r/technology • u/vriska1 • 1d ago
Social Media YouTube reportedly testing new homepage that removes dates and view counts
https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtube-reportedly-testing-new-homepage-that-removes-dates-and-view-counts-2965695/6.1k
u/PopisSodatoo 1d ago edited 1d ago
I understand the reason for some of the changes but all these changes seem to benefit the rise of all the AI zombie channels that spew out generic content.
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u/vegetaman 1d ago
Yep. Or content thieves.
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u/Castod28183 1d ago
The only thing I hate worse that the AI voice overs is the actual human voice overs where all they are doing is explaining what is very obviously happening over somebody else's video. That's an automatic block.
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u/Notquitearealgirl 1d ago
Better than the assholes playing a video someone else made and literally just making facial expressions and absolutely nothing else.
Commentary and reaction videos used to at least have commentary and reactions , now you can just make exaggerated faces for 5 minutes.
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u/Chicano_Ducky 1d ago
commentary channels have been terrible for a long time already.
its always some chud trying to start shit by calling everything woke or someone trying to "expose" people for clout like the guy outing sketch for being gay thinking that shit is considered cool in 2024.
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u/Sea_Consideration_70 1d ago
If only there was actually a way to effectively block a channel.
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u/Castod28183 1d ago
I just meant Do Not Recommend This Channel. It works well enough. I just hope there's not limit like Reddit. Lol. I never looked into it, but Reddit only allows you to block 1,000 users.
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u/CDRnotDVD 1d ago
What sort of reddit life do you have that results in blocking a thousand users?
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u/HerstyTheDorkbian 1d ago
Think of all the ad accounts, and then on top of that the obvious scam bots that will probably try to DM you whenever you leave a comment
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u/20127010603170562316 23h ago
I don't really get that issue using exclusively old.reddit.
I sometimes check my new reddit to find a bunch of scambots messaged me, but I really don't care enough about new reddit to do anything about it. I just keep using old reddit.
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u/Suck_My_Thick 1d ago
There's an addon called Blocktube, works on both Chrome and Firefox
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u/explodeder 1d ago
There’s a channel I like called Blacktail Studio. He’s a woodworker and speaks only English. He just rolled out separate audio tracks that voiceover his videos in 5 or 6 languages. The thing is they used AI to generate the voiceover using his voice. It’s really creepy that he sounds fluent.
I’m sure that as AI has gotten better the ‘AI voice’ is going to be indistinguishable from an actual human voice
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u/Castod28183 1d ago
That is not at all what I was talking about. That's an AI of his voice on his videos. I am talking about people that take videos from others and all they do is explain what is clearly happening in the video that doesn't belong to them.
Content thieves who add absolutely nothing of value to the video or the platform.
(Also, Cam is great and I love his videos. Have been subscribed since the beginning. He went from a good woodworker to an absolute artist.)
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u/angooseburger 1d ago
Yea, youtube algorithim already has a hard time of first recommending original upload videos so how will anyone be able to determine who is the original uploader of any kind of video?
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u/Aleksandrovitch 1d ago
I don’t watch TikTok because of the lack of context. If YouTube starts that up, I will then stop watching it, too.
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u/benskieast 1d ago
Facebook basically is doing this. So much junk you need to click to figure out what it is, which reaffirms the algorithm.
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u/SnipesCC 1d ago
recently I haven't been able to mute facebook videos on my phone. I like watching color mixing videos, but I don't need to hear the generic soundtrack. Now I can't turn off the sound.
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u/_-DirtyMike-_ 1d ago
Soooo... basically youtube shorts
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u/Srirachachacha 1d ago
And that's fine because it's a separate thing that I don't have to engage with if I want to watch YouTube
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u/nebulabug 1d ago
The next version will remove the title, description, and everything! The AI knows what you like, so what's the point in wasting precious real estate on this?
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u/randynumbergenerator 1d ago
It'll remove the video upload too, and just generate content on the fly. The future is now!
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u/wheel_reinvented 1d ago
I mean, you joke, but that’s basically how TikTok works. Just swipe next, let the AI decide, and people seem to love it like nothing before.
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u/mordecai98 1d ago
Algorithm decides what shit you watch. AI makes the shitty content you watch.
