I’ve noticed YouTube specifically has become more addictive, I never used to be one to sit and scroll for long durations before but I often catch myself spending way too long on shorts now
Even people or older generations seem to be getting sucked in nowadays
I block shorts on youtube, I don’t care for short form content. Give me those hour long analysis type videos. Without shorts youtube still does a rather poor job at recommending new stuff.
That being said, shorts are being more addictive by nature since the barrier of entry to watch ‘one more’ is so low. If you engage with them on any app, you will waste more time on your phone.
Yes TikTok is a disease and I have it.
Your phone does too with all of their custom spyware…
🙄 I’ll bite. What custom spyware?
Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
Common. Steam does this. It’s behind a permission these days and nothing is custom or special about this in any way.
Other apps you have installed (I’ve even seen some I’ve deleted show up in their analytics payload - maybe using as cached value?)
Patched out and was common at the time via Androids API. Again zero secret sauce, most apps pulled this.
Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
Bullshit provide some verification in the least bit. It’s a random anonymous redditor mouthing off.
Whether or not you’re rooted/jailbroken
Again in the API patched out several years ago
Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds - this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
More unverified bullshit.
Pro tip: when your source is a random redditor who definitely worked for tiktok maybe consider for a second that someone is just making up bullshit and reaching to push their objective.
You’d think for being the most spyware app on the planet you could provide a source from a professional and not a redditor.
They set up a local proxy server on your device for “transcoding media”, but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication
Lemmy is not fantastic with condescending pricks like you posting comments.
You could have delivered your point without being an asshole about it.
👌
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The tiktok videos I get recommended are way too long and dense/informative for me to be able to watch too many at one time.
When I first started using it I made a point of skipping anything I considered dumb or any videos I couldn’t fast forward through. Now, it’s mostly all stuff about history and philosophy and I have to purposely search for new things. Still works way better than YouTube at recommending actually interesting content.
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How do you disable shorts?
Firefox has an addon called “Hide shorts for youtube”. I don’t use any other browser on any device.
Youtube reVanced has that option.
Not on iOS I guess
I too ignore shorts but I disagree with YouTube’s recommendations. It has gotten significantly better from even 2 years ago. I used to only watch my subscriptions, what I specifically sought out, or links from others. What YouTube recommended me was honestly confusing considering the amount of data they have on me and my interests. Now it’ll actually recommend general content I would watch. But also small YouTubers from the types of content I consistently watch. It’s pretty great.
That’s still pretty hit or miss for me. I’ve watched a video about cats exactly once a few weeks ago when my cat did something strange, and my recommendations are still littered with click-bait videos about certain cat behaviors. I watch tons of the aforementioned hour long analysis videos and I still need to resort to playlists compiling them instead of getting recommendations. To me, it seems the algorithm really wants to push certain types of content and will flood me with them if I so much as hover a video too long. But it really dislikes other types of content and almost hides them on purpose, despite me liking them. My best guess would be that longer videos have less ads per minute of content and are therefore not recommended as much, but I couldn’t tell, I started blocking ads on Youtube when they added a second ad banner back in the day - long before video ads were a thing.
I have premium so maybe that’s a reason. Also, if I watch a video I know YouTube will latch unto them I remove it from my watch history and heavily use not interested option.
Is it just me or did the recommendation algorithm become much worse a few years ago? I think there was a big update at some point and it’s sucked ever since. If feels like it remembers about the last 10 videos I watched. You were interested in topic XYZ a few months ago and there is lots of new content about it? Sure you don’t want to know anything about it!
I’m finding it to be the opposite. All content on YouTube and social media, including lemmy, seems to just be endless reposts of the same limited list of topics and memes.
Its become boring to the point where I’m just going back to specific interest forums websites for content.
People talk about how good algorithms are now, but they can’t figure out anything I actually want to watch nowadays
YouTube Shorts doesn’t even work properly for me. At least half the videos, that are suggested to me, I’ve already seen multiple times before. Boring, as you said. I’ve found myself staying off of social media or news sites more in the last couple of weeks. News’ll make me depressive, social media bores me. Then again, more time for hobbies!
more time for hobbies
Exaaaactly
I’m feeling the opposite lately. YouTube recommendations suck. I often open the app/page for the quick dopamine rush, but few of the recommendations interests me, so I just bounce off. For me, YouTube is mostly for long form content nowadays. Something I can put in the background while cooking/doing dishes.
