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Anyone else frustrated by cross contamination from Youtube, Youtube Music and Youtube shorts? (self.technology)

submitted 1 year ago by greenskye to c/technology

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

These are all products that I legitimately like and want to engage with, but linking them all to a single account and more importantly a shared recommendation engine feels very flawed.

My music playlists from Youtube Music keep showing up on my Youtube homepage. Likewise, engaging with Youtube Shorts (especially subscribing) also subscribes to their youtube channel. I don't know about anyone else, but what I find interesting in a 30 second video is not what I find interesting in a 10-30 minute video.

I feel like Google would be better served separating these recommendation engines. Even looking at this from a monetization lens, it feels inefficient. How do you guys feel? If you have any hacks or recommendations I'd love to hear them. I'm personally ready to create a TikTok account just to avoid contaminating my youtube feed.

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[–] crowsby@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.

This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.

[–] zurohki@lemmy.fmhy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I've had to add something like #infinite_scroll_content > div:nth-of-type(1):others() for a few sites in uBlock Origin because every site wants you to just scroll the site forever now and attaches a bunch of other random articles to the bottom of any page you open.

I also block a lot of sidebars, sticky title bars that follow you as you scroll, widgets prompting me to chat with a salesweasel and so, so many cookie notice bars because sites still think they're a get out of jail free card by EU law.

I've actually got quite a few Youtube lines in my filters file, because it's my computer and it still does what I want despite the best efforts of big tech companies:

www.youtube.com##.yt-formatted-string.style-scope.yt-simple-endpoint:has-text(YouTube Music):nth-ancestor(13)
www.youtube.com###video-title-link:has-text(Mix – ):nth-ancestor(7)
www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)

[–] ASCIIansi@infosec.pub 5 points 1 year ago

I also block a lot of sidebars, sticky title bars that follow you as you scroll, widgets prompting me to chat with a salesweasel and so, so many cookie notice bars because sites still think they’re a get out of jail free card by EU law.

Never occurred to me that that was an option. I'll need to look up how to do that. Although I imagine it makes your footprint more noticeable.

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[–] tyo_ukko@sopuli.xyz 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Sorry I can't really contribute to your question, but would anyway like to take the opportunity to air my grievances: I hate Youtube shorts and TikToks with fierce passion. The format of short videos makes sense and is a good idea to some extent, but who the hell decided we're not allowed to rewind our videos anymore? I want to hunt down that person, go to their house at night and tell them that they are not very good at their job so loud that their whole family can hear it.

[–] saigot@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tiktoks are mostly rewindable. The creator can set a setting I think to disable that, but I've only ever seen that on dumb thirst traps, on shorter videos you have to pause before the scrubber appears, which isn't a great ui choice imo but it's not a deal breaker.

I don't use shorts but I just tried out like 5 and they all had scrubbers?

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[–] Silviecat44@vlemmy.net 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can rewind shorts

[–] tyo_ukko@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

How? I just see a progress bar that cannot be interacted with.

Edit: did a google search and found this https://7labs.io/tips-tricks/fast-forward-youtube-shorts.html - now that's a shit design if I've ever seen one.

[–] azureeight 12 points 1 year ago

Youtube shorts being visually hard to tell the difference but being in my sub lists AND breaking the queuing is obnoxious. I have been cutting myself off from google products as much as I can, they are just so shitty now.

[–] sajran@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago

I hate shorts and I hate seeing them in my subscription feed.

[–] Matt@lemmy.one 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's one of the most significant reasons I stopped using YouTube Music.

[–] Spooser@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I switched from Spotify to YouTube Music because I was under the impression I could use YouTube Music to play any song that is currently on YouTube. Apparently, that's not how it works and it was actually much harder to find not only music I had on Spotify, but there are many songs from YouTube that you couldn't even get on YouTube music, making it a shittier version of listening to songs from YouTube. The service is pretty pathetic.

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[–] brie 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think I used to use a brand account just to separate my music subscriptions and regular subscriptions. I'm not sure if it affected suggestions though.

[–] hare_ware@pawb.social 4 points 1 year ago

It does affect suggestions, as far as I can tell.

[–] lukini 3 points 1 year ago

This is exactly how I've done it. My original youtube account from before google accounts existed will stay my youtube account. My personal account is only used for music. I do share a favorite music playlist between to two though so it's super easy to add music I like on the youtube account that will then show up in my youtube music app.

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[–] hybridhavoc 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I never engage with YouTube Shorts, so I'm mostly just skipping right past those. While I tried out YouTube Music after Google Play Music got shut down, I ultimately did not enjoy it as a service and started using Pandora instead. With that said, I still occasionally see recommendations of playlists on YouTube due to my YouTube Music data. It's marginally annoying.

