BlockTube, a YouTube Content Blocker(github.com) |
BlockTube, a YouTube Content Blocker(github.com) |
So YouTube this week alone has tried to show me Blackhead videos twice, one video of a deformed baby just after it was born, one video of a child dying free fall in an elevator.
All when I'm getting ready to eat dinner so thanks for that Neal Mohan...
Wish I was joking, never watched videos like these on YouTube in my life but yeah I search for a recipe and there it is, a gore or grossout video....
i.e. the suggested videos in the sidebar will always be relevant to what I'm currently watching, whatever that is, rather than stuff youtube thinks I might like in general.
I know it's doing something good because youtube keeps nagging me to turn watch history back on again.
One thing I did notice is when I upload an unlisted video the sidebar suggestions are lots of fighting clips, maybe some Joe Rogan, and all the baby Rush Limbaugh's getting rich off of hate. I'm assuming this is like the default for an unknown user who is not logged in.
And just like you, I'm sitting down to eat dinner. It makes me, sad? Hard to say what the emotion is. But I feel something when I sit down at the end of a day to watch content I like on a device I own, the only content I ever watch on a platform I subscribe to, and I am forced to see violent, emotionally outrageous, troublesome thumbnails instead because some metric says that for someone statistically "good number go up get performance bonus" if everyone gets that shoved in their face. Oh, you want to relax and watch SortedFood? No - you will feel rage, you will feel sorrow, you will feel stress, YouTube demands it of you. This specific word is hyperbole, but I feel abused by big tech these days.
This drives me insane. For some searches, you're not going to find anything near what you're looking for if YouTube decides that their "personalized" search results will be better. I was looking for clips from a comedy podcast once and they refused to show them, they'd only show clips of one of the hosts on other podcasts. It was so odd to break something that worked perfectly fine, especially when it actively decreased my engagement.
But on the subject of blocking, I have two things going on: ad blocker, courtesy of Brave and a plugin that removes youtube shorts, which I hate with a passion.
(I note that if you go to youtube .com in incognito and refuse cookies, you get no suggestions at all, not even the default homepage.)
I do wonder what, if anything would happen about reporting this stuff to OFCOM; https://variety.com/2023/tv/global/ofcom-media-bill-streamer... if we're going to have an overly intrusive regulator we might as well use it against things that are genuinely bad.
I blocked one video like that and all of a sudden my recommendations that were tech and comedy centric started being prepper/anti-antifa/weaponry/pro-republican/Jordan Petersen/Ben Shapiro/Pro-trump general dog crap, and the more I blocked and reported the more it sent my way.
I cleaned my browser history and it kept coming.
I was losing my mind with frustration as it got so bad I had to explicitly go to my favorite channels just to see their videos.
Then, I deleted my youtube watch history and it stopped but reset all of my stuff to their generic front page. That was exasperating.
I just searched for chicken tikka masala on the android app and got nothing but cooking/recipe videos.
So try turning off your watch history? Or at least start it over?
The other suggestion I have is check the videos you "liked" to make sure you didn't accidentally hit "like" on one of these videos. Especially if you don't use the "like" button.
Some are alright, some are just weird, and some are unpleasant hatespeechy screeds, but I haven't had even a single shock video recommendation so far.
Definitely an odd experience.
What it _actually_ does is build a demographic profile of each user based on the videos you watch and tries to lump you into a stereotype and then recommends videos that other people in that stereotype watch. I hope the engineers/managers at Google don't try to fool themselves into believing they are "woke" because this is one of the most un-woke things I can think of.
For instance, if I start watching woodworking and motorcycle repair videos (just two of my MANY hobbies), YouTube decides I am a retired rural conservative christian conspiracy theorist, when in fact I am none of those things. I start getting video recommendations of gun reviews, Fox News clips, religious debates, and suchlike.
Oh yes, and girls in bikinis jumping on trampolines. I mean, I am not exactly against the _concept_ of girls in bikinis jumping on trampolines as such, but it's not something I've ever searched for or even watched videos of. But more importantly, it's not the kind of thing I prefer to have pop up on my phone or computer screen when a friend or family member is nearby.
They have added a button "propose me something different" which will add new topics for you to discover, maybe you accidentally clicked it.
It can lose data if you use it from more than one tab.
It uses local storage and so has a much lower limit on size of its block list and the information it can retain about what was blocked than if it used IndexedDB instead.
