Ha! So I am not alone. I thought it was just me as I have search history off and all privacy toggles switched to maximum off.
I was under impression that this was the reason all follow-ups/recommendations are just irrelevant rubbish.
But the sound of it, it is just a feature of modern YouTube.
Also side note: 3-4 years ago watching hardware reviews was fine on YT. Today it is a pulp of sponsored/biased reviews (disclosed or not). I give youtube 0 trust, on par with Amazon reviews.
Most of trusted creators already moved or double publish to Nebula.
From my experience, YouTube recommendations on Apple TV suck compared to the home feed you get when you open YT on iOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I opened YouTube on mobile after a long time, it actually felt like what YouTube used to be with a wide variety of new and interesting videos (plus added shorts and posts).
I think Google needs to look into optimizing it better for those of us who prefer watching YouTube on TV.
What’s funny and sad is that the evolution of YouTube toward a chum feed that pulls people toward rubbish may have broken some peoples addiction but overall it has probably increased it.
One of the things that flabbergasts me about YouTube and TikTok is the utter bilge that people will watch. TV had some of this: trash daytime TV, late night infomercials, soaps to some extent. But the stuff social media runs on today is a whole other level.
If you went back in time and told me that millions would spend endless hours watching other people play video games while monologuing about nothing and randomly doing the same juvenile reactions over and over, I would not have believed you. Same goes for obvious zero effort AI slop, machine voices reading Reddit posts to a slide show background, incoherent rambling, or for kids videos of people unboxing toys for eight hours… it’s just astounding.
There seem to be these “hooks” that if mastered can take the place of plot, aesthetics, information, and everything else, and mesmerize people.
Sometimes it seems like the banality and bizarre nonsensical nature of it is the hook, like people just want to stare at nothing.
A slightly different perspective for your consideration:
I watch videos of people playing through games and talking about or alongside it. There are two main reasons, both of which I (obviously) think are valid.
1. I enjoy gaming and use these videos as background noise when I’m doing things for work that don’t have a high cognitive load. If I’m going to have something on TV or streaming, I’d prefer it be associated with one of my interests.
2. For games with some sort of planning or problem solving element, I watch videos of people who are better at them than me so that I can learn different ways to do things. A classic example is Factorio, which has a thousand ways to organize a production line. It’s useful to see different people do this in different ways and optimize for different things, and yes - talk through it while they do. That translates into me being more informed and coming up with better ideas myself, which means more fun playing the game.
It’s very much fine for this to not be for everyone and all, but that doesn’t always make it trash/bilge.
What I can't understand are those videos of 20-something year old nobodies, who apparently got plastic surgery to look like waxy, sticky 40 year old ladies with huge lips, sitting in their car, talking about nothing. No matter what history and features I turn off, no matter how many times I click "No, I don't want this" they end up in my feed. These videos must make a fortune to these companies somehow.
What did it for me was disabling my history (a setting). Consequently your YT homepage is blank and it doesn’t suggest any shorts. You can maintain a kind of history by liking videos or just via the browser itself.
Their changes are so bad that someone made a browser extension to jump straight to your subscriptions so you never see the homepage (my watch history was off already and I didn't like the homepage telling me to turn it on).
The ridiculous amount of ads is what’s made me basically not use YouTube unless I really really need to.
On my computer I have an ad blocker which makes it more tolerable but then there’s the added friction of “ugh I have to go start the computer and sit down yadda yadda”.
I could pay for a mobile ad blocker so I could watch crap on my phone. But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life.
You seem to suggest that you have a device which does not allow you to watch YouTube videos on it without ads. Is that the case?
The uBlock Origin browser extension removes all YouTube ads. It works fine on Firefox, even on mobile. With Chrome, it is possible to use the "lite" version of this extension that seems to block at least the YouTube ads without issue.
On Android, there are several apps which can do it, for example NewPipe or Grayjay. At least NewPipe works fine on Android TVs as well. Also on Android TVs, it is possible to use Kodi with YouTube and InputStream Adaptive add-ons which can also be used to watch YouTube without ads.
I would avoid buying devices which claim to support YouTube but do not allow watching it without ads, for whatever reason.