All of this to say, it would probably bother me more if they were all services that I interacted with on a regular basis.

[–] greenskye 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I originally had a Google Play Music subscription. This came with free youtube premium when that launched. My wife gets an incredible amount of value out of youtube premium as she almost exclusively watches youtube content (Game Grumps, Good Mythical Morning, etc). Youtube premium is equivalent to a netflix subscription in our household. Given that I could not drop Premium at this point, it just makes sense to stick with Youtube music vs Spotify or something. I personally don't mind Youtube music, it works well enough for my casual music listening needs. I just hate the cross contamination of it.

[–] Granixo@feddit.cl 2 points 1 year ago

A wife that watches Game Grumps!?

Phew, i need one of those. :D

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[–] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Personally I like the YT/YTMusic cross. I listen to the same music in the car or at work that I do at home in YT fairly often. I just hate shorts and wish they'd get the fuck off my homepage. That "hide for 30 days" button is so aggravating.

[–] zurohki@lemmy.fmhy.ml 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

uBlock Origin doesn't have a 30 day limit:

www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)

[–] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haha I did that a while back but the premise of it still annoys me.

[–] zurohki@lemmy.fmhy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

The feeling of "You've clearly indicated you don't want this, but this is how long we're willing to wait before we try to force it on you again" of the 30 days is annoying, yes.

[–] ASCIIansi@infosec.pub 2 points 1 year ago

I'd love to see that option in the lbry client.

[–] Metacortechs@lemmy.stellarvortex.com 2 points 1 year ago

undefined> www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)

I love you, thank you for this! I've been bitching about it every 30 days when they come back but ultimately lose the momentum as soon as I hide them, thinking I'll do it tomorrow. But, hey there's a squrrel outside!

What was I saying?

[–] Pixelologist 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There are browser extensions that hide shorts for you. I haven't seen one in a long time.

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[–] saigot@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I really really liked Google play music. When they killed it I tried YouTube music, liked a few artists, then went to my normal YouTube subscriptions saw it was flooded by dumps from those artists and unsubbed and never looked back.

Spotify isn't nearly as good as gpm but ytm is a non starter for me for exactly this reason.

YouTube doesn't care though, they very much want everyone to stop using subscriptions it seems.

[–] AndrewMettier@mastodon.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@saigot @greenskye oh man I used to use Google Play Music ALL the time back when I was a kid. That was my go to and back when I used to use Android my way of pirating and getting free music is that I would download/screen record all of the music videos from YouTube and convert them to mp3 files and they would show up. Those were the days. Nothing else is as good or convenient, also google play musics song recognition was better than Shazam. I miss it :(

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[–] x2XS2L0U@feddit.de 7 points 1 year ago

I don't have a google account. You can find the RSS feed of channels you like in their accounts sites source code and just use a feedreader (I can recommend feedbro) to follow them. Also: Use sponsorblock in addition to your normal adblocker. Shorts I skip, music I listen to from other sources.

The enshittyfication is getting strong over at yt

[–] Snapz 7 points 1 year ago

Glad you called it out. Hate this forced crossed contamination.

I make it a point to not engage with any of the shorts content - especially since they deliberately made it difficult to add to watch later list. My time is held hostage in that moment and FUCK if that isn't a great way to get me to not engage with that bullshit, even if I was interested in the content.

[–] plantstho 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I can't stand Shorts. I don't even mind the aspect ratio so much, but the lack of a scrubber or even time information is a dealbreaker for me. I wrote an adblock rule to remove them from the website UI, but it is a bit of a bummer how much content is only in Shorts.

Edit: And the looping!!! Ugh

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[–] Osayidan@social.vmdk.ca 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don't do much except reading on mobile so can't comment from that perspective. On desktop youtube shorts is just toxic. I keep clicking the X to get rid of them but that only works for 30 days. I often just close my browser tab now if I scroll and see a row of shorts.

I want nothing to do with shorts. If a video isn't long just have it play in the regular video player. There's also no valid reason to encourage people to shoot vertical video, it hurts my brain. The absolute worst though is there being no volume control. Love having my ear drums wrecked if a short opens up.

[–] greenskye 5 points 1 year ago

I really don't know why they even have it on the desktop website. When did these places decide that they have to have their content on every platform they support? Is Amazon going to bring ebooks to my roku next? It's just dumb. The content has a place for those interested, but it's not on a desktop or TV.

[–] Dusty@l.dustybeer.com 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I personally despise yotuube shorts. I use rules in my ublock origin to block them so I don't see them on my youtube page.

