No it doesn't. If you were hoping it would mean you don't see shorts when you visit the Youtube home page, that's not what this is. I just tried the thing mentioned in the article-- set my Shorts time limit to 0 minutes. What it does is make it so if you click a short from somewhere the short plays, but then if you try to swipe to the next one it hits you with the "You reached your short limit". If you then return to the home page you still see Shorts.
It really amazes how how Youtube refuses to let me hide stuff I don't want to see on my homepage. I still long for the ability to tell them to not give me mix playlists, I do not want them, and often they annoy me when the first song is one I'd click on but I don't want to have to pay attention enough to kill it before the next song plays (since you cannot disable play next in playlists...)
It's not a product where you are the user. Your attention is the product being sold to advertisers and the videos are a harvesting/production mechanism.
It is not in the interests of either YT or the advertisers to allow you to opt out of features that are proven to be lucrative for eyeballs.
I’m a Premium subscriber. I don’t see ads, and YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections.
It seems like the incentive for Premium subscribers should be to keep them happy, so they keep paying, and minimize how much they watch, as they’ll be a cheaper user using less bandwidth.
> YouTube added a feature so I can easily skip in-video sponsored sections
That feature benefits YouTube, too. Maybe even more than its value as a Premium feature. It makes it so that viewers can skip the ads the creator was paid to make without YouTube getting a cut of the proceeds, pushing down the value of those ads.
Hasn't this always been the case? If a movie or show features product placement, a TV station playing said movie/show doesn't get any of the proceeds from that advertisement, do they?
This is just the pros having more tact than amateurs, and actual writers. I do see some “influencers” that do more of a pure product placement. They just happen to be drinking a specific energy drink in every video where it sits perfectly with the label out. I see some YouTubers trying to get better at integrating the ad into the video, but most of them can’t be bothered to write and record a custom script.
That said, Subway often seemed to get pretty heavy with its product placement. The last season of Chuck had a good amount of this, even what was essentially an ad read right in the middle of an episode by Big Mike. On Community they personified Subway and based a whole episode on him. In the Office they brought in Ryan Howard to say “eat fresh” over and over again, and even called out that it was for Subway to make sure it didn’t go over anyone’s head. Subway was big on sponsoring the last seasons of struggling shows with loyal fanbases, and littering the episodes with Subway product placement to the point where it became a plot point. I remember Zachary Levi (Chuck) tweeting out to ask everyone to go buy some Subway before the finale. It sounded like if Subway saw enough of a spike in buying from the sponsorship, they might fund yet another season.
I know, but I don't see a fundamental difference. If TV networks are happy to pay for a show that also gets advertising revenue from product placement, I don't see why YouTube would not be happy to deliver ads and pay some percent of that to a channel that displays its own ads. Especially given that YouTube has much, much less cost per video than a traditional network, which can only broadcast one program at a time.
It's still a fine argument for that case, you've just moved yourself out of it. They still have an incentive to keep you addicted to the service, which is basically the point of Shorts, "so you keep paying us money to satisfy your addiction" instead of the first case's "so you keep watching ads that pay us money to satisfy your addiction"
The thing that is funny about it is at least with the mixes, it does actively make me engage less because there are videos I would click on if they were not being tied into a mix, but because they are I actively choose not to open the video and let the song play.
YouTube has multiple different products. YouTube as a company do not call your attention a product. There isn't a product team that is in charge of people's attention as a product.
Believe me, if they tried as hard as FB, an ordinary user wouldn't stand a chance. As it is now, a single uBlock Origin action is enough to make these disappear from my YT page for good, and for all accounts.
Youtube has added random people's text posts to my subscription feed, and it's pissing me off. They're never anything interesting or entertaining, it's always just gumpf
I so hate the videos YouTube shows me that I wrote a plugin to place a white box over videos called TubeGate [0], which I open-sourced [1]. It does keyword-based filtering so you can tell it to hide "sports", "politics", etc.
Honestly, the only thing really keeping me from watching shorts is the perplexing UX decision to not show the channel name as part of the preview tile. As basic Internet hygiene it just feels real bad to click on a video without the tiniest bit of idea about its provenance. For that reason I never do and have always just wanted to hide Shorts altogether.
I don't watch shorts because of the type of content it encourages - short clickbait content for the attention deficit.
I want long form, well researched, well put together content. These types of content takes a long time to produce, unfortunately, and the youtube algorithm doesn't favour it.
