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Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Of all of the various online services, YouTube is the one where I feel I get the most value in return for paying for premium. 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free. (Well, except that so much of hobby YouTube is implicitly all ad because the video is about some piece of hobby gear, but that's sort of the nature of the beast.)

I've never watched a YouTube short.

My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.

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> 90% of my video and music consumption is through YouTube, and it's all ad-free.

If it works for you, great! Most video I watch is in the form of TV shows and movies. And Youtube sucks for that. Youtube is great for some hobby stuff. I used to like it for reviews, but even that sucks now - when I do a search I'm inundated with low effort reviews (i.e. by people who haven't used the product they're reviewing).

But if there's a creator you really like and follow, I can understand that.

> I've never watched a YouTube short.

Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?

> My recommendations are all very well aligned with my interests. The trick here is to go through your watch history and delete things that are leading the recommendation algorithm astray. I am ruthless about that.

I don't want to pay money and then have to do this. This is a pain I don't have to deal with in any other service.

> Don't you think they should give you an option not to present them to you, given that you don't watch them?

Yes, I certainly do! The fact that YouTube still tries to get me to watch Shorts every few weeks is 100% a user-hostile choice. Seems like basically every app these days does that kind of shit. It makes me sad, but it's pretty clearly in the set of things I can't change, so I try to just be mindful of the serenity prayer and accept it.

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