I have the YouTube app on iOS. I never found a way to remove ads other than paying (lol). Then again - I didn’t look too hard as by then I’d already realized 99% of YouTube content is crap anyway. Sure I could install a combination of apps that would let me watch ad-free. But at this point I’m weaned off - better off without the damn thing.
For my Kodi box that is connected to a 24" monitor in my bedroom, the Youtube plugin used to work, but it got slower and slower. I've now created a PHP wrapper to yt-dlp, I load the webpage (hosted on my NAS) on my phone, paste the video URL, click download, and a while later the video is an MP4 video stored on my NAS, ready to view on Kodi.
Well, just pay for the subscription. It gives you youtube music as well, and you can share it with several other people. It just a few bucks a month, totally worth it.
I still watch a lot of youtube. I'm subscribed to lots of youtubers providing me with more interesting stuff than I can manage to watch. I'm not aware of a better platform for watching stuff like that.
The trick with youtube (if you are not paying, like me):
- Use Firefox and a decent ad blocker to skip the ads. I never see any. It think Google just gave up on doing anything about that and just focuses on making life miserable for Chrome users only. Whatever it is, if ads are the reason you are no longer watching Youtube, Firefox is the fix.
- Ignore recommendations and the glorified more of the same shit algorithm that produces them. It's just not very good. And you can't really potty train it to better. The controls are there but they don't do anything useful or productive. I just bookmarked the /subscriptions page and only bother with the front page if I'm really bored.
- Ignore shorts. They are easily recognized because they are portrait mode instead of landscape mode. So, just don't click them. I find them disappointing and bland. And stupid. I have no patience for that.
I can't use YouTube without a handful of extensions. I use waterfox.
Ublock origin.
Enhancer for Youtube.
Sponsorblock.
DeArrow.
Privacy Badger.
Enhancer does the heavy lifting while DeArrow unshittifies all the titles/thumbnails. Ublock gets most the ads. Privacy Badger increases load time significantly. Sponsorblock skips those sponsor ads.
I support creators directly through patron or merch. I don't wanna see their ads and there isn't really a way to avoid them in most cases.
Every once in a while I click on one because it's not just a small tidbit from a longer video, and every time I get annoyed the feature exists and don't want to see another one for a long time.
I don't understand Shorts. My primary use case for YouTube is putting some 20-30 min video on the TV while I eat. I barely watch YouTube in any other context.
I may be unusual but there's an entire subreddit for "mealtime videos" so this use case must be common.
Interesting. I've found YouTube to be so good at recommendations that I've kinda forgotten to subscribe to some channels I watch often, YT is good about promoting them when they release new videos. This applies to a few small channels as well, I don't think they're "partnered" in any way but they do have good engagement/long form content.
But reading through replies here, it looks like people are disabling features like history. Not sure why one would do that, I want to be able to quickly find something I passed by 3 months ago but can't remember the name of.
If I had to go through my browser history to dig up a YT video I'd probably be at a loss, there aren't thumbnails there.
Readit News
I was under impression that this was the reason all follow-ups/recommendations are just irrelevant rubbish.
But the sound of it, it is just a feature of modern YouTube.
Also side note: 3-4 years ago watching hardware reviews was fine on YT. Today it is a pulp of sponsored/biased reviews (disclosed or not). I give youtube 0 trust, on par with Amazon reviews.
Most of trusted creators already moved or double publish to Nebula.
I think Google needs to look into optimizing it better for those of us who prefer watching YouTube on TV.
https://www.thewrap.com/youtube-more-people-watch-tv-vs-mobi...
One of the things that flabbergasts me about YouTube and TikTok is the utter bilge that people will watch. TV had some of this: trash daytime TV, late night infomercials, soaps to some extent. But the stuff social media runs on today is a whole other level.
If you went back in time and told me that millions would spend endless hours watching other people play video games while monologuing about nothing and randomly doing the same juvenile reactions over and over, I would not have believed you. Same goes for obvious zero effort AI slop, machine voices reading Reddit posts to a slide show background, incoherent rambling, or for kids videos of people unboxing toys for eight hours… it’s just astounding.
There seem to be these “hooks” that if mastered can take the place of plot, aesthetics, information, and everything else, and mesmerize people.
Sometimes it seems like the banality and bizarre nonsensical nature of it is the hook, like people just want to stare at nothing.
I watch videos of people playing through games and talking about or alongside it. There are two main reasons, both of which I (obviously) think are valid.
