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Places like Youtube are now a public platform serving many important purposes. Designing for addiction, vague policing, and arbitrary trends is a problem. Are t

by yipbub 3y ago

Places like Youtube are now a public platform serving many important purposes. Designing for addiction, vague policing, and arbitrary trends is a problem. Are the videos on YouTube worth a payment? Yes, but there is an arbitrarily frustrating and exploitative user experience that comes with it. I pay for premium, but have stopped watching Youtube out of frustration with the addictive nature. I will probably stop paying for it soon as it is currently harming me and designed to do so in exactly that way. I would pay more for something where I have more control over the content I receive and has a more transparent way of governing content creators, and slightly less power over content creators. Moderation is well and good and necessary, but Youtube has failed unrepentantly many times in this regard.

miohat 3y ago
You definitely have control over what you get from YouTube. You can delete certain type of videos from your watch history so that such video will disappear from the recommended list. Pretty easy. As for regulation, mega-platforms like YouTube are facing pressure from governments from all over the world, and each government has its own concern and requirements. It is pretty hard (or impossible) to come up with an explicit policy that satisfies every user and government.
- yipbub 3y ago
  To me, it seems to be merely the illusion of control. Sure, you can teach it what topics you prefer, but it'll always be tempting you with what is truly addictive and crap. Trying its luck like an adversary. It also punishes creators who create their content at a pace that's more sustainable for both producer and consumer. There's plenty of really good bait, but in the end a trap is a trap.
carlosjobim 3y ago
> Designing for addiction As if people haven't been addicted to watching TV for the past five decades. You decide for yourself what kind of content to get from YouTube, they don't force you into harmful habits.
- w-ll 3y ago
  > You decide for yourself what kind of content to get from YouTube, they don't force you into harmful habits. Have you ever used Youtube? Serious question? There is next to no way to tell them what kinda of content I want. I pay for YT premium and recently my Android tv youtube is full of sports/football games at the top, never i have watched a sports game on YT. Shorts are shoved down your thrown on desktop or mobile, even with paid thers no way to turn that off.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    If you subscribe to only high quality channels you will almost exclusively get high quality recommendations. Except for the shorts, those are a plague. I have a YT account only for the TV and the recommendations are incredible. If that doesn't work, you can use your subscription page as your entry to YouTube and you won't see any recommendations at all.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - dns_snek 3y ago
      That's not true in my experience, I only subscribe to the type of content I want to watch, but my homepage is still filled with tons of garbage. God forbid I watch a one-off video on a topic I'm not typically interested in, like woodworking. Current iteration of Youtube algorithm seems to boil down to "oh I see that you watched ONE woodworking video? Well half of your homepage is about woodworking for the next week!". I've started watching videos in incognito mode which I definitely didn't need to do a couple of years ago. Current Youtube UX is beyond terrible, half the time I can't even find what I'm looking for through search because they arbitrarily cut off real search results to push clickbaity dopamine-sucking content. If they want me to pay for Premium, they need to do more than just removing ads, the entire experience needs to feel, well, Premium. They could add customization options for the homepage and search results so we can remove shorts and all the "For you" crap, add knobs to tweak recommendations, return dislike counters which were the best way of quickly filtering out terrible/clickbaity/dangerous content. They could even add some power user features like being able to find videos by searching through their indexed transcripts rather than by the title alone.

by yipbub 3y ago

miohat 3y ago

You definitely have control over what you get from YouTube. You can delete certain type of videos from your watch history so that such video will disappear from the recommended list. Pretty easy. As for regulation, mega-platforms like YouTube are facing pressure from governments from all over the world, and each government has its own concern and requirements. It is pretty hard (or impossible) to come up with an explicit policy that satisfies every user and government.

yipbub 3y ago
To me, it seems to be merely the illusion of control. Sure, you can teach it what topics you prefer, but it'll always be tempting you with what is truly addictive and crap. Trying its luck like an adversary. It also punishes creators who create their content at a pace that's more sustainable for both producer and consumer. There's plenty of really good bait, but in the end a trap is a trap.

carlosjobim 3y ago

> Designing for addiction As if people haven't been addicted to watching TV for the past five decades. You decide for yourself what kind of content to get from YouTube, they don't force you into harmful habits.

w-ll 3y ago
> You decide for yourself what kind of content to get from YouTube, they don't force you into harmful habits. Have you ever used Youtube? Serious question? There is next to no way to tell them what kinda of content I want. I pay for YT premium and recently my Android tv youtube is full of sports/football games at the top, never i have watched a sports game on YT. Shorts are shoved down your thrown on desktop or mobile, even with paid thers no way to turn that off.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  If you subscribe to only high quality channels you will almost exclusively get high quality recommendations. Except for the shorts, those are a plague. I have a YT account only for the TV and the recommendations are incredible. If that doesn't work, you can use your subscription page as your entry to YouTube and you won't see any recommendations at all.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dns_snek 3y ago
    That's not true in my experience, I only subscribe to the type of content I want to watch, but my homepage is still filled with tons of garbage. God forbid I watch a one-off video on a topic I'm not typically interested in, like woodworking. Current iteration of Youtube algorithm seems to boil down to "oh I see that you watched ONE woodworking video? Well half of your homepage is about woodworking for the next week!". I've started watching videos in incognito mode which I definitely didn't need to do a couple of years ago. Current Youtube UX is beyond terrible, half the time I can't even find what I'm looking for through search because they arbitrarily cut off real search results to push clickbaity dopamine-sucking content. If they want me to pay for Premium, they need to do more than just removing ads, the entire experience needs to feel, well, Premium. They could add customization options for the homepage and search results so we can remove shorts and all the "For you" crap, add knobs to tweak recommendations, return dislike counters which were the best way of quickly filtering out terrible/clickbaity/dangerous content. They could even add some power user features like being able to find videos by searching through their indexed transcripts rather than by the title alone.