this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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[–] [email protected] 186 points 9 months ago (8 children)

After YouTube started filling their search results with mostly shorts, I stopped using it for new stuff. It's terrible now.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 85 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (2 children)

For what it's worth you can replace the "short" in the url with "watch" to get the old interface back.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

There are obviously also extensions/userscripts that do that for you and convert all shorts into regular videos.

[–] Scubus 2 points 9 months ago

Truly thou art a diety

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Most of my browser addons are aimed at making YouTube usable. Hiding shorts is priority one

[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago

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-scope

Personally 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)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Thank you for this

[–] [email protected] 32 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I found an extension that gets rid of the shorts, thank god

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Also if you have enhancer it has an option to turn off the shorts bar and convert shorts to real videos.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yes. The way the default search now works is that, when you search you get:

  • Three or four videos that are actually from your search.
  • Some recommended playlists.
  • The shorts tray that vaguely has some content related to your search.
  • Maybe two or three more videos from the actual search.
  • "People also watch" recommendations.
  • "Shorts for you" recommendations.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thanks for the tip, I'll try that next time. Even though it's infuriating that it's necessary in the first place

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

for real the discovery is terrible. it's all junk and it's a waste of my time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] _cnt0 3 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

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.