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.
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.
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)
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.
That’s one of the most significant reasons I stopped using YouTube Music.
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.
I hate shorts and I hate seeing them in my subscription feed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It does affect suggestions, as far as I can tell.
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.
I have separate profiles for youtube music and youtube, for this exact reason.
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.
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.