That's where off-platform, trust worthy sources are important.
Over the years, i've curated a lot of subscriptions on youtube of such long form content (talking about things like Primitive Technology, Smarter Everyday, etc).
It simply sucks that youtube has gutted the UI for subscriptions - the layout is horrible, i can't scan it as they removed the list view, etc. And sometimes subscribed channel's videos don't even show up there - you have to visit the channel page directly to see the new videos.
it's almost as if they want people to rely only on the home page and the recommended videos from their algo.
Honestly I'd sometimes like a checkbox to ignore any results uploaded after, say 2023. Or else to only see 'verified non-AI' content. There is nothing I'd ever search Youtube for where an AI generated video would be an acceptable answer.
I use the control panel for youtube plugin - there is an option that any short plays in the traditional player. It also has lets you customize the thumbnail grid sizes. it is a little over aggressive with its defaults but you can turn them off. it has a lot of options
If TikTok does it that way (I have no idea if it does actually), YouTube obviously has to copy that! If a fishy channel name stops you from clicking on a short, that hurts your engagement, and that's the last thing social media companies want.
Classic "self regulation" of an addictive product. "You look like you might have a problem with self-control, here are tools for managing yourself better" while admitting no fault and continuing with all of the hooks and barbs, design and advertising built to addict as many people as possible.
I was referring to Google+. I don't know if you mean something else like Facebook, which is no less abusive than Google+ ever was
People seemed to like Google+ but a) nymwars lead to dangerous situations (although no less dangerous than Facebook's graph search) for people that don't want to reveal their real names but also b) the merging of accounts ruined some people's Youtube channels. Zuckerberg is so much of a control freak that I suspect (based on evidence I've vaguely heard, not just my own intuition) links to Google+ used to get deleted. It used to be the case people liked it but they "couldn't get their friends to use it". So yeah - in part, inertia; but also what if you linked it and nobody saw it in the feed?
I know. I was joining in on the joke, I think I just made that one up though. Im pretty sure youtube asks that If you upload a video and don't have a phone number on file
Well played. I don't think many remember this. The product was completely forgettable but the introduction of this user hostile pattern was a turning point.
Yeah, it's pretty broad consensus that the Chinese opium epidemic was really on the parents. 19th century Chinese parents really dropped the ball there, and no further considerations or blame should be placed.
My parents are retired. How exactly do they come into play?
I'm actively avoiding Shorts, Reels, and whatever else with those mechanics precisely because they pull you in and snap an hour is gone with nothing of value to show for it. It's so totally different from regular long form videos.
We regulate addictive substances too, even for adults and without relying on parents. The amount of productivity and quality of life lost to these platforms must be staggering in aggregation.
I actually set the time limit to 0 minutes , then I restarted the app in iOS and right now I do not see any shorts. Let’s see how long it would take for them to reappear again
Argh. I was really excited for this. I'm a YouTube Premium user, and I get a lot of value from YouTube, but I can't get rid of the nicotine-tastic home feed and shorts. I go to YouTube for useful (especially, long-form) stuff, and get sucked into garbage.
On desktop you can manage this with extensions. Not so much on mobile.
If you want to completely eschew shorts, consider adding https://www.youtube.com/shorts to your adblocker blocklist, and maybe use an extension like Stylus to hide the "Shorts" links on YT pages.
I would rather keep the ability to see a short if I need it.
ROFL because there is no danger that I'm going to spend any time watching shorts. If they put some limit on other videos now that might be relevant... but shorts are just taking up real estate on the screen which could be filled with content I might engagement. I want to say it is like picking their shareholder's pockets except nobody profits from the existence of shorts in any way.
An ad blocker handles this use case just fine, however. It's easy to create a rule to remove the div containing shorts. Also works on many Use AI buttons.
In my case, once I set the limit to 0 minutes and refreshed the home tab I don't see Shorts recommendations at all. There is still a Shorts tab at the bottom that tells me I have no remaining time (and allows me to trivially override it, sigh). But otherwise this seems to have cleaned up the "feed" that I see in the app of anything Shorts related (for now, at least).
Swipe. Not a problem with mouse control and generally full computer, seems like even such a dumb move as swiping can become addictive and be done subconsiously. Never understood why people complain here so much about shorts since they never go beyond the one video played that I opened myself I guess that explains it.
Tablets/touchscreens/phones are not the best way to experience online stuff, rather the worst. ublock origin in firefox makes internet usable in other dimension for me, since I am allergic to ads but thats another story
"Shorts" is the #1 reason I switched to the SmartTube app on my Chromecast.
