I’ve noticed this behavior for all Google properties. Every time I click “not interested” “don’t show me this again” or anything similar, it seems to have no effect as the best case. The worst case I’ve seen is when clicking these options seems to acts as a positive signal to show me more of that content. I’ve noticed this over years.
As such, I’ve simply stopped interacting with googles recommendation systems and most of googles content delivery systems. Including using YouTube as minimally as possible.
It's the same in tiktok: there's literally a button that says “I'm not interested in any live videos”, but it keeps inserting livestreams into the feed anyway.
I'm 100% convinced that these 'show fewer' options are there for dark-pattern reasons. They are sprinkled throughout Facebook and LinkedIn as well. My hypothesis is that companies put them there to give consumers the idea that they have any control at all over their "feed." But if they actually try to use them, they discover the options don't actually do anything, and resign themselves to whatever the algorithm feeds them.
I clicked the "show fewer shorts" button on youtube for a while--they'd come back every 2-3 weeks, but then I'd click it again. Then I tried a different tactic: as soon as I saw a short in my "recommendations" I closed youtube and didn't return for at least 24 hours. I only had to do that about three times and I haven't seen shorts in my recommendations for at least 6 months now.
It's purely there to provide a signal to the oxygen waster product manager who is pushing the obnoxious "feature" in the first place. Their KPIs are not only "positive" engagement with the feature but also lack of "negative" engagement such as clicking the "show fewer" button. It otherwise has zero user-facing impact.
The phrasing alone proves it's a dark pattern. At this point, I think we need some good-guy-AI to fight the algorithms, dark patters, and bad-guy-AI. It should also do everything it can to discourage the bad guys from even trying to implement them...
I do the same, and after a day of doing it- they seem to go away for a time depending on the platform, but they always come back and sometimes they come back a lot.
The web-browser is the least aggressive and I think I haven’t even seen them on Apple TV.
The iPhone App is the most egregious offender of not respecting the request though, it seems to almost not care at all, and now the thumbnails on the home screen have started autoplaying (with audio) and I can’t find how to disable it (older instructions seem to be invalid).
They have all the content though; so I have no choice but to deal with this, until a good enough competitor comes along and my favourite youtube channels upload to both places.
Auto play with audio needs to be controllable for accessibility. May be a regulatory requirement depending where you live. So it’s gotta be there somewhere.
Which would make sense, but they do it for the logged-in users as well! (And of course there’s platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter which do this and require you to log in for any meaningful interaction.)
I’ve left Twitter, yeah, and I’ve only really used LinkedIn while searching for a job last year. I am, however, guilty of scrolling through Instagram every now and then, even though it’s just as hostile.
My point is that you get this even if you try to do it correctly. The best you are ever going to get with cookies or local storage, even with the best intentions, is "ask me again later".
They'll also record the press and probably use it as part of their "KPIs". "The number of suckers trying to have control has decreased 5% this month, well done all".
They might be getting mixed up with the “close door” button, which is something always included because it makes people feel better but when you order the elevator you can choose whether it actually does anything or not
In the US the door close button is required to work in "fire service" mode, so that's why the button is always there.
Outside of fire service the button most likely will work, just that it can't override the minimum open door delay mandated by the ADA, so it feels like it doesn't work. You may be able to trick the logic into disregarding the timer by pressing door open and door close immediately.
In Europe, there is no "fire service" mode that I know of, so the button isn't always there. But if it is, it basically always works and doesn't have a minimum delay.
> it can't override the minimum open door delay mandated by the ADA
I've definitely seen this not be the case, though it is probably in elevators older than the ADA. I lived in a building where selecting a floor or using the "Close Door" button immediately began closing the door. Some hotels as well.
It's amazing that the algorithms are so universal rather than personalized.
You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.
I understand why FB/IG do it; I _occasionally_ give in and get sucked into a couple. But that NEVER happens to me with YT.
> You'd think they'd want to notice that I _absolutely never_ watch shorts, and stop showing them to me, instead recommending something else.
Oh they've noticed, and they just haven't found the right recco just yet to get you to watch. Bear with them, as they will eventually find you something. Even if it is just a video you would normally watched cropped to format.
Shorts are treated as a privileged feature; they aren't going to simply hide them just because a few of us have the unmitigated gall not to watch them. That's not to their benefit. Youtube and the other platforms want to manipulate users into getting on that particular hamster wheel, and the app's UX reflects that. In that, it's not dissimilar to how streaming services routinely prioritize engagement maximization over user experience. If it takes you a few more clicks to find your continue watching list, that's your problem.
I'd be surprised if the algorithms have much say on when and where shorts show up in your feed versus just inserting them into specific spots in your feed that were determined by a whole lot of user testing to see what's most effective. There might be some logic to tweak it, but overall placement is probably fairly uniform across users.
I would expect (but cannot prove) that these hostile patterns decrease engagement on the individual level.
But maybe the effort to cater to people who avoid this stuff isn't worth it, or maybe they find it doesn't really discourage us from finding what we want, or the value of this stuff is so high that they find a sufficient number of converts over time.
As someone that pays for YouTube premium (and isn’t