Anyone else frustrated by cross contamination from Youtube, Youtube Music and Youtube shorts?

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.

distractedcactus,

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.

plantstho,

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

Cube6392,

And why are all the shorts by Squidinkidink? Who the fuck even is Squidinkidink?

Reil,

I wish I could at least separate my likes list by content type. I hit like/dislike on shorts way more frequently than long-form videos to train that algorithm, but when I go into that list, I'm usually trying to find a long-form video from a while back.

aedyr,
@aedyr@lemmy.ca avatar

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.

x2XS2L0U,

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

petrescatraian,

@greenskye Basically Google is looking to turn YouTube into a social media of sorts. And it's trying various stuff and sees what sticks.

brie,

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.

Entropywins,
Entropywins avatar

My videos I like are usually history, science, engineering with stand up and Scott the woz thrown in there so the shorts and long format go well together and my music tastes are jam bands so I don't mind 3-6 hour youtube videos of live performances being recommended. For my use case it works very well... sorry it doesn't seem to vibe with you

neshient,

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,

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.

trekz,

Sorry. You lost me at "YouTube Music" 😄

crowsby,
crowsby avatar

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,

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:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">www.youtube.com##.yt-formatted-string.style-scope.yt-simple-endpoint:has-text(YouTube Music):nth-ancestor(13)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.youtube.com###video-title-link:has-text(Mix – ):nth-ancestor(7)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)
</span>
mrwiggles,

As a note, the cookie notices are required by EU law for any tracking of the user via cookies. I just went into this with my lemmy instance. Lemmy isn't required to have a cookie notice because it doesn't track you with cookies.

zurohki,

According to gdpr.eu:

To comply with the regulations governing cookies under the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive you must:

  • Receive users’ consent before you use any cookies except strictly necessary cookies.
  • Provide accurate and specific information about the data each cookie tracks and its purpose in plain language before consent is received.
  • Document and store consent received from users.
  • Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies
  • Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a site with a revoke consent button.

Many of them start dropping cookies as soon as you load the page and mostly you get a link to their privacy policy rather than cookie explanations. So they aren’t even meeting GDPR requirements anyway. Sites just treat the cookie notice popup as a complete GDPR solution.

It looks like Lemmy sets a cookie when you log in to an account, so it might actually need a paragraph explaining the login cookie. Or maybe it has one and I’ve forgotten.

mrwiggles,

So, from what I understand, the login cookie is considered "Strictly necessary" as it is involved with the necessary functions of the site. As far as privacy policy and cookie explanations, lemmy has none, and I've been campaigning in Github to get the necessary changes made to make the Lemmy UI compliant, which to my understanding it is not currently. This has nothing to do with cookie banners and everything to do with privacy policy.

iAmTheTot,
iAmTheTot avatar

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.

Godwins_Law,

I actually Really like the crossover. I love mashup music and tons of it is only on places line YouTube and other “less official”/record company controlled places.

So YouTube music being able to integrate those sources is 10/10 for me.

deadcream,

I'm fine with music content in Youtube recommendations, but videos in Music recommendations is absolute cancer.

iAmTheTot,
iAmTheTot avatar

Honestly I've used both every day since Google Play Music shut down and I can't say I've ever had video stuff come up on YT Music.

swope,
swope avatar

My kids get annoyed when YTmusic plays the video version of a song. I get annoyed that my kids choices influence what the algorithm recommends to me. (Play Music let kids under 13 have their own profile, but not YTmusic.)

Shorts are quite annoying and I want to disable them permanently.

zurohki,

uBlock Origin doesn’t have a 30 day limit:

<pre style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<span style="color:#323232;">www.youtube.com###title-text:has-text(Shorts):nth-ancestor(7)
</span>
iAmTheTot,
iAmTheTot avatar

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

zurohki,

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.

bloop,

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

greenskye,

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.

bloop,

As long as the accounts are linked to the same email, I think it should be fine. I multiple Youtube brand accounts that are all under the same gmail address.

Entropywins,
Entropywins avatar

I believe the only way would be with a family plan which doubles the price of youtube premium

i_am_not_a_robot,

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.

Quentinp,
@Quentinp@lemmy.ca avatar

Yes whenever you make a new channel it has its own history. Also great if you find yourself boxed into a dead end with recommendations…just start fresh!

saigot,

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,
@AndrewMettier@mastodon.social avatar

@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 :(

lemillionsocks,
@lemillionsocks@beehaw.org avatar

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)

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