Ask HN: Did YouTube start recommending more short videos to you out of nowhere? I don't watch YouTube Shorts and I also don't watch videos shorter than 3 minutes. And yet they still show up a lot on the recommendations page, even though I click "Not interested" button every time. I do use a Google account and YouTube history is turned on. Does anyone else notice this? |
A lot of content creators are seeing short term spikes in their shorts engagement due to this YouTube promotion strategy and cannibalizing their channel in the process, focusing on content that can match shorts vs. higher value but longer content.
This is my theory because I don't think the short video concept works outside of the infinite loop. I uninstalled the YT app after this. I must admit I was spending too much time on it after they added it. Really a shame, I really liked YT.
YouTube Vanced lets you customise what UI elements are displayed in the app. Android-only, I believe, but I couldn't imagine not installing it now
They are trying to take on tik tok
Generally, some month ago, two?, I felt like the feed has changed for the worse.
It's not actually presenting anything new or interesting anymore. Feed turned more into an echo-chamber of the same topics just from different people. A massive waste of time. Hasn't always been like this, so I might be at fault for that to happen.
If I had to roughly guess I feel like it started getting worse about 6 months ago but it's hard to quantify - am I just getting older and more bored/less adventurous? I don't think so. Maybe a little.
I believe I encountered an A/B test starting today. While looking at a channel, I saw the Short under "Videos" as a regular video. But refreshing the page, I can no longer see it there, but only on the channel page, under Shorts.
I discovered that a Short can be viewed as a video by replacing its https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<ID> URL with regular https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<ID>.
I despise the fact that I can't rewind. Needless to say, the experience falls... short.
I've turned off watch history and they recently made that necessary for the main suggestion queue ('discover?')
As a result I really only get suggestions in the end of video cards (selected by the channel) and the list on the right - which is almost always ~8+ minutes
I watch almost exclusively on a desktop machine/browser for what it's worth. The mobile experience is way too much
Google LOVES a/b testing. I wouldn't be surprised to find we're in different studies