Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction

From my experience, YouTube recommendations on Apple TV suck compared to the home feed you get when you open YT on iOS. I was pleasantly surprised when I opened YouTube on mobile after a long time, it actually felt like what YouTube used to be with a wide variety of new and interesting videos (plus added shorts and posts).

I think Google needs to look into optimizing it better for those of us who prefer watching YouTube on TV.

What’s funny and sad is that the evolution of YouTube toward a chum feed that pulls people toward rubbish may have broken some peoples addiction but overall it has probably increased it.

One of the things that flabbergasts me about YouTube and TikTok is the utter bilge that people will watch. TV had some of this: trash daytime TV, late night infomercials, soaps to some extent. But the stuff social media runs on today is a whole other level.

If you went back in time and told me that millions would spend endless hours watching other people play video games while monologuing about nothing and randomly doing the same juvenile reactions over and over, I would not have believed you. Same goes for obvious zero effort AI slop, machine voices reading Reddit posts to a slide show background, incoherent rambling, or for kids videos of people unboxing toys for eight hours… it’s just astounding.

There seem to be these “hooks” that if mastered can take the place of plot, aesthetics, information, and everything else, and mesmerize people.

Sometimes it seems like the banality and bizarre nonsensical nature of it is the hook, like people just want to stare at nothing.

Their changes are so bad that someone made a browser extension to jump straight to your subscriptions so you never see the homepage (my watch history was off already and I didn't like the homepage telling me to turn it on).

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ytmysubs/

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/lfoephndcoilebphhdb...

You still get shorts in search results :(

This seems to be ip-address-based. Change your ip if feasible, possibly using a vpn, and you can likely bypass that.

Or you could just do the healthy thing and walk away from YouTube. Plenty of better things to do with one’s time!

If it's Android, you can install NewPipe.

For my Kodi box that is connected to a 24" monitor in my bedroom, the Youtube plugin used to work, but it got slower and slower. I've now created a PHP wrapper to yt-dlp, I load the webpage (hosted on my NAS) on my phone, paste the video URL, click download, and a while later the video is an MP4 video stored on my NAS, ready to view on Kodi.

You seem to suggest that you have a device which does not allow you to watch YouTube videos on it without ads. Is that the case?

The uBlock Origin browser extension removes all YouTube ads. It works fine on Firefox, even on mobile. With Chrome, it is possible to use the "lite" version of this extension that seems to block at least the YouTube ads without issue.

On Android, there are several apps which can do it, for example NewPipe or Grayjay. At least NewPipe works fine on Android TVs as well. Also on Android TVs, it is possible to use Kodi with YouTube and InputStream Adaptive add-ons which can also be used to watch YouTube without ads.

I would avoid buying devices which claim to support YouTube but do not allow watching it without ads, for whatever reason.

PipePipe? https://pipepipe.dev/

EDIT: also skips sponsor segments.

Well, just pay for the subscription. It gives you youtube music as well, and you can share it with several other people. It just a few bucks a month, totally worth it.

Piggy backing.

I can't use YouTube without a handful of extensions. I use waterfox.

Ublock origin. Enhancer for Youtube. Sponsorblock. DeArrow. Privacy Badger.

Enhancer does the heavy lifting while DeArrow unshittifies all the titles/thumbnails. Ublock gets most the ads. Privacy Badger increases load time significantly. Sponsorblock skips those sponsor ads.

I support creators directly through patron or merch. I don't wanna see their ads and there isn't really a way to avoid them in most cases.

Have you tried a filter list for shorts?

Something like this? https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts

I find shorts actively annoying.

Every once in a while I click on one because it's not just a small tidbit from a longer video, and every time I get annoyed the feature exists and don't want to see another one for a long time.

I don't understand Shorts. My primary use case for YouTube is putting some 20-30 min video on the TV while I eat. I barely watch YouTube in any other context.

I may be unusual but there's an entire subreddit for "mealtime videos" so this use case must be common.

> disabling watch history also disables Shorts.

I have YouTube watch history disabled and when I search for something I usually get a few "lines" of search results filled with "Shorts".

With uBlock Origin browser extension it works just fine even without logging in.

I do believe they send you some notification or mail if you watch over 50 hours a week.

They have ruined recommendations, too, a long time ago. They ruined search, too. If you search for something, it will give you maybe 5 results at best, and as you scroll down, the rest is totally unrelated to the searched term. YouTube has been ruined a long time ago.

Because you have not pressed “do not recommend channel”. That is the best youtube feature.

I was going to comment this. My experience matches yours, the home page shows videos I may be interested on watch, and the subscriptions page shows videos from my subscriptions. Watch something new and you get related videos for a couple days, but ignore those and they disappear. I also like the occasional videos from old subscriptions or old watched videos, reminders from time to time.

I do not have the paid subscription though, but I do use only android (never web).