Youtube seems to base my suggestions on shoots wall of videos with a shotgun style of recommendations.
I do everything in my power to stop Google from tracking me, but when I’m watching youtube videos on youtube, it should be able to gifure itself out.
And “don’t recommend this video to me, I don’t like it” does nothing. Just to see how long it will keep this up, I keep telling it I don’t want to see let’s play videos of star trek online. But it sure wants me to see them, dozens of them, daily, sometimes recommending the same video I already told it not to.
And its really been pushing me to watch right-wing conspiracy videos and flat earth videos after whatever I just purposefully clicked on, despite most of my content views being future Sci fi with either apocalyptic levels of devastation on galactic scales, or “post-scarcity utopia where energy is virtually limitless and energy/matter manipulation is easy peasy, usually liberally peppered with anti-capitalist and progressive themes”
And of course “female leads bad because feeeemale”.
Only engage with things you want to see more of. Downvoting and Not Interested are both forms of engagement.
Engagement metrics allow YouTube to show advertisers that you’re actually looking at the page and not just letting it run in the background
That is stupid. I wish it would just let me block channels for real in search. Also, I wonder how that works if you’re colorblind?
If I want something news related, that doesn’t mean I want to see Fox News or other random right wing nutjobs who scream into the camera about “wokeism” every day for 4 hours.
Things I wish YouTube would let me do:
- See dislikes
- Disable Shorts (uBlock lets me filter them out, at least)
- At the very least let me control the fucking volume on Shorts instead of muting/unmuting them only if you’re going to force them down my throat (seriously, it makes the entire video format unwatchable on Desktop because every fucking Short video is so god damned loud)
- Disable holding left-click to fast-forward a video (I do this thing where I’m about to pause a video and hold down the click until they’re done talking and this change is just so fucking stupid, I don’t understand who needs to hold down left click to fast-forward)
- Actually block channels I’m not interested in
- Block videos based on keywords
- Recommend videos based on the one I’m currently watching if my watch history is disabled
- Seriously, since disabling it YouTube does nothing but recommend “trending” crap that has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m watching
If they’d implement even half of that, my user experience would shoot up through the roof. But, you know, they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about user experience.
One thing that brought back the joy of earlier times youtube for me was
- Disable thumbnails (e.g. “Clickbait Remover for Youtube” on ff)
Holy crap, the amount of hate in here, and no actual description of what it does. It’s essentially your normal home feed, but only the videos with thumbnails of the selected color. It’s also way over at the right of the home feed filters, so it isn’t like it’s being shoved down your throats.
I like algorithms giving me suggestions in all sorts of ways, but not shady ones. None of the people around me seem to mind, but I worry about a company like Google strongly influencing what information we consume. Even if they didn’t use this influence, it’s dangerous to have them in the position where they could.
Color is so stupid. Who the fuck cares what color the video is. Couldve used this to actual good like pick three minor subjects from the video and ask me if im interested in more of those. That would be awesome. And I know they have that data.
Even easier, pick video lengths.
<1min, 1-10min, 10-30min, 30-60min, 60min+.
I’d use that all the time.