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[–] trekz 5 points 1 year ago

Sorry. You lost me at "YouTube Music" 😄

[–] altz3r0 5 points 1 year ago

I cannot imagine what goes on in the product department of Youtube. "So we got this mammoth video library that is barely profitable, if at all, we don't know, we have too much money to count. Lets enshitify it!"

[–] nii236@lemmy.jtmn.dev 4 points 1 year ago

I hate how I can’t skip and fast forward shorts!

[–] Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 year ago

I miss Google Play Music, it was way better in terms of recommending music and plus you could buy albums to gain access to them if they, for example, had rights issues in terms of streaming.

There's literally artist who I used to listen to just fine on Play Music that I now can't listen to their albums anymore because they're still not on YouTube Music.

And Play Music's algorithm for continuous play was way better than YouTube Music.

For a quick example of albums that are broke on YouTube music, Breakfast in America by Supertramp. On YouTube Music the album is missing 3 songs, I have to go to someone's playlist they put together to listen to the album in full. On Play Music I could just buy the album to fix that problem but now I can't.

And yeah the cross contamination of content on the 3 platforms is also annoying.

The shorts thing is because many YouTubers only have 1 channel that they upload a mixture of content to their channel, so shorts and full length videos get mixed in when you sub. Which makes sense.

[–] lemillionsocks 4 points 1 year ago

I just browse music with a different account than I do regular youtube. The shorts dont bother me too much conceptually but I absolutely hate the player with how it doesnt have media controls and forces a portrait mode(especially when im watching youtube on my tv and laptop)

[–] ratherrisky@lemmy.kiberness.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My main gripe is with movies. After a while, the simlar video recomentaions are filled with "Free with Ads" movies. I don't even watch movies on Youtube. Its annoying.

I usually have to clear cookies to get rid of them.

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[–] distractedcactus 3 points 1 year ago

What I find irritating is seeing the long-form video channels that I watch repeatedly pushing new shorts videos to keep up with the algorithm and draw traffic, but because they don't do a lot of quick daily vids they break up old videos into multiple shorts. So now my feed is full of snippets of videos from months ago, and it makes it harder to know when there's actual new content to see.

[–] aedyr@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I have no interest in Shorts (or TikTok for that matter), but I'm probably aged out of their target demo anyway. I do think, as a general point, platforms shouldn't be trend-chasing each other. YT does longer form video well. TikTok does vertical video shorts. I say stick to your core competencies.

[–] amju_wolf@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago

They kinda have to chase each other, because if they don't they risk that if other platform's way of serving content becomes dominant, they'll be left in the dust.

They're already "behind" when they see a potential leader emerge, so they need feature parity so that they catch at least some people in their audience in the same trap as that competing platform.

[–] jlarex 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I used to use a brand account to keep it all separate but managing 2 accounts was kind of a hassle too so I just gave up at some point.

I'm still salty that Google killed off Google Play Music for YouTube music. YTM is still missing features and doesn't function as well as GPM did back in the day. Now they're trying to cram podcasts under the YouTube umbrella too, it's all getting too bloated.

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[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 2 points 1 year ago

It's the reason I can only access YouTube from invidious or newpipe. Once a friend sent me a link of a song called "gelato al cioccolato" (Italian rickroll), and YouTube spammed the home page with the whole discography of this 80s artist for weeks. I just listened to it for ten seconds...

Same for YouTube and the shorts. If I open YouTube I only want long content. Luckily newpipe has a bug where all shorts are automatically hidden, but I don't want this stuff mixed

[–] bloop 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have separate profiles for youtube music and youtube, for this exact reason.

[–] greenskye 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Does this work with the paid subscriptions? I figured that would require multiple subscriptions. Plus in my experience Google is really hostile to being logged into multiple accounts at a time. I wouldn't want to have to constantly switch my Gmail for example.

[–] i_am_not_a_robot@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago

It does work. Create YouTube brand accounts and log in to them using the same Google account. It will constantly switch all your YouTube windows to the same brand account, but it won't affect any other Google services and it won't charge you for additional subscriptions.

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[–] neshient@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not a YouTube music user but I've started to use the shorts to find new creators since my video feed has gone stale. That's the frustrating since I just want a long form video to leave on but find myself doom scrolling on shorts looking for something new.

[–] howler 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I feel like YTs feed is plain awful. For a site pretty much known for storing data and searching... The YT search, and their referral algo are maybe the worst.

[–] lhamil64 2 points 1 year ago

This bugs me too. i use a separate YouTube account for Music vs normal YouTube. It works great on mobile because each app can be set to a different account, but it's annoying on desktop because you have to switch back and forth.

And to clarify, I don't mean multiple Google accounts. You can create multiple YouTube accounts under the same Google account.

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