Instagram is turning more and more like TikTok. Sometimes it recommends me something fun (like cat videos), but often it’s just nonsense. So I bounce off quite quickly there as well.
I feel happy about it.
Say no to shorts on every platform.
Even porn is getting shorts. What the hell is going on Internet?!
Really? Where?
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As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s I disagree.
They remind me of the d nickelodeon pictures that actually cost a nickel. I think you youngins should salute your shorts. It’s fun to watch wild and crazy kids doing stupid bottle tricks. Legends of the hidden temple in some state park nearby. It’s just cool stuff and you can’t do that on television.
I might agree with you if the shorts player wasn’t ass. Everything about it works differently to the video player, and everything about it pushes you to more shorts. Even on the video player I disable autoplay and the prev/next buttons, having a player built around those was DOA for me.
shorts are designed to be addictive. just don’t use them. otherwise, the platform hasn’t changed, you have
Shorts are new-ish to the platform. Like others that saw the success of TikTok (e.g., facebook with their reels, presumably instagram has something similar) they pumped out their own version to better trap people on the platform.
Same idea as ever but more addictive than before.
Shorts made it less addictive, they’re awful to watch and I invariably stop at one.
Perhaps you are experiencing a spike in your own addictive behaviour?
same with me. they’re awful and the content quality is depressing. but i think for many people shorts are the addiction
Oddly enough, there’s specific content only available through shorts that I would love to see (Scott Manley in particular does fantastic shorts), however I never see them because the shorts player invariably kills any enjoyment I may have be having at the time.
No matter what content exists on shorts, I will go out of my way to disable shorts altogether. If I could block the URL I would.
Recently? No, but maybe I’m in my own bubble. I’ve made my phone more boring intentionally. Getting rid of Reddit made me get off my phone a lot more. I really just mindlessly browse Lemmy and Mastodon now, and I run out of content on those.
If anything I’m less addicted to my smartphone now that Reddit got rid of the 3rd party apps.
I feel the exact opposite about you tube. I feel like there is nothing interesting to watch any more unless one of my follows post a new video
This just put me off YouTube, I get that they are trying to copy Tiktok’s addictiveness but I just don’t get anything out of short-form video content.
No? The opposite of anything, I consume media much more on my TV, PC and via my ereader recently.
My smartphone has mostly been relegated to a communications device the recent 3-6 months as I’ve lost the will to try to go through media on a needlessly tiny screen. Luckily though, I don’t have a commute any more. But when I did, I read books on the ereader during the train travel instead of being on the phone.
I’ve been considering just getting a dumb phone and maybe a kindle for entertainment
Problem is I want to be able to run apps like signal, WhatsApp, discord etc
I’ve noticed the recommendations suck now. It that’s their attempt at sucking me in?
Idk I am pretty addicted, but it’s like Netflix where I spend more time selecting than watching nowadays.
Kinda looking forward to Google making me fight for ad free YouTube. There is a 0% chance I will continue to use YouTube if there are any ads in my way. Even a stationary suggestion in my feed? Nope, fuck that. As soon as revanced is toast I’ll leave YouTube like I did reddit.
But the recommendations are God awful now.
It’s the opposite for me. I never consume shorts/tiktoks because they simply don’t interest me. Most of the things I watch are very in-depth (Flaw Peacock’s video essays are between 5-7 hours a piece).
Since I almost exclusively go for this long form content, I feel I have a lot more “say” in what I consume online.
If you can stay at this side of the fence concerning short form content you’ll be golden.
It’s been the opposite, I feel like I have to put in huge amounts of effort just to find something interesting. Most of the YouTubers I follow barely post anything anymore.
I’ve never found anything about those short video platforms appealing, yes there’s some creative people making great content on them but everything else is pretty much garbage.
My phone gets maybe an hour of use on a regular day and most of that is searching for music to listen to on Tidal.
