It's wild how disrespectful this is to viewers and content creators. Google literally couldn't care less what people want, it's just a machine that optimizes for whatever KPIs a given manager has that quarter, users be damned.

Of course Google doesn't have to care about users because they have a dozen different monopolies. It's sad that they were allowed to get to this point.

Vimeo.

Unless it’s Google’s price, and network effects you want.

In which case…well, they’ve already told you.

I tend to raise holy hell about Whatsapp because that's pretty clear antitrust and Zuckerberg lied

However with that also being said Google is a menace

"Jedi Blue" - the 2 big menaces, working as friends!

That is extraordinarily hostile to both creators and consumers.

Gotta pump those engagement metrics for shorts.

I personally feel it would be best to stop watching shorts itself, and I personally feel the best way to block it is using some chrome extension for atleast the desktop... I use

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-and-r...

Important content and information I want is on YouTube. I pay a YouTube subscription.

I have ADHD. YouTube shorts are poison. I don’t want them. I keep clicking “not interested”. They go away for a bit, they come back, I waste hours of my life scrolling through them before I notice. I click “not interested” 20 more times to get a few days relief…

Even when you’re the customer, you’re not the customer.

I haven't tried it, but I was able to search and find a greasemonkey script:

https://github.com/conifer215/hide-youtube-shorts

> Even when you’re the customer, you’re not the customer.

I think a better way to phrase "if you're not the customer, you're the product" is "we don't want your money, we want you".

The most irritating thing for me now is that YouTube doesn’t work in my browser anymore. Clearly being a/b tested because sometimes it does, and sometimes it spews out thousands of console errors and doesn’t load anything.

You don't have any old browser extensions by any chance? "Enhancer for YouTube" is an extension which has become unmaintained, and will break YouTube.

No I have a few privacy plugins/adblock but they all work fine with YouTube normally. I tried disabling everything. All the standard debugging tests.

Yes. Presently, with ublock origin on fairly default settings, YouTube causes an unresponsive tab that doesn't play the video, and a blast of errors on the console. Disabling UBO on youtube.com fixed the problem instantly for me (which is fine since I pay for YouTube Premium because it's the correct solution to the problem of "pay content creators and don't destroy my experience")

Make sure your uBO extension is fully up to date. No issues here but I did a couple days ago until I updated.