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> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over You can disable autoplay at
by tambourine_man 1y ago
> This means you can't hover your mouse in the gaps between columns while you scroll to prevent videos autoplaying when moused over
You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
- Levitating 1y ago> It resets itself every 15 days or so Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
- PaulHoule 1y agoIt seems to do that all the time. Try hiding YouTube shorts and they just come back.
- nobodywasishere 1y agoIf you turn off watch history it completely disables shorts as a whole (with no recommendations on the homepage as a side effect, but one I'm willing to live with). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795204
- nullc 1y agoThe no recommendations at all sure feels like malicious compliance with California privacy law. Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site. It's still better than having shorts on the screen.
- OJFord 1y agoYup yup yup. If you actually care about recommending things I'll want to watch, my subscriptions list is the strongest signal there is anyway, surely!
- xp84 1y agoThe word "want" is the key there -- they have zero interest in what you 'want' to watch, they have every interest in what will compel you to watch for the longest time! Maybe a certain person wants to watch a few 2-minute cute cat videos, and subscribe to those exclusively. But research showed Google that those people's watch minutes per day can be tripled if you fill their homepage with "Trump did WHAT?" videos (or whatever effectively baits their rage, makes them more afraid, or stokes some addiction or anxiety).
- PaulHoule 1y agoShort term yes, but long term it turns people away from YouTube. A year ago, I had a serious YouTube habit, once I replaced my trash Jellyfin server with a Plex server I can listen to my music collection on my phone anywhere… so no more music from YouTube. I got tired of asmongold and all his imitator gaming YouTubers, fell out of the habit of watching Ukraine warbloggers, etc. I saw other people who got into toxic rabbit holes in YouTube so bad that they decided to physically destroy their computers…
- mrguyorama 1y agoGambling has been around forever. Hyper aggressive slot machines do nothing to dissuade addicts, and dark patterns on the web are the same. They are trying to build addiction, and addiction doesn't care that something hurts to do, you need it. The few of us who go "ew" and recoil are vastly outnumbered by the billions who just watch. Every complaint about ads on youtube is someone who can't even be bothered to download an adblocker before Chrome killed it. It was one click, but that didn't dissuade the vast majority of eyeballs.
- 1y ago
- Agingcoder 1y agoThis is what I’ve done - YouTube is a much better place now.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoI love how passive aggressive the home page becomes: it momentarily displays a grid of thumbnails, then erases them and says, "Your watch history is off. You can change your setting at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you" with a button to do that.
- tambourine_man 1y agoIf you are not being sarcastic, yes, it happens all the time. Probably to maximize whatever metric they're measuring. I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
- jeffhuys 1y ago> I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good. Don't. Nowadays we can just re-introduce it, at least all who read this. iOS, macOS, Windows, Android... All have browser extensions, all can be modified.
- bunderbunder 1y agoConstantly. They also keep resetting the settings to not show shorts or video games in the feed. I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
- shrx 1y agoFirst it was "hide shorts". Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?). Now it is "show fewer shorts".
- cobbaut 1y agoThere is an 'unhook' add-on for Firefox that blocks all shorts forever. Highly recommended.
- pete1302 1y agoUsing Unhook for 4 years, I save recommendation using my phone and watch it later on PC.
- MaxikCZ 1y agoI wish there was something like this for safari on macos. Lately the option to disable ambient lighting around video has been reseting to ON for me on every video I open. I cant even formulate how I feel about that without breaking some rules somewhere
- acaloiar 1y agoThose who disable watch history probably know this, but others probably don't -- when you disable watch history your "subscriptions" page effectively becomes your home page. And on your subscriptions page, shorts cannot be removed like on the actual home page. So if you disable watch history, you implicitly must enable shorts. Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their team's stats.
- hackyhacky 1y ago> Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences? My preferences change all the time, regardless of Youtube. For example, when I was a kid, I hated mustard. On the other hand, my Youtube configuration may change independent of my actions.
- eatbitseveryday 1y agoMany websites do this. Facebook resets your feed sorting preferences, as does LinkedIn (sort by Recent, then refresh the page, it will be Top again).
- walt_grata 1y agoI used to have a cronjob to change them to what I want daily. Only worked for sites with an API, but was better than the user hostile "we know your preferences better than you" garbage.
- marssaxman 1y agoWith Facebook, you can get around this by bookmarking https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr and going there instead. It's worked reliably for years - though there's now so little of value there it hardly matters, I suppose.
- RankingMember 1y agoSee also: Spotify's "repeat" functionality. I turn it off whenever I see it on, but somehow it's always back on within a few days.
- driverdan 1y agoIn addition to what others said, they gaslight users by regularly resetting blocked accounts from recommendations. They also lose your play history after a while and start showing old videos you've watched as never been viewed.
- fuzztester 1y agonot op, but have seen the same. this is quite bad behaviour. they should not sneakily change our preferences behind the backs. similarly, all notifications, advertisements, et cetera, should be opt in, not opt out. many of these cos. do this sort of thing, of course. they excuse it under the protect of company policy. Google the ant letter as an example.
- fuzztester 1y ago>they excuse it under the protect of company policy. sorry, pretext, not protect. an autocorrect error.
- OtherShrezzing 1y agoYou can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter. Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
- mubou 1y ago> You can also set this in your browser with the _reduce motion_ parameter. Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result. They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.
- 47282847 1y agoFirefox: open about:config and add ui.prefersReducedMotion as a Number and set it to 0 (no) or 1 (yes) to override the OS setting. Chrome: command line switch: --force-prefers-reduced-motion --force-prefers-no-reduced-motion
- mubou 1y agoOhh!! Thanks so much for this, I greatly appreciate it.
- delecti 1y agoThat setting can be fairly sticky. Mine has stayed off since I initially disabled it, shortly after they added the "feature". I have no idea why it's not sticky for you. Maybe they fuck with me less because I have premium?
- lolinder 1y agoI don't have premium and it's sticky for me but only on a single computer, I have to reset it if I switch computers or browsers. Same with dark mode. So maybe it's stored as a cookie and they wipe their cookies?
- wpm 1y agoYes, it's stored client-side in a cookie. Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.
- tredre3 1y ago> It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime. It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.
- al_borland 1y ago> It resets itself every 15 days or so This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?
- autoexec 1y ago> I pay for YouTube Premium That's your mistake. Never pay someone to remove the same obstacles they've been putting in front of you. It's the definition of racketeering.
- hbn 1y agoI set that a long time ago and it never disabled. Maybe something with your browser?
- fuzztester 1y agoI too found that my auto play setting was ignored. this is in the YT app.