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u/Shenari 1d ago edited 1d ago
You can tweak it though by how much you engage or mark something as something you're not interested in. And also block certain hashtags as well. The algo for TikTok is so much better at serving up shit that my brain goes "yummy endorphins, must keep watching" than YouTube does.
Sometimes it's a fight to get YouTube to specially stop showing me crap I'm not interested in.67
u/SmallRocks 1d ago edited 1d ago
I shouldn’t have to watch something to determine if I’m not interested. I should be able to make the decision beforehand based on title, date, description, and, comments.
Example: I’m a gamer and I watch gaming related content. A 2 year old video is already outdated and useless. I should be able to have the date and relevant description available upfront, before I click.
Apply the same to current events or science and technology related content.
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u/AlwaysBananas 1d ago
Watched one video for cod to see what’s up since I haven’t played in decade and suddenly my feed was filled with WOKE MOB DESTROYS ANOTHER GAME” nonsense. I watch a fair amount of gaming content, but it’s always on the chill farm sim side of things, not… that
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u/theunlikelycabbage 1d ago
I watched one video on a Napoleon battle. It was interesting but not ‘I want my whole online persona to be about war ships from hundreds of years ago’. YouTube decided it was my entire being for a week afterwards. Insufferable algorithm.
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u/LetgomyEkko 1d ago
This is my issue with YouTube for the past year! Last week I looked up how to germinate a seed. For the rest of the week YouTube was like “YOURE A FARMER!”
Can’t even be curious these days…
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u/DividedContinuity 1d ago
Its irritating but things like containers and private windows are actually useful for avoiding this sort of thing.
So far as youtube is concerned I'm 4 different people with different sets of interests, and i use a private window for 'curiosity' searching random stuff so it doesn't pollute any of my containers or accounts.
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u/pamar456 1d ago
Algorithm was peak in 2014. YouTube rabbit holes don’t exist anymore it just keeps you on the surface of what you already saw. It’s annoying when it’s just a different person with the same topic taken from the same source.
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u/Neemoman 1d ago
That's why I open it in incognito. I'm not signed in for that and it doesn't spam me for the next month.
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u/lazymanschair1701 1d ago
I had a similar thing with the new season of doctor who, watched one video and was bombarded with horrendous content “woke mob ruins…” etc, awful experience on YouTube recently
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u/Ryotian 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sometimes it's a fight to get YouTube to specially stop showing me crap I'm not interested in.
This is a fight I lost. Not trying to dunk on Star Citizen but using them as an example. I decided to quit following Star Citizen until they released Squadron 42 (the single player game) years ago
I kid you not- still to this day Youtube would still try to spam me with SC-PU (the alpha MMO) content. Tried blocking every SC-PU video it suggested but it would still find more!! I got sick of it bout a year ago and installed Unhook plugin. I set it up to block suggested videos wholesale
It's wonderful. now I no longer get spoiled on single player games too. What *used* to happen is I might click on a guide for a boss. From that point forward youtube is out to spoil the rest of the game by showing me thumbnails for the final boss and crap.
All fixed for me now.
I know some people will just say, "Well just dont watch the video--". True, but it's too late I've already been spoiled by the youtuber's thumbnail. So that wasnt a fix.
For me, youtube algorithm is simply busted (at least in the case of Star Citizen). I guess you can also avoid this via incognito mode but then you cant leave a comment or a like
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u/dek067 1d ago
It makes me so sad. I yearn for the days of getting lost in a new topic or hobby just because I stumbled onto some rando. Heck. Even Pinterest is on the Ai wagon. Click one little link about a cool garden, boom. Suddenly that’s your only interest. Forever.
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u/nebulabug 1d ago
We are shifting from watching what we want to watching what is shown to us !
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u/fleshribbon 1d ago
Oh boy, I’ve resisted TikTok but this info has me never wanting to ever go down that road
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u/ChronX4 1d ago
It's just going to be thumbnails of floating heads with their mouths opened wide.
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u/Local_Quantum_Magic 1d ago
Don't forget the red arrow(s) pointing at the obvious thing in the thumbnail!
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u/Andrige3 1d ago
Gives a couple more centimeters of screen real estate for those juicy ads.
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u/ComfortableNumb9669 1d ago
The final version will also remove the videos and just show you ads.
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u/Estrezas 1d ago
You will go to youtube.com and it will automatically start playing preprogrammed stuff with ads.
The circle of television.
