Read something similar the other day about the original Walkman.
The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.
Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.
I’m gonna say it’s YouTube. They are obsessed with pushing short form shit videos to me despite me never wanting to watch them. I hate YouTube shorts so much
I'm with you on not liking shorts. I read there is a new option to limit time spent in shorts, if you set that to 0 they do go away. Have not tested it.
In the Home Screen it is always completely full of shorts. In my recommendations, full of shorts. There’s no way to just never be shown shorts. It’s very clear from the layout that they REALLY want you to watch shorts. I assume it’s because they are more addictive = more views = more ads. But I pay for YY premium! So why do they still insist on putting shorts everywhere? If I want shitty short videos I’ll use TikTok
But there are ways to never be shown shorts. They just tend to require avoiding the YouTube app.
Remember the World Wide Web? Even here in 2026, YouTube is still just a website -- if you want it to be. Web browsers like Firefox can still be used to block whatever you don't want to see.
So an effective way to deal with this situation is to switch to a browser, block the shorts, and then cancel premium and block ads as well.
In this way: A person can still consume the content that they want, while also protesting with their wallet.
Subscriptions and even viewing history(?!) pull shorts out of order and place them at the top.
Hell, many times I launch YouTube and it immediately starts playing a short, no interaction required. And I have "show touches" on, so I know it's not a phantom tap or something, it's doing it all on its own.
I wonder if they are doing some A/B testing on this. I see shorts about once a month or so, which is when the "not interested" option runs its course. Other than that, they don't push it to me at all, and the app has certainly never started auto playing a short when I've opened it.
I've also never watched a short, or if I did I immediately removed it from my watch history. I do keep that trimmed with prejudice, because the algorithm is desperate to show me something other than what I normally watch.
I somewhat suspect the auto-play is a bug with "accessibility -> remove animations". There are quite a lot of Google-product bugs with it enabled (nearly all other apps I use are 100% fine), though most don't render things unusable (except the recent apps list, WOW wtf). Youtube has also lately been jumping straight to "Shorts [that I have uploaded, which is zero]" when I open the "You" section, despite it being the last in the list and completely empty - this too is very likely an animation-related bug.
Why it happens with remove-animations: well I'm pretty confident they don't test with it. But it's super freakin' weird. I kinda doubt it'll get fixed though, doing so will cause "engagement" to drop, and it has been happening for most of a year now.
Ah, yeah, that does make more sense. I'm glad I tend to work in spaces where cute animations aren't desirable. The last thing any product needs is pointless transitions and a whole new class of race conditions and timing bugs.
I don't get them on desktop either, but on the mobile app they're very hard to avoid. Seems like YouTube doesn't want to be YouTube anymore, it wants to morph into TikTok. We don't need more TikToks, having one TikTok is already bad enough thankyouverymuch!
Yea on desktop I can solve it too - but on mobile it’s a pain. I’m subscribed now because I want background playback and using the various blockers was getting annoying. So the app is all I have.
But I subscribe now god damn it! Can’t I just only see what I want to see? Is this too much to ask?
But under Ofcom rules, it is social media if we are to assume that they’ll apply the same scoping as the Online Safety Act does for user-to-user services. I think a lot of comments here assume that only sites like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter/X would be in scope, but I see no reason why they wouldn’t use the same definitions from the OSA (essentially any site where user-to-user communication and content posting takes place, including forums and aggregators).
Which was not contradictory, as they were saying they wanted to quit. I also want to quit all social media, including hackernews, in the same way I want to quit eating Mcdonalds and getting high all the time.
The weird thing is that this is the utopia that the AI companies are chasing - this is the best case scenario where AI doesn’t kill us all. We become happy sheep relying on the AI to think and provide for us.
"It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points."
I’ve just set up some old phones between my daughter and her school friends. I also looked at tincan but it’s quite expensive for each device + high monthly cost.
Using voipfone I have them all on a separate network with 3 digit phone numbers for £2 a month each and all connected with a grandstream voip controller + an old landline phone that I got on eBay / donated from neighbours.
It’s been so nice to see them all calling each other up and chatting. Retro tech is so good because it’s single purpose. No distractions.
The engineers wanted to add recording function, thinking it would help with sales and to only cost a negligible amount to add.
Someone cleverer said no, because if you add that feature now people will be confused what it is for. If they don’t want to record audio, they’ll think the product isn’t for them.
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