Hacker News Reader

Comment by yipbub | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Like I wrote, use your subscriptions page as your YouTube homepage, and you wont be pestered by irrelevant stuff. I also have a separate account for watching work or hobby related instructional videos or other crap, so as to not mess up the recommendations on the TV. YouTube makes it very easy to switch between several accounts.

YouTube search results are awful, can't disagree with you on that. The same for shorts. Searching for videos on Kagi or FreeTube instead of inside YouTube can be a better option. I've also noted that YouTube search results are much better on the TV than on desktop, and that they don't suggest "Others also watched.." crap there.

As for premium, I only consider it that I'm paying for the bandwidth to have the videos delivered to my computer, phone and TV without any ads. Just for that, it is incredible value already. Adding the features you list would make it even better.

TV also followed that addictive formula though, because it too was just a means to show you ads.

Recommendations, promotion, automatically playing a related video after the one you watched ended, etc.

Even a landing page with "tailored for you" or "currently popular" is a distracting attention grab, and that attention grab leads to the addictive nature.

Combine that with how those YouTube recommendations and search rankings seem to prioritize click bait titles and cover image, and yes, I think you can start forming a thesis that in-fact, they are trying to force you into more screen time spent watching more YouTube videos.

What's TV got to do with anything? Your whole argument is wrong. People have written books and books about how a technology encourages a particular way of interacting with it and discards the rest. Youtube carefully encourages addictive watching. Blaming the victims and saying "it's your fault" is an argument from two decades ago, before we knew better.

Because people want to zone out with their addictions. If they didn't have YouTube or endless scrolling, they'd stay in front of the TV just as their parents or grand parents, and if they didn't have that they'd spend every evening drinking and playing cards or dice for money.

I wouldn't call somebody who sits and watch YouTube clickbait "a victim".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com