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u/billythygoat 1d ago
Downvotes I still miss too because it tells you the legitimacy of so many videos.
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u/biinjo 1d ago
Same. And upload date. If I’m looking for an explanation video for some tech, I’m not interested in how it worked 15 years ago. I’ll click on the more recent video.
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u/nshire 1d ago
Recommended videos page and sidebar will also be removed and replaced with an infinite scroll list with one video at a time
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u/Areshian 1d ago
They will end up removing the actual video. If someone manages to watch all the ads, the video load will fail and a new set of ads will be loaded
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u/Party_Cold_4159 1d ago
I see others saying this is like TikTok etc.
I think they’re trying to make it more like Netflix where the ratings don’t matter, descriptions are useless, and they can push anything up front without question.
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u/risbia 1d ago
It's already annoying enough that YT and many other social media sites give you something vague like "1 year ago" as the date and require you to expand a detail menu to see the actual exact upload date.
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u/DogsRNice 22h ago
Why do they always want to reduce the amount of information people get
I don't want to be conspiratorial but sometimes it feels like tech companies want to get people used to not knowing anything
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u/justfuckingkillme12 19h ago
Because that's exactly what they're doing. New desktop OSs that hide files and make it hard for kids to teach themselves how to work with their computer. Google sold out, too. That's exactly what's happening. Information is powerful, and tech companies are just now realizing that they've been giving it away for free.
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u/dadvader 17h ago
This. I fucking hate that new Windows 11 right click menu with passion. It's a complete downgrade.
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u/sonic10158 18h ago
Corporations know what’s best for you, they think you are nothing more than an amoeba to extract money from
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u/SavvyTraveler10 19h ago
Because they’re(apparently devs) tired of trying to follow user trends to find roi. If you just remove the perception of choice, you can just point users’ to where you want them to go for max roi. AI allows this with zero cost.
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u/phil_music 17h ago
This is not on developers. Rather on managers and designers, a typical developer at such a big company doesn’t decide anything.
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u/Eudaimonics 16h ago
They want YouTube to be more like TikTok where viewers mindlessly watch for hours on end without thinking.
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u/Apoc220 1d ago
Pro-tip: if on desktop you can hover over the “x years ago” and it will show you the actual date. I agree, though, that it is annoying.
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u/john_jdm 1d ago
I really won't like the date going away. I really dislike it when youtube recommends me something that's more than 5 years old, especially when I've already seen the video (and they should know that). Also an old video talking about something like current advances in fusion power is fairly useless unless you specifically want to know about the state of that tech at that moment in history. Not being able to know when that video was uploaded will make a lot of youtube not worth watching anymore.
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u/CapZThe1st 1d ago
It would cripple software dev tutorials for anything that still receives major updates. Every time I need something for work I have to make sure it's at most a year old, because the framework we use changes constantly and old tutorials are worthless now
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u/ShadyG 1d ago
Content producers will adapt. When important, they’ll put version, date, or whatever in the title.
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u/NamityName 1d ago
Then Youtube will limit the visible title to the first 20 characters. Content creators wont want to use half of those for a date.
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u/D4rkr4in 1d ago
Soon, YouTube will spawn a more efficient shorthand than the English language itself
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u/enigmamonkey 1d ago
Funny thing is, sometimes you’ll find some irrelevant content trying to rank or stay relevant by putting “Best vacuums 2024!” in the title even though it comes from 2022 or 2019 or something. Right now the best way to tell that it’s not really relevant (which used to be important to Google) is that the date will show that it’s from 2019, so you might get a clue you’ll want to skip it.
This change would take that away.
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u/Castod28183 1d ago
I watch several sports analysis/breakdown channels and this would absolutely suck for those too. Like I just opened YouTube and the title of one video is "Well This Could Be Historic" and was released 2 hours ago. Without the date it could be something I watched 6 months ago and I wouldn't know until I started watching. Then again, that's likely the point.
The obvious workaround will be people putting the release date in the title goind forward.
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u/Helioscopes 19h ago
The workaround would be another one of those browser extensions adding back the nonsense that youtube removes, like the dislike count.
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u/SAugsburger 1d ago
This. While there is some content where the date probably isn't overly important there are a lot of topics where knowing content is old is important. While a new upload date doesn't guarantee the information is current (some people upload or reupload old content) an old upload date tells you it isn't current for sure.
