These are all products that I legitimately like and want to engage with, but linking them all to a single account and more importantly a shared recommendation engine feels very flawed.
My music playlists from Youtube Music keep showing up on my Youtube homepage. Likewise, engaging with Youtube Shorts (especially subscribing) also subscribes to their youtube channel. I don’t know about anyone else, but what I find interesting in a 30 second video is not what I find interesting in a 10-30 minute video.
I feel like Google would be better served separating these recommendation engines. Even looking at this from a monetization lens, it feels inefficient. How do you guys feel? If you have any hacks or recommendations I’d love to hear them. I’m personally ready to create a TikTok account just to avoid contaminating my youtube feed.
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.
I hate shorts and I hate seeing them in my subscription feed.
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.
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.
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 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.
That’s one of the most significant reasons I stopped using YouTube Music.
I switched from Spotify to YouTube Music because I was under the impression I could use YouTube Music to play any song that is currently on YouTube. Apparently, that’s not how it works and it was actually much harder to find not only music I had on Spotify, but there are many songs from YouTube that you couldn’t even get on YouTube music, making it a shittier version of listening to songs from YouTube. The service is pretty pathetic.
Sorry. You lost me at “YouTube Music” 😄
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’m fine with music content in Youtube recommendations, but videos in Music recommendations is absolute cancer.
Honestly I’ve used both every day since Google Play Music shut down and I can’t say I’ve ever had video stuff come up on YT Music.
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 have separate profiles for youtube music and youtube, for this exact reason.
Does this work with the paid subscriptions? I figured that would require multiple subscriptions. Plus in my experience Google is really hostile to being logged into multiple accounts at a time. I wouldn’t want to have to constantly switch my Gmail for example.
As long as the accounts are linked to the same email, I think it should be fine. I multiple Youtube brand accounts that are all under the same gmail address.
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.
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 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
