They’ve also changed the browser experience, so that Shorts now appear on the same row as regular videos.
I wouldn’t mind them playing with these new layouts and features if they just allowed me to turn them off.
As it stands, I have an increasingly large library of FIrefox plugins dedicated to deshittifying Youtube.
Edit: Personal recent favourite, Fix Pink Youtube that removes the stoopid pink shading from the progress bar, which had me thinking my monitor was damaged.
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I don’t mind shorts as a format. What I do mind is the complete interface and mental model change that comes when one views a short. Yes, I am interested in the short-format content from the creators I follow. No, I do not want to experience YouTubeTok.
(Incidentally, if you tinker with the URL you can view shorts as regular videos. If I knew more about writing a browser plugin I’d make one that did the URL rewrite any time it encountered a shorts URL.)
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Oh don’t get me wrong, I quite like Shorts. But why do they need to loop?!
And I’d like them in their own section.
But nooooo, Google knows what’s best for me, or rather what’s best to “drive engagement.”
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I’ve got a Yellow, although I started with a Raspberry Pi at first due to the shortages of CM4s at the time. I’d probably recommend a Green for anyone that’s starting new. Much less to mess around with just to get a working system.
I don’t know the specifics of the OS on the Green, but there is a Tailscale client for Raspberry Pi/ARM that may work. That’s probably the fastest/easiest way to set up a VPN for remote access without a monthly fee. The Nabu Casa solution is probably easier and better integrated, but it’s not required.
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I use the app for uploads, but not for viewing. With a mobile browser & the NoScript & uBlock Origin extensions, I never get ads. However,
- Within the past few months, the page for the video will load blank & I have to reload, &
- over the past week or 2, I’ve noticed that a given video will stop playing & never finish
(or, sometimes, error out)
(ETA accidentally hit save before I was done)
I assume both of those are on purpose, for not using the app &/or blocking ads & scripts.
What does seem to work, for now, is searching for a video on DuckDuckGo & playing the video from within the results
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I wrote about streaming’s relentless enshittification at the incompetent hands of fail-upward brunchlords like Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslav
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Listened to an episode of a podcast where part of the discussion veered into how capitalism is based on an antiquated economic model where capital is centered around interest. Which means that to make money you need infinite growth, which is not how reality works. Economic models need to be based on being value based, and a company’s measurement for success is what they can bring to local communities. I’m no economist so i can’t really speak with any kind of specificity but at least my layperson’s brain can understand that infinite growth is unsustainable and encourages corporations to exploit people with no incentive to give back. Maximum profit and low cost.
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I’ve noticed that online stores tend to have terrible search systems, often treating everything as an OR search, with no AND or NOT options. Smashwords, Itch, and Kobo all do this. Also sometimes treating parts of the word as the search terms, so access and accessible are treated as hits for each other, Roman and Romance, etc.
Of course there’s a lot of pressure for sellers to optimize their ranking and enshittify the search system that way, so maybe the stores’ve given up.
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Booooy don’t get me started on shitty search functions. Unrelated but related is Outlook’s search function for emails is pretty uneven for me. There are times where i KNOW i have an email for something, i search under email title, sender, and anything else i can think of and i just can’t find it. Then i manually look for it and find it, though there are times i just give up and ask someone else to see if they can find info for me in their emails.
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Watch possibly the nicest man on YouTube explain the utter ridiculousness of a $1000 dishwasher that can’t use a simple rinse cycle without using their app, which can only talk to the appliance in your house via round-trip through the Internet.
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As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.
Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.
‘You can turn it off!’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’
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In the future, an oligarchy of television networks rules the world. Even the government functions primarily as a puppet of the network executives, serving mainly to pass laws—such as banning “off” switches on televisions—that protect and consolidate the networks’ power.
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Correct.
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