No more Shorts.
It also has other great features that are well beyond what the Youtube app lets you do to customize the expernience.
And then I realized, it also blocks all the ads. I was a Youtube subscriber, but they alienated me with their "Shorts", so I switched apps, and then I cancelled my subscription.
Most of big tech is too big. It's ridiculous how bad these monoliths have gotten.
Not just insider knowledge. Being more willing to put in hard work than anyone else, being better at synthesizing public knowledge, or maintaining a more clear and unemotional outlook all can also lead you to superior outcomes.
"Bus stop reduction" makes it sound like it will make it harder to take the bus. But the point of the article is that's compensated by the buses being more useful because they get where they're going more quickly. So "balancing" seems apt to me.
But it does make it harder to take the bus. That's the point.
And as I pointed out, there are two proven ways of making buses actually much faster. This seems exceedingly unlikely to help, since buses already often skip stops.
Can't you also make money by making a good decision that benefits you and another party? I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
"Good" is subjective. But yes, all wealth creation requires working with other people. No one is an island. And most people are increasingly disturbed by the types of decisions required to amass more wealth than sovereign nations.
Not at the scale of billions of dollars. Sure, some of their money comes from positive contributions to society. But you don't get to be a billionaire if you restrict yourself to that. Millionaire? Sure, possible.
Yes, and when you see people excusing those actions even here on HN, that's exactly the mindset they have. Who is to say otherwise? There isn't some objective scale, it's all utilitarian.
Someone further down[1] talked about how “normal people” don’t realize the problem with Bill Gates and Thiel. But I think it’s rather the tech people here that don’t fully realize it.
> I feel like I do this all the time, just on a relatively small scale.
Yeah, scale. Scale is obviously important.
The road to billions of dollars is built on exploitation.
You can be multimillionaire by doing that. But not a billionaire.
It's pretty much "get unbelievably lucky/inherit it" or "be a piece of shit consistently, else you will be out-competed by someone being bigger piece of shit than you.
Becoming a billionaire is never done through your hard work.
It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers at scale that permits being a billionaire. It is their hard work, not the billionaires.
Now, how much surplus the workers get is primarily the discussion between capitalism, socialism, and communism.
Naturally, capitalists are disinclined in giving ANY of the surplus, and keeping it all for themselves. But when every capitalist does that, thats how we end up with 7 year depression/boom cycles, when the whole economy treats workers poorly.
>It is only by exploiting the surplus of large amounts of workers
Well, it's possible for a person to become a billonaire without directly doing this.
I think it was said somewhere that Lebron James was one of the first wage billionaires, due to his 20+ years on top of the NBA.
But loosening the statement a little, if the person themselves hasn't its almost certain that the people that have paid them have (in the case of sports athletes, the companies paying for the ads).
Be that as it may, being a wage-slave billionaire still leaves you less exposed to direct first-hand moral dillemas than the CEOs of companies.
I'm in the US, I never experience any of the issues people complain about. Just checked and I don't have the setting disabled that that one guy talked about up thread. But I do have all notifications off. Maybe that is why?
Only if you choose to take it that way. All the names were like that to me when I joined years ago, but I just looked them up, or not, as I went and now the discourse is almost always legible. As is usually the case if you want to be part of something interesting on the internet, lurk more is the first step.
They were needlessly inflammatory, but none of that changes the fact that something requiring you to watch a 2-min video to get started does not pass the [non-inflammatory term for non-technical person but you know what I mean]-test.
I'm saying this in a jocular tone, because - otherwise - the reality is too depressing. But I know people like this.
Anyone with a large enough social group will have some people like this. These are people who've engaged in football, boxing or contact sports like rugby. Or, people with severe ADHD. Or have had some kind of traumatic brain injury. These are real users and they're my friends.
I won't switch to using your application if they're going to be left out in the cold.
If a messaging application can't be used by that person, then that's a default fail. I'm not going to expose them to it.
But you will expose them to Discord's nagging popups for random quest thingies, animated emojis, disorganised channels, etc.? It sounds like you've already decided it's a foregone conclusion.
I am not arguing from a particular desire to get your jock friends on Zulip. Like I said in another subthread, I consider Zulip to be mainly for people who want to achieve things together, not just hang out. It's a productivity app. I wouldn't recommend it as a social app. Why I'm replying is because I feel your approach to the discussion is a little... uncharitable?
