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?
https://www.boredpanda.com/tik-tok-reverse-engineered-data-information-collecting/
Common. Steam does this. It’s behind a permission these days and nothing is custom or special about this in any way.
Patched out and was common at the time via Androids API. Again zero secret sauce, most apps pulled this.
Bullshit provide some verification in the least bit. It’s a random anonymous redditor mouthing off.
Again in the API patched out several years ago
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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https://www.boredpanda.com/tik-tok-reverse-engineered-data-information-collecting/
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
Well, there’s your first problem
I can’t be arsed with wasting time to try to degoogle an android phone and keep my banking applications working.
Apple is good enough for me :)
I don’t touch google products or services, and fully agree.
Plus, iOS is fucking stellar. Every phone I’ve had from them is blazing fast after YEARS of NEVER REFORMATTING
(Posting from my XS Max that I’ve never reformatted lawl)
Yeah, I too noticed android phones usually go to shit after a few years. Even formatting doesn’t fix them entirely, and I never play games on mobile
Saaame. I loved my android phones before I switched over, but it’s soooo nice to have a phone that works smoothly for so long without fucking about with custom ROMs.
But maaaan this site fucking hates Apple hahaha
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!