I dislike the general trend towards platforms feeling compelled to blindly imitate the various interaction mechanisms from platforms. Sometimes I just want to Instagram on Instagram. But then they had to follow-the-leader, so now you can Snapchat on Tiktok, or TikTok on Instagram. Companies are compelled to do many things haphazardly instead of one (or a few) things well.

This is simultaneously coupled with a growing trend towards disallowing any type of UI customization. You will take our experience and you will like it. How dare you want to turn off our faux Tiktok bullshit that our developers spent so many months plagiarizing.

Sorry I can't really contribute to your question, but would anyway like to take the opportunity to air my grievances: I hate Youtube shorts and TikToks with fierce passion. The format of short videos makes sense and is a good idea to some extent, but who the hell decided we're not allowed to rewind our videos anymore? I want to hunt down that person, go to their house at night and tell them that they are not very good at their job so loud that their whole family can hear it.

Youtube shorts being visually hard to tell the difference but being in my sub lists AND breaking the queuing is obnoxious. I have been cutting myself off from google products as much as I can, they are just so shitty now.

Personally I like the YT/YTMusic cross. I listen to the same music in the car or at work that I do at home in YT fairly often. I just hate shorts and wish they'd get the fuck off my homepage. That "hide for 30 days" button is so aggravating.

I personally despise yotuube shorts. I use rules in my ublock origin to block them so I don't see them on my youtube page.

I hate shorts and I hate seeing them in my subscription feed.

Glad you called it out. Hate this forced crossed contamination.

I make it a point to not engage with any of the shorts content - especially since they deliberately made it difficult to add to watch later list. My time is held hostage in that moment and FUCK if that isn't a great way to get me to not engage with that bullshit, even if I was interested in the content.

Sorry. You lost me at "YouTube Music" 😄

I think I used to use a brand account just to separate my music subscriptions and regular subscriptions. I'm not sure if it affected suggestions though.

My main gripe is with movies. After a while, the simlar video recomentaions are filled with "Free with Ads" movies. I don't even watch movies on Youtube. Its annoying.

I usually have to clear cookies to get rid of them.

I don't have a google account. You can find the RSS feed of channels you like in their accounts sites source code and just use a feedreader (I can recommend feedbro) to follow them. Also: Use sponsorblock in addition to your normal adblocker. Shorts I skip, music I listen to from other sources.

The enshittyfication is getting strong over at yt

That's one of the most significant reasons I stopped using YouTube Music.

I just browse music with a different account than I do regular youtube. The shorts dont bother me too much conceptually but I absolutely hate the player with how it doesnt have media controls and forces a portrait mode(especially when im watching youtube on my tv and laptop)

I have separate profiles for youtube music and youtube, for this exact reason.

I miss Google Play Music, it was way better in terms of recommending music and plus you could buy albums to gain access to them if they, for example, had rights issues in terms of streaming.

There's literally artist who I used to listen to just fine on Play Music that I now can't listen to their albums anymore because they're still not on YouTube Music.

And Play Music's algorithm for continuous play was way better than YouTube Music.

For a quick example of albums that are broke on YouTube music, Breakfast in America by Supertramp. On YouTube Music the album is missing 3 songs, I have to go to someone's playlist they put together to listen to the album in full. On Play Music I could just buy the album to fix that problem but now I can't.

And yeah the cross contamination of content on the 3 platforms is also annoying.

The shorts thing is because many YouTubers only have 1 channel that they upload a mixture of content to their channel, so shorts and full length videos get mixed in when you sub. Which makes sense.

Not a YouTube music user but I've started to use the shorts to find new creators since my video feed has gone stale. That's the frustrating since I just want a long form video to leave on but find myself doom scrolling on shorts looking for something new.

I don't do much except reading on mobile so can't comment from that perspective. On desktop youtube shorts is just toxic. I keep clicking the X to get rid of them but that only works for 30 days. I often just close my browser tab now if I scroll and see a row of shorts.

I want nothing to do with shorts. If a video isn't long just have it play in the regular video player. There's also no valid reason to encourage people to shoot vertical video, it hurts my brain. The absolute worst though is there being no volume control. Love having my ear drums wrecked if a short opens up.

@greenskye Basically Google is looking to turn YouTube into a social media of sorts. And it's trying various stuff and sees what sticks.

What I find irritating is seeing the long-form video channels that I watch repeatedly pushing new shorts videos to keep up with the algorithm and draw traffic, but because they don't do a lot of quick daily vids they break up old videos into multiple shorts. So now my feed is full of snippets of videos from months ago, and it makes it harder to know when there's actual new content to see.

I wish I could at least separate my likes list by content type. I hit like/dislike on shorts way more frequently than long-form videos to train that algorithm, but when I go into that list, I'm usually trying to find a long-form video from a while back.

I can't stand Shorts. I don't even mind the aspect ratio so much, but the lack of a scrubber or even time information is a dealbreaker for me. I wrote an adblock rule to remove them from the website UI, but it is a bit of a bummer how much content is only in Shorts.

Edit: And the looping!!! Ugh

Yeah I have no interest in Shorts (or TikTok for that matter), but I'm probably aged out of their target demo anyway. I do think, as a general point, platforms shouldn't be trend-chasing each other. YT does longer form video well. TikTok does vertical video shorts. I say stick to your core competencies.

I really really liked Google play music. When they killed it I tried YouTube music, liked a few artists, then went to my normal YouTube subscriptions saw it was flooded by dumps from those artists and unsubbed and never looked back.

Spotify isn't nearly as good as gpm but ytm is a non starter for me for exactly this reason.

YouTube doesn't care though, they very much want everyone to stop using subscriptions it seems.

I never engage with YouTube Shorts, so I'm mostly just skipping right past those. While I tried out YouTube Music after Google Play Music got shut down, I ultimately did not enjoy it as a service and started using Pandora instead. With that said, I still occasionally see recommendations of playlists on YouTube due to my YouTube Music data. It's marginally annoying.

All of this to say, it would probably bother me more if they were all services that I interacted with on a regular basis.