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YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It's terrible now.
Yeah youtubes attempt at being tiktok is just awful and they don't even have options to not have shorts show up in the feed. On top of shorts just being inferior versions of regular videos without functional controls
This is what gets me. Wanna show me shorts? Ok. But why the fuck am I not allowed to rewind a couple of seconds if I want to? It's an artificial, completely useless limitation that had no place in 2023.
So, no thanks.
For what it's worth you can replace the "short" in the url with "watch" to get the old interface back.
There are obviously also extensions/userscripts that do that for you and convert all shorts into regular videos.
Truly thou art a diety
They're not even doing a good job at cloning TT. You've been able to seek in TT videos for a long time now lol
Most of my browser addons are aimed at making YouTube usable. Hiding shorts is priority one
I started blocking those from appearing when they first showed up. There are a number of ways to do it. The Blocktube extension is one.
if you click ublock, select the settings cog, then in the tab that opens select 'my filters', you can enter the following to do the same thing:
www.youtube.com##.ytd-rich-section-renderer.style-scopePersonally I avoid installing too many extentions as they are quite literally apps that auto open whenever you just want to browse the web (regardless of if you're going to youtube, you're computer runs a youtube specific adblock)
Thank you for this
I switched to FreeTube and now all the shorts are on a separate page I can switch over to if I feel like watching them. It's also got SponsorBlock built in. Now I can enjoy youtube with a clean, faster interface and google isn't tracking a damn thing. All because google got greedy and made their user experience shit.
Google didn't get greedy, it's doing what it's been doing for years. Before resorting to plunging us into Matrix-like pods, they're trying to squeeze some more data out of users.
I only wish PiP worked the way it does in Firefox, not in Edge/Chromium. I like to have my browser next to full height video on my ultrawide, but PiP will not go beyond 1080 pixels tall.
Yeah, I hate how crappy search now is.
It'll show me a couple of videos, then shorts, then some kind of recommendation list. If I actually want to do a complete search for the thing, and only the thing, I'm looking for, I have to go to advanced options and specify I'm looking for videos. JUST videos.
I don't even care about the shorts showing up in search results. What really irks me is that you get like 3 videos related to search results, then some random unrelated shit, 3 relevant videos, more unrelated garbage, and then the rest of the actually relevant videos. I am specifically searching for something, just show me the damn thing.
Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:
If you want to get just your search results, cutting away shorts, playlists, and the recommendations that take up the majority of the search page, you'll have to open up the filters and click on "videos" on the cl tent type list. Then you actually get to see the search results.
Thanks for the tip, I'll try that next time. Even though it's infuriating that it's necessary in the first place
I found an extension that gets rid of the shorts, thank god
Also if you have enhancer it has an option to turn off the shorts bar and convert shorts to real videos.
for real the discovery is terrible. it's all junk and it's a waste of my time.
First thing I did when the shorts spam apocalypse started, was create custom ublock filters to strip them out of youtube as much as I could. Too bad I didn't back them up before my system decided to go poof.
I just copied them over from here. Works for me.
https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
Thanks for the hint! I mostly just ignored the shorts, but I just added that filter list to uBlock in firefox on android and it is much more pleasant when they're not there in the first place.
the shorts tend to be so bad and pointless. occasionally there is someone who makes an effort, but the number of low effort and garbage ones made me stop looking at shorts ever.