I’m paying over 40 dollars a month for YouTube but it doesn’t allow me to choose almost anything of what I see, despite trying hard to fine-tune my recommendations.

I can’t permanently turn off shorts - and this I find personally insulting. It really feels like encountering a drug dealer outside my house every time I come home, always expecting me to cave and try some of that good smack.

But apart from ignoring me when I say I’m not interested in whole genres of ‘fun’ videos, it also resets the streaming quality to the lowest setting every single day and then hides the quality setting deep inside a menu with several fiddly clicks.

And this isn’t for my benefit of course: I can easily stream 4K video to my screens. It’s to shave a few cents off each stream and max the gouging.

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testfrequency an hour ago | parent | next [-]

YT is desperate for me to engage with rage bait news, and I’m not biting.

It’s so god damn annoying, regardless of how often I choose to ignore channels or don’t suggest feedback.

All they care about is vote time…give me content I want to view!

Also, in the evenings, my timeline gets weirdly paranoid phobia centric, like deep insecurities people live with that are triggering and keep you up late. It’s so obvious YT is doing this to try and bait me into watching these deeply emotional and personal content, and again, ignoring it and providing feedback seems to do nothing to my feed. I hate it.

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bluescrn 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm amazed that they still haven't added any way to organise/categorise your subscribed channels, it's just a big flat list.

	▲	mostlysimilar 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		YouTube is social media first, even if it also happens to be a repository of useful content. Social media does not want you to navigate with agency. They want to choose what you see because it lets them keep you on the platform longer, which is the entire goal.
	▲	dietr1ch 21 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What's crazy is that their adtech definitely knows how to categorise stuff down to super specific topics, yet they only use that internally.

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nathancspencer 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pretty sure shorts disables if you turn off watch history: (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/08/youtube-update-homepage-wa...)

	▲	goalieca 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I’ve had watch history off for years and it shows me shorts above my actual subscriptions.

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drnick1 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why are you still paying for Youtube? I run uBlock and haven't seen ads in years, don't see any cellphone format crap now thanks to this list, and VacuumTube on my TV defaults to 4K.

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stbtrax 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

doesn’t work on iPad or iOS? Also not worth my time given how cheap it is

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raw_anon_1111 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Hacker News commenters: “I don’t like ads. They are evil”

Also HN commenters: “I don’t want to pay for goods and services”

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PlatoIsADisease a minute ago | parent | next [-]

Normies who can't figure out the 3 buttons it takes to use ublock pay for such things.

Its a tax on not being smart?

I'm mostly kidding, but I just use ublock and I've never considered buying youtube premium. Try harder google?

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calmbonsai 15 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I pay for plenty of other media (music, games, sports, comedy, books) and even do some Patreon for a few podcasts and YT channels, but I refuse to directly support a publishing monopoly that has had an actively user-hostile interface for over a decade.

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dietr1ch 12 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And how do I pay for a YouTube competitor that's libre or at least won't spy back without losing access to its monopolisticly large catalog?

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11 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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AngryNPC 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

With the change in culture here, especially in the last 2-3 years, HN might as well be called Reddit News now. So it's not surprising that most people aren't consistent with their principles.

	▲	shermantanktop 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Was HN known for consistency of principles before? I don’t remember that. Whenever an online community is anthropomorphized as an individual, it looks hypocritical. The only groups that don’t look hypocritical are monocultural backwaters of groupthink, permabans, and self-editing.

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AlexandrB 36 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

I pay for plenty of goods and services. Just not YouTube. As others have noted, YouTube premium makes ads go away, but none of the other engagement baiting and user disrespecting anti-patterns. As far as I'm concerned, Google is in adversarial relationship with its users, whether your paying or not.

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raw_anon_1111 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t know. But most of the time when I don’t like a service, I don’t use it. I know that’s a crazy idea. I find YouTube like everything Google does a piss poor user experience. I’m forced to only use it to watch official AWS videos and those don’t have ads.

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phero_cnstrcts 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Does it make the sponsor sections of the videos go away too?

	▲	Nannooskeeska 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		No, but SponsorBlock[0] is fantastic for that. I even have it setup on my home server[1] so it skips sponsor segments on my Apple TV, which is where we watch most of our YouTube. [0] https://sponsor.ajay.app/ [1] https://github.com/dmunozv04/iSponsorBlockTV

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phero_cnstrcts 29 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I hate that you can’t block specific channels from showing up in your feed. So much ai slop.

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NoahZuniga 23 minutes ago | parent [-]

This is not true. You can in fact block specific channels. From YouTube support[1]: > On certain pages, such as your Home and Watch Next pages, find a video from a channel that you don’t want recommended to you.

> Click More next to the video title.

> Select Don't recommend channel .

[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6342839?hl=en

	▲	calmbonsai 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is also not true and hasn't been so for years. One can set a preference to "not recommend", but one can not explicitly block any channel. Depending on your particular "preference constellation's weights" (over which you have no direct control), you can, in fact, be shown videos from that channel again.

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Larrikin 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't pay for YouTube

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mog_dev an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you pay for youtube, you are part of the problem

	▲	RGamma 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Youtube is far too significant a video collection to risk losing it. Yes there is insane anounts of garbage and yes their history is getting spottier by the day, but nothing else comes close to all of the good stuff that is still on it. Google needs to get its shit together and give users power tools. YT hasn't improved materially for many years now. I hope they can snap out of whatever governance dysfunction they're in. Not sure whether increasing financial pressure (above what must, no doubt, build up on its own) is the right answer here. It will probably only lead to more enshittification, and a long, slow death and I'm pretty saddened by that thought.

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easwee 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

You're stupid. Period. I will end it here.