auto dubs, still cannot completely disable auto play, still cannot completely hide Shorts.

It’s amazing how UX hostile companies can get when they don’t have real competition.

My YouTube does not auto-play, so not sure what you mean by that. Also the ability to "hide shorts" isn't a feature I'd expect from any other web platform out-of-the-box, so definitely didn't expect to get it with my Premium subscription.

Wrt auto-dubs, they can be turned off. To me this feels less deliberately hostile on YT's part and more tunnel vision where they assumed everyone would find this to be a helpful feature and didn't even think about adding a user-level preference to disable it.

But also I find user-level preferences kinda an anti-pattern anyway. Would be nice if you disable it for one video and it just remembers that preference for the next one (or vice versa).

By auto-play I mean in the feed, there’s an option to stop it from doing that, but after a while YouTube decides to turn it on again. It also has an option to hide Shorts, but same thing, they simply ignore it. About the dub thing, I get it could be tunnel vision coming from english-only speakers, it didn’t occurred to them that outside their circles is common for people to be bilingual or even multilingual, but that auto dub thing hasn’t been fixed for years there are tons of complains, the way I “fixed” it was setting my language to English, but from time to time I get my own language dubbed to English.

Auto play as in the video starts playing immediately when you load the page, not auto play as in automatically play the next video. Only the latter is configurable by the user. YT even circumvents the browser's own auto play configuration, as pointed out elsewhere in this thread.

Network effects are incredibly difficult to overcome. Bluesky is the only example that I can think of that came close in recent memory, but fell victim to an extreme userbase and now is experiencing degrowth. Similar things happened to all the (many) times someone tried to create reddit without the reddit.

I guess Kick is an example, but that's not exactly a model to follow unless you're also a questionably ethical casino with deep pockets who wants to be able to advertise to young men.

YouTube has to become truly awful for a new long-form video content platform to gain a lot of traction. Think of how long Windows has been enshittifying for and how slow the move from it has been.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com