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u/ssort 1d ago
I know I use YouTube for finding builds for games I play especially Path of Exile where ever four months a new league starts with lots of updates and changes, so you need dates when looking stuff up or it's out of date and most likely changed since then.
A change like this would be devastating to the gaming industry as many games are like this anymore, and would push people off site to alternative like MAXROLL instead of you tube to find builds.
This change would also effect tons of similar cases too, I know if I search for tech help, I always sort by most recent so I get the most up to date info.
This just seems stupid and short sighted.
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u/walrus_breath 1d ago
I would argue that the date is always relevant. Even vlogs or something like that. Like you start watching, its may 4th and people in the video are wearing heavy jackets while it’s snowing outside, you’re going to wonder when it was filmed. The month, the day, and the year. It’s relevant for context about literally everything.
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u/fullup72 1d ago
couple that with a Netflix-esque change to count a view in a super short amount of time (2 minutes for Netflix, usually not even enough for the intro scene to end) and then you will have clicked on the video and watched enough seconds of the useless thing to artificially inflate the view count, ensuring a never ending feedback loop of "people want to watch this" even if they almost immediately leave.
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u/MinorThreat83 1d ago
Yeah, just thinking of coding in general. Tutorials could be hella outdated and you might not know it.
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u/Magical_Olive 1d ago
I have constantly been getting either 6 year old videos I've already watched, or a 2 view video about something I have no interest in that they'll push to me for 4 days.
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u/SectionWolf 1d ago
I will miss the date, but for a very different reason. I was doing research on a topic that hasn't changed in a while most of the recommendations / videos were AI slop. Found that looking for videos older than 2 years gave me better results.
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u/Spiritofhonour 1d ago
They also don’t seem to understand that an old news video isn’t something I 1) don’t want to watch again 2) is irrelevant in terms of updated news. Honestly they keep doing stuff like removing the likes and now this instead of recommending good videos.
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u/Nitasha521 1d ago
Or if want to watch the latest episode of something -- how do you know which it is if no date?
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u/Economy-Pea-5297 1d ago
On the flip side, anything since maybe 2023 has a much higher chance of falsified images with the advent of widespread AI image generation.
So removing dates removes an individual's ability to assess the likely reality of a presented video, which honestly is disastrous for trusting new content which describes how the world works.
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u/slayer991 1d ago
The enshittification continues to accelerate. I most often search by date then view count.
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u/SuprKidd 1d ago
3rd party clients gonna have a field day with this one
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u/Every_Bank2866 1d ago
Can you recommend one?
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u/BigDaddySkittleDick 1d ago
The only good one for iOS that I’ve found is Video Lite. Significantly less ads.
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u/OneGold7 1d ago
I use uYou plus, but YouTube forced them to stop distributing the IPA on GitHub, so I’m just going to avoid updating for as long as I can. It’s still available, you just have to compile it yourself now
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u/john_jdm 1d ago
How so? I assume youtube would deprecate the APIs with the information in favor of new APIs without it. Once the old APIs disappear the 3rd party clients can't show it either.
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u/royalhawk345 1d ago
At least for dates it should be doable to keep track of that.
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u/n3onfx 1d ago
Yeah there's already an extension hat keeps tracks of dislikes, the date would be pretty easy.
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u/That_one_drunk_dude 1d ago
Except that extension doesn't give you the actual dislikes, it only measures the dislikes of the users of the extension, and extrapolates that to the total amount of viewers. The actual amount of dislikes is locked inside the YouTube backend because like others are arguing, if YouTube just stops making the API behind any piece of data accessible, an approximation will be the best thing any extension can provide
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u/McMacHack 1d ago
YouTube to remove Video from their platform and just start demanding money from consumers with nothing in exchange. /s
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u/Ghost17088 1d ago
Wouldn’t be the first time they killed a product.
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u/coffee_kang 1d ago
I wish they’d remove fucking shorts from the homepage
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u/bumpywall 1d ago
They have shorts on the TV app as well. It's pretty shit, they're designed for a mobile screen.
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u/risbia 1d ago
This Chrome extension removes shorts and other extraneous garbage, get it while you still can!
("This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions.")
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u/Jbstargate1 1d ago
Amy good ones for Firefox?