1. I enjoy gaming and use these videos as background noise when I’m doing things for work that don’t have a high cognitive load. If I’m going to have something on TV or streaming, I’d prefer it be associated with one of my interests.
2. For games with some sort of planning or problem solving element, I watch videos of people who are better at them than me so that I can learn different ways to do things. A classic example is Factorio, which has a thousand ways to organize a production line. It’s useful to see different people do this in different ways and optimize for different things, and yes - talk through it while they do. That translates into me being more informed and coming up with better ideas myself, which means more fun playing the game.
It’s very much fine for this to not be for everyone and all, but that doesn’t always make it trash/bilge.
Dead Comment
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ytmysubs/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lfoephndcoilebphhdb...
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/unhook-remove-youtu...
Dead Comment
Deleted Comment
On my computer I have an ad blocker which makes it more tolerable but then there’s the added friction of “ugh I have to go start the computer and sit down yadda yadda”.
I could pay for a mobile ad blocker so I could watch crap on my phone. But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life.
The uBlock Origin browser extension removes all YouTube ads. It works fine on Firefox, even on mobile. With Chrome, it is possible to use the "lite" version of this extension that seems to block at least the YouTube ads without issue.
On Android, there are several apps which can do it, for example NewPipe or Grayjay. At least NewPipe works fine on Android TVs as well. Also on Android TVs, it is possible to use Kodi with YouTube and InputStream Adaptive add-ons which can also be used to watch YouTube without ads.
I would avoid buying devices which claim to support YouTube but do not allow watching it without ads, for whatever reason.
For my Kodi box that is connected to a 24" monitor in my bedroom, the Youtube plugin used to work, but it got slower and slower. I've now created a PHP wrapper to yt-dlp, I load the webpage (hosted on my NAS) on my phone, paste the video URL, click download, and a while later the video is an MP4 video stored on my NAS, ready to view on Kodi.
EDIT: also skips sponsor segments.
There are few great creators without them, but these ranks are shrinking fast.
Youtube Music (Premium too) -> RiMusic
13.99 -> free
OP addressed this already: "But then again - it is mostly crap so why bother. Perfectly fine with less YouTube in my life."
Watch too much Daily Wire? Good luck with your Google interview.
Want to enter the US on a visa? Perhaps they'll demand your YouTube history next.
Every video is just this now:
Or you could just do the healthy thing and walk away from YouTube. Plenty of better things to do with one’s time!
The trick with youtube (if you are not paying, like me):
- Use Firefox and a decent ad blocker to skip the ads. I never see any. It think Google just gave up on doing anything about that and just focuses on making life miserable for Chrome users only. Whatever it is, if ads are the reason you are no longer watching Youtube, Firefox is the fix.
- Ignore recommendations and the glorified more of the same shit algorithm that produces them. It's just not very good. And you can't really potty train it to better. The controls are there but they don't do anything useful or productive. I just bookmarked the /subscriptions page and only bother with the front page if I'm really bored.
- Ignore shorts. They are easily recognized because they are portrait mode instead of landscape mode. So, just don't click them. I find them disappointing and bland. And stupid. I have no patience for that.
I can't use YouTube without a handful of extensions. I use waterfox.
Ublock origin. Enhancer for Youtube. Sponsorblock. DeArrow. Privacy Badger.
Enhancer does the heavy lifting while DeArrow unshittifies all the titles/thumbnails. Ublock gets most the ads. Privacy Badger increases load time significantly. Sponsorblock skips those sponsor ads.
I support creators directly through patron or merch. I don't wanna see their ads and there isn't really a way to avoid them in most cases.
Something like this? https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
Fun fact: disabling watch history also disables Shorts.
Every once in a while I click on one because it's not just a small tidbit from a longer video, and every time I get annoyed the feature exists and don't want to see another one for a long time.
I may be unusual but there's an entire subreddit for "mealtime videos" so this use case must be common.
I have YouTube watch history disabled and when I search for something I usually get a few "lines" of search results filled with "Shorts".
But reading through replies here, it looks like people are disabling features like history. Not sure why one would do that, I want to be able to quickly find something I passed by 3 months ago but can't remember the name of.
If I had to go through my browser history to dig up a YT video I'd probably be at a loss, there aren't thumbnails there.