If an a page was loaded in the past, and you have since interacted with the extension via another tab, interacting with that page will revert the block list to what it was when that page was loaded. Losing the updates which have been done since.
I regularly search for nature videos. There are a handful of notorious channels that create absurd thumbnails and stitch together footage from completely different animal encounters to create an extravagant story that would be incredibly interesting if only it were real. Such channels are easy to spot but clutter results and keep showing up because they do trick a lot of people and are therefore seen as popular by youtube's algorithm.
I've gotten fed up with the app, so this morning I decided to use Firefox mobile to play a video on YouTube.com
Whenever the video plays, my microphone turns on. The thing is I have my microphone permissions in Firefox turned off, with no exceptions. Has anyone else encountered this behaviour?
Under firefox settings/site permissions the microphone is "Blocked by Android"
So I decided to double check my android settings, and was greeted by some splash page explaining what the permissions settings page was for. (Perhaps this page appeared after a recent update?)
After clearing the page I see Firefox microphone permissions sitting in the "ask every time" catagory. Im 100% sure i did not get asked or give permission for microphone usage.
I go back to Firefox and YouTube no longer accesses my microphone when playing a video. The only variable I can think of was clearing that splash page. Mysterious. :)
The project is not 100% serious, but I'm starting to think that within the next 1-2 years we'll get tools for purely offline/on-device AI based content moderation. It's sad.
You don't pay xx USD per month, to get LinusTechTips shoveling ads down your throat.
The content creator is already paid for the content as he receives a small % of the subscription as revenue.
It would be very logical that content creators have to mark these segments.
like a pihole sort of thing.
YouTube Red/ads, and sponsored content in the creator's videos are totally separate things, and should stay separate things.
I'm not a creator myself but I've done some research on the idea and there are basically three ways to make anything like decent money with a YouTube channel, in increasing likelihood of success:
1) Get stunningly popular over a short period of time, a.k.a. Go Viral. This is almost entirely down to luck, so is not a strategy for normal people having a serious go at it.
2) Accept (and generally beg for) donations from subscribers via Patreon or similar. Optionally, lock up some percentage of your videos behind a subscription via Patreon or similar. This only works well if you can generate a significant following that will not also abandon you the instant you decide to start monetizing things.
3) Product placements and sponsored content. Typically this means accepting a significant chunk of change in exchange for a 3-4 minute ad for a VPN or some crap smack-dab in the middle of your video.
Notice that nowhere in this list is "rake in the cash from YouTube ads" because there is no such thing. Yes, YouTube pays creators _something_ for ads, but unless you are the top video creator in your broad field (e.g. LTT -> computers), you are never going to be able to live off it. (And we'll put aside the difficulties that content creators regularly encounter with monetizing their videos through YouTube ads, due to bogus copyright claims, and false positives from the AI thinking it heard something politically incorrect. And to be clear, YouTube will still show ads in demonetized videos, it just keeps the ad revenue to itself in those cases.)
So if you are paying for YouTube Red, you are REALLY only paying YouTube, not content creators. This is why most semi-serious content creators go with either the donation or sponsorship model.
You may wish to know about Sponsorblock, a browser extension that clips out sponsored segments. It only works if at least a few people have marked the sponsored sections before you watched the video. It works a lot better than it has any right to.
Yup. YouTube search is essentially entirely worthless. The purpose of the search bar isn't "show the user want they want to find," it's "show the user the videos that will make us the most money."
Amazon does the same thing, but with product search results.
For both of these, I never end up using the built-in search engine, I always go to an external search engine like DuckDuckGo or Bing. Which have their own problems of course, the least of which is that they generally only index YouTube, but there is no other decent alternative.
> especially when it actively decreased my engagement.
Agreed, but it's likely that you and I are in the tiny, tiny minority. Most of the people who use the YouTube search function are looking for entertainment, not content related to specific interests, tutorials, or information. See the top search queries for YouTube over the last year, basically ALL of them are to do with music, movies/tv, and video games: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?gprop=youtube
To allow for false positives I've stolen an idea from HN and simply made the videos hard to see.
The current iteration of the filter looks something like:
www.youtube.com###video-title-link:has-text(/^you won\'t|^you will not| but | except |^when the|reacts to|^when you|wait for it|^\d+ (\w+y|amazing|strange|best)/i):upward(.ytd-rich-item-renderer.style-scope):not(:hover):style(opacity:0.1)
Thanks!