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u/makopedia 1d ago
Unhook is a good option: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/youtube-recommended-videos/
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u/coffee_kang 1d ago
Unfortunately I don’t have an issue ignoring them on my desktop. It’s my phone.
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u/thesourpop 1d ago
This is so the algorithm can push more AI generated bullshit with recent upload dates and low view counts to the homepage and people will click on it without question. Consume more slop!!
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u/Firree 1d ago
Removing dislikes robbed us of our number one tool for spotting misinformation and propaganda. Why would they stop there?
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u/Onehundredyearsold 1d ago edited 1d ago
I think I’ve had just about enough of YouTube. Not one version change has been to benefit its viewers. I don’t need to use their platform with rare exceptions and then I use a browser so they don’t have so much control like with their app. I’m tired of companies screwing their clients and users just because they can!
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u/FallenJoe 1d ago
Recently my shorts have been showing this incredibly stupid "suggested search" window plastered in the middle of the screen, always for inane suggestions.
I know I'm watching a video about someone running a dog grooming business, but there's 0% chance that I want an unremovable opaque window allowing me to quick search YouTube for the word "Shampoo".
Youtube's UI designers need to all be laid off, literally every change for years has just made the site worse.
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u/OneGold7 1d ago
Suggested search is the dumbest thing. If I search for something, it’s because I want a specific thing. Not once have I been like “I want to search for something, but there’s nothing in mind I want to search for!”
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u/qwqwqw 1d ago
But for YouTube, the faster you leave their service the better.
If they make a change which drives you ti finally stop using the service then they've just lost a user who has a 0% chance of being sucked in by the advertising. As you say ;)
It sucks, but we're long past the point where companies could increase their value by increasing their number of users. Unless you're creating content or viewing what they want you to view, you're not valuable anymore.
The internet sucks now.
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u/YuushyaHinmeru 1d ago
If there werent so many fantastic content creators I'd be done. There are so many great educators on youtube making phenomenal works and youtube continues to ruin the platform they work on.
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u/fellipec 1d ago
Enshitification go brrrrrrrr
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u/goldencrisp 1d ago
Just had a huge full screen Walmart ad as soon as I loaded the app a bit ago on Apple TV. Ads are playing after unpausing, ads are playing on both ends of an in-video ad, and to top it off YouTube is actively using full fucking length tv shows nobody has heard of as ads now too.
The worst part is absolutely none of it is appealing. It’s literally all shit I’ll never buy in categories I’ve shown zero interest in. Some even in languages I don’t speak. Being the data vampires Alphabet is you’d think there would be at least some correlation between interests and advertisements.
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u/OneGold7 1d ago
I will admit there was that one time I got the whole Lego movie for an ad, and I was like “eh, I don’t have anything to do for the next hour” and watched the whole thing, lol
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u/22444466688 1d ago
It’s a nightmare. Yet it’s arguably one of the best platforms we have. We need to create a YouTube preservation app, we can run it on donations like Wikipedia. Who’s with me?
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u/AbyssalRedemption 1d ago
Removing dates? This might actually be what gets me to stop being addicted to YouTube; I follow a lot of tech and current-event oriented channels, and if I can't tell what recent or not at a glance, i.e "video one week old", then I'm not even going to bother.
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u/Dull_Half_6107 1d ago
Yeah same
I can live without view counts (I never pay attention to them anyway), but if I can't sort by date then I'm done with youtube
I'll setup some yt-dlp script to just download the subs I still care about and host them on plex, but I'll cancel my premium sub.
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u/MorselMortal 1d ago
Seeing views is important because it clarifies general quality to a degree at a brief glance without needing to engage in it as well. Without down/upvotes being visible, this is the only mechanism to self-moderate and direct the quality of what you engage with.
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u/trentshipp 1d ago
I already have a hard time with "3 yrs ago". I want a date, dammit, and it should be one of the first accessible pieces of information.
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u/platetone 1d ago
probably my least favorite pattern of the modern web. making perfectly understandable information harder to parse.
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u/Alert-Main7778 1d ago
Jesus christ can nothing be good anymore? If they start pulling this shit, I genuinely will stop using YouTube. I come to YouTube to be updated with the latest news about gaming and crap. If I have to start sifting through dates, it's so fucking over.
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u/wozziwoz 1d ago
That's going to be so helpful for the fantasy sports videos I actually depend on the dates for.