They're already using discord. It's a single click.
I think you're misunderstanding me. I'm not here to argue particulars. I'm sharing my reality as a user. A user who runs multiple communities. Including one for my friends. And my friend group extends to 2k+ people (my friends, their friends, their friend of friends... It adds up).
It's not fair that the CTE friend uses discord out of the box, but that's the power of network effects. Any competing solution needs to be 10x better to incentivise the switch.
I can setup a new discord server in a click. Versus,
Sponsorship and discounts
Contact sales@zulip.com with any questions.
Community plan eligibility
Open-source projects
Research in an academic setting
Academic conferences and other non-profit events
Many education and non-profit organizations
Communities and personal organizations (clubs, groups of friends, volunteer groups, etc.)
Respectfully, I'm not emailing your sales team to create a movie night server. Or one for class / group notes. Actual use cases. https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted
You don't need to email the sales team unless you have questions about the policy. It should be clear that "groups of friends" are eligible from the text you quoted.
You just need to spend 2 minutes filling out a brief form that's integrated in the server setup process if/when you have more than 10 users on your server. We enjoy hearing the brief notes users provide about how they are using Zulip. Is that too much to ask in exchange for reliably delivering you a service that you use every day?
It takes quite a bit longer to install a self-hosted server or configure an organization for thousands of users than to fill out the form -- I'd expect most people to spend more than 2 minutes creating a VM before they even get to running the installer. I'd expect that nicely configuring a Discord server for 2K people takes hours.
Is there something that we could change in the website that would make it obvious this is not an onerous process? The purpose of the section is to make clear that self-hosting Zulip is free for this sort of non-incorporated community use ... but we do need to have some eligibility process where you describe what you are, or it's free for Amazon too.
Not the original commenter, but I have faced similar friction from people who are not grandmas or quarterbacks. I don't particularly agree with its tone, but I agree with the original commenter's general message.
I won't be so confident to identify what it is, but there is something that causes "end users" to bristle at Zulip.
Where I'm coming from, everyone uses Slack. I spearheaded an effort to switch to Zulip because our Slack server is on a free plan and our messages get sucked into the void after 60 days now. Everyone agrees that this is bad, and that we don't have the money for Slack premium (we're an academic organization, so AFAICT we wouldn't even have to self-host to avoid paying), and yet so many people do not want to switch. Here are some common responses I've gotten:
* I refuse to use another messaging app and Slack is nonnegotiable for some of my collaborators.
* I don't want to learn a new UI.
* I don't want to learn a new UI that isn't basically the same as Slack.
* I will only switch if everyone else switches.
This is half a social problem ("I will only be receptive if everyone is using this"), but I do think there is some legitimate friction in Zulip's UI. I am fairly confident that we could successfully switch to Zulip if the Slack dissenters could be convinced to use Zulip --- or if Zulip could somehow be coerced into being more Slack-like.
As the "agent of change" at my organization, I felt like the resources Zulip provides are lacking in what I really need. Like I know there are technical details on how to move to Slack (https://zulip.com/help/moving-from-slack), but what I really need is help with the above: convincing people to try and acclimate to the UI. And yeah, I kind of agree that a 2 minute video on how to use Zulip is not the resource I need since it presupposes a degree of openness and cooperation that I don't have access to.
These are somewhat disorganized thoughts, but happy to expand upon anything if you're interested. I really do want to successfully move our org to Zulip since I'm tired of our messages disappearing.
It's not required. It's just there if you want it. Zulip is easy enough to jump into, especially if you have friends who actually care to onboard you into a community.
Adminning a Zulip for a small community group, I've actually found I have better tools to help with this. E.g. in Slack, we had constant nags to "please reply in the thread!" In Zulip, I can just move messages where they belong, and either leave the automated notes there to show where the messages went, or DM the person to let them know what I did.
The all you can eat buffet analogy makes way more sense to me, because it speaks to the aspect of it where the customer can take a lot of something without restriction. That's the critical thing with the Anthropic subscription, and the takeout analogy or delivery service don't contain any element of it.
No it doesn't. If you were hoping it would mean you don't see shorts when you visit the Youtube home page, that's not what this is. I just tried the thing mentioned in the article-- set my Shorts time limit to 0 minutes. What it does is make it so if you click a short from somewhere the short plays, but then if you try to swipe to the next one it hits you with the "You reached your short limit". If you then return to the home page you still see Shorts.
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