Asklemmy

I find YouTube is less attractive than a year ago. Ads are more invasive and more difficult to remove. Recommendations skew heavily to the rage-inducing, e.g., I watched one late night comedy sketch making fun of Jordan Peterson and then my feed was full of clips of him spewing his hot trash for weeks.

I gave up on reddit earlier in the year when all the API / sub blackout / forced mod removal stuff was going on.

Freemium apps seem to be pushing ads more and more, which makes me more resistant to using them.

If what I read online is true, the days of investors throwing money at anything tech related are slowing down. Which means some companies that have never had to be profitable before now must find a way to do so. Which means tightening up subscriptions and/or more ads.

I’m feeling the opposite lately. YouTube recommendations suck. I often open the app/page for the quick dopamine rush, but few of the recommendations interests me, so I just bounce off. For me, YouTube is mostly for long form content nowadays. Something I can put in the background while cooking/doing dishes.

Instagram is turning more and more like TikTok. Sometimes it recommends me something fun (like cat videos), but often it’s just nonsense. So I bounce off quite quickly there as well.

I feel happy about it.

shorts are designed to be addictive. just don't use them. otherwise, the platform hasn't changed, you have

No, shorts are shit and I'm absolutely not sucked in. They try to emulate tik tok so I would say this format simply works for you.

Recently? No, but maybe I'm in my own bubble. I've made my phone more boring intentionally. Getting rid of Reddit made me get off my phone a lot more. I really just mindlessly browse Lemmy and Mastodon now, and I run out of content on those.

Shorts made it less addictive, they're awful to watch and I invariably stop at one.

Perhaps you are experiencing a spike in your own addictive behaviour?

I'm getting bored with my smartphone. Stuff like YouTube I never watch on my phone anyway, but imo YouTube has gotten much worse over time and I barely watch it at all now.

Their algorithm is specifically designed to keep you entertained. Kind of a curse or a gift depending on who you ask. Think the worst cases are children tbh it was insane my first time seeing a tablet kid out in the wild. Faced glued to the screen being walked by their mom

If anything I'm less addicted to my smartphone now that Reddit got rid of the 3rd party apps.

Use revanced and remove shorts

The problem is that most people aren't aware that shorts / stories are made to be addictive.

If you keep pointing out to your friends and family how much time / battery they waste watching them they may start to take action though.

If you find yourself suddenly grasping for more and more time escaping reality consider seeing a psychiatrist.

You could have major depression: it was one of my symptoms.

...and less effective, and more proprietary, and more homogenous.

Shorts (tiktoks, reels) are designed to do just that, hook you in and keep you scrolling.
It's like a constant rolling cliffhanger.

Has its good sides - not everything can or should be a long format video. However, I think the scale is tipped too much towards shorts recently. There is not enough time in shorts to formulate a proper statement, so they need to stretch over multiple parts.

My biggest dislike is the separation of context - shorts and longs are completely separate in Youtube even by the same creator, and the most popular platform TikTok, doesn't even support longer videos.

Not really. I never got into mobile gaming, tiktok, reels, shorts, instagram, snapchat etc. so I mainly use my phone for podcasts, maps and browsing lemmy while on toilet. While on my computer I spend 95% of my time on YouTube but I feel like even that has gotten worse lately. I've been getting suggestions about videos with like 19 views constantly and no matter how many I mark as "not interested" or "don't recommend channel" they just keep coming back. Apparently because I like watching TheRunningManZ I must also like every other DayZ streamer that no one has ever heard about.

Not really.

Just stay away from garbage content like TikTok and shorts. But you can't blame your shitty media consumption on the smartphone.

It seems to also be a switching task issue in our minds. These changes of states takes more effort than playing the next video does or just keeping on what we are doing. It's so much easier for us to keep playing the digital dopamine slot machine that, TikTok, instagram reels, Facebook and YouTube short videos provide.

From a business sense they want to keep your attention, from a biology sense we are safe and don't see a need to move with the random rewards another quick video offers.

It's amazing how well they have refined getting and keeping our attention. We also get rewarded with dopamine from the anticipation of the next story or short video. It gets we don't even really need the next video, just the anticipation is enough to reward us with more dopamine.

I've read doing a simple reverse mental countdown of 5-4-3-2-1 blast off helps us switch gears from another part of the brain. It can also help us get out of bed or off the couch.

I just avoid shorts or reels or whatever personally. They're short and engaging making it easy to lose track of time.

But yeah you're 100% right my parents (late 50s) have started doing it a lot. I've noticed a lot of teenagers do as well.

Lately I've been more conscious of my decisions to watch trash on you tube. You watch a few traffic cam videos and pretty soon that's half your feed. So I'm finding myself thinking twice before clicking.

Shorts I mostly avoid because I feel that feature is toxic clickbait.

Hey, if it's fun/interesting/informative it seems fine to me. If you're turning into a drooling maga zombie watching rage bait then that's on you.

Big tech writes the equivalent of digital heroin.

The longer they can keep you on their platforms,
the more they can data-farm you,
the more data they have on you,
the more they can sell about you / earn on you.

Detox yourself from your bad heroin addiction,
by switching to fair FOSS (Free Open Source Software) alternatives.

E.g. Use Invidious, Grayjay or NewPipe instead of YouTube.

Can't say I agree with your example, but I agree in general with the idea. Shorts suck.

I don't watch shorts, but the algorithm became absolute trash for me recently.

I don't watch shorts, for this reason. I tried them when they first started and noticed I was just scrolling video after video, so I stopped watching them. I don't have addiction issues, though.

When I watch videos on my phone, I mostly just watch downloaded TV shows using VLC. I never use the youtube app. If I watch a youtube video, I use Firefox with uBlock origin.

I hate using a small screen, so I watch 99.9% of my videos on my laptop and desktop. I can't stand youtube shorts, so I use an addon to block them.

I am using

• Mull + adblock
• greyjay
• jerboah
• several Discuss webapps
• internet searching
• antennapod for podcasts

This is already enough to get me addicted and its not even typical social media

I hadn’t noticed but I think you’re right