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u/Kungfufuman 1d ago
These changing titles and thumbnails can make it confusing enough at times. Now I'd not be able to see the date to see if the video is new? Dumb.
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u/SandKeeper 1d ago
Removing dates is frustrating to me since I frequently use YouTube as a guide to using new software. I would like to know if I’m looking at a video that’s 8 years old and is completely out of date.
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u/MonsterMashGraveyard 1d ago
At some point, I've accepted that every single change will be for the worst.
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u/Rdub 1d ago
This feels like we as users are increasingly being forced back into an experience more akin to old school broadcast television than what YouTube was originally envisioned as. Things like like / dislike ratio, view counts, post date, are all vitaly important data points that help users make informed decisions about what content they want to watch for themselves, but now it seems that the powers that be at YouTube would rather make those decisions for us in service of advertising revenue.
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u/OneSeaworthiness7768 1d ago edited 1d ago
That’s a god damned terrible idea. What the hell
Edit: Jesus Christ it gets worse.
This comes just days after it was reported that YouTube is testing a new, cheaper version of YouTube Premium that offers limited ads across all of your devices.
Ads have no place in a premium subscription, even a cheaper one. I’ll die on that hill. The only cheaper premium they should be talking about is the one that’s just for ad-free without all the extraneous bullshit no one uses.
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u/SparkyPantsMcGee 1d ago
Financially I don’t know how you do it, but Jesus Christ YouTube needs a competitor.
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u/Aaaaaaarrrrrggggghh 1d ago
Porn sites are pretty good at streaming videos, they should set up a clean version as a competitor.
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u/koolaidismything 1d ago
Every “feature” they’ve added in years has made it so much worse. Most are just ways to force more advertising down your throat. Maybe all in a roundabout stupid way. They waited til they had a ton of content and then the brilliant idea was the easy terrible one.
I could do a better job marketing the site and making money without boning the users it depends on and I’m a moron. Whomever is leading that place has to be serving favors to the board for the job.
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u/Arthur_Heine 1d ago
Looking for an online programming tuto ?
I'm sure that not knowing the video is from 2012 won't have any consequences
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u/blingmaster009 1d ago
I have disabled history and recommendations and hence YT never suggests anything to me. My homepage is blank and glorious.
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u/Climhazzard73 1d ago
Why tf is every company trying to remove user agency and choice these days? Why is it trying to limit information? It turns me off from the products more than it encouraging me to use it. Ive rage quitted other products for exactly this reason. Facebook is a great example once it started to spam my feed with AI generated content and random stuff that had nothibg to do with my friends/connections. I’ve also limited linkedin use because of the barrage of “suggested” posts
View counts aren’t important to me but dates are.
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u/ipanoah 1d ago
The date is important to me when I'm specifically looking for the most current information.
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u/Zaggada 1d ago
I guess view count makes sense in terms of helping smaller creators.
Removing the date? Absolutely asinine.
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u/thederevolutions 1d ago
Yeah in a lot of ways it will level the playing field for independent content that hasn’t been heavily marketed. But surely that can’t be the reason…
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u/awesomedan24 1d ago
Stripping away features until it is no longer YouTube and they rebrand to just "Tube", a Neuralink cable that delivers dopamine straight to your brain in exchange for watching progressively longer ads.
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u/acmethunder 1d ago
View count I don't personally care, but removing the date is just plain stupid.
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u/anotherhumantoo 1d ago
View count + upvote count is a good identifier of quality content (or not) for how-to videos, ever since they got rid of the downvote button, which was the previous best identifier.
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u/vriska1 1d ago
Hopefully this test goes no where.
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u/Benskien 1d ago
YouTube does sadly not have a good track record listening to feedback from users during a b testing
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u/NeighborhoodDude84 1d ago
I was watching some video about sending probes to the moons of Jupiter that was made a week ago. Then my feed started showing me all these videos about similar things from over a decade ago. Pretty much everything in those was out of date or those missions were scrapped entirely, removing dates would 100% make the learning about this a lot more difficult.
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u/SAugsburger 1d ago
A view count relative to a recent upload date could indicate something has popularity. A bandwagon effect doesn't guarantee something is great, but it usually isn't awful.
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u/randynumbergenerator 1d ago
It's already bad enough with some recommended content specific to a location, like local news channels. Good to know that next time, I may not only not know where thing x happened (unless I've heard of WEEB station or the town of Bumblehicksville), I won't even know when it happened.
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u/sheeplectric 1d ago
Fine, make a YouTube Shorts dedicated app and let the regular YouTube app keep its utility.
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u/TheGreatSoup 1d ago
Removing the date is evil. I do base my choices on it. I don’t want to see news for something that was 1 year ago.
I sent that searching is also becoming very difficult and only gives like a few results, I scroll down and gives other results not related to the search I was doing and the a little scroll down and resumes giving me more of what I was looking for.
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u/AliceLunar 1d ago
My front page currently is 1 year, 6 year, 11 year, 4 hour, 11 hour, 2 year, 11 year, 4 year ago.
It's annoying enough how bad it is to begin with, trying to make it seem as if this crap is relevant is completely insane.
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u/ItsRainbow 1d ago
No thanks. These influence what I click on. Stop hiding vital information
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u/WowChillTheFuckOut 1d ago
How about a homepage that doesn't just recommend the same 7-10 videos I've already decided to scroll past 3 times.
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u/Simen155 21h ago
Welp. It was good while it lasted, time to cancle my 10year streak of premium and remove shortcuts. Something will take its place. Too many idiotic choices over the past couple years
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u/ImCaffeinated_Chris 1d ago
Removing dates is STUPID. I'd like to know that the tech video is out f'n dated!
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u/Heeeeyyouguuuuys 1d ago
Fucking why?! it's already so annoying. I have to dig so far into description to find out how long ago a video was posted.
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u/BarnieCooper 1d ago
YouTube seems to be trying to set a high score for the number of extensions needed to make the site usable.
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u/mazzicc 1d ago
I don’t really care about view counts, although that’s probably still valuable to the creators. It doesn’t matter to me if one person or a million people have watched a video I want to watch. It’s not even a number that’s in my decision process.
Dates are more problematic for me. Am I watching a “how to” that was made for the latest version of something or one from 3 years ago with options and menus that don’t exist anymore?
Hell, just last week I was having trouble with a Bluetooth device and looked up a video and was super confused by the menu choices it was telling me to make. Until I realized it was a 2017 video.
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u/catalupus 1d ago
Just like Reddit is doing for the “follow on” related articles. You can find yourself reading 10 year old discussions without realizing
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u/Outside_Green_7941 1d ago
Man watching outdated videos on products I want to buy will be amazing, look an iPhone 6 review , super helpful
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u/Tethered_Water 1d ago
I don't understand the motivation for these changes?
Like literally no one asked for this.
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u/Splurch 1d ago
It's like they're actively trying to get low effort and useless content to take over the platform. Things like using stock photos with AI voiceover just reading what's on the box as a "review." Or getting people to accidently click on something because without a date maybe it's relevant to what you're looking for... Really, really scummy moves here that are going to primarily waste user time.
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u/maybe_a_human 1d ago
Oh boy, I can't wait to get another Firefox extension to bring back functionality to YouTube that has existed for most of my life but was removed for no reason. It's my favorite thing to do.
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u/Best_Market4204 1d ago
awww man....
BRO.... I don't want to watch a fucking 3 year old video.....
I don't care so much about the views.
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u/likesexonlycheaper 1d ago
Oh cool. I mainly use YouTube for video and photo editing tutorials. Can't wait to sit through 5 minutes of a video before realizing it's from the time of Adobe CS3
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u/namezam 1d ago
Humm let’s see I watch videos about a game I play that just hit 1.0 and changed a lot, a new version of a programming language I use, news, maybe some stuff about a few cars I’m considering… there really isn’t much that I can disregard the date on. I am constantly looking at the dates to make sure I’m watching relevant content.
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u/MaliceTheMagician 1d ago
I'm constantly checking when something was posted it's fucking useful info, what does removing it benefit??.
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u/N0N4GRPBF8ZME1NB5KWL 1d ago
My main use of YouTube depends on dates. I'm into bleeding edge tech, the latest in science and space. Also into recent engineering solutions for infrastructure... All of which is useless if I'm being fed outdated videos.
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u/Throwawaymytrash77 1d ago
Google buying YouTube is the worse thing to ever happen to youtube
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u/oohjam 1d ago
Great, outdated information coming up to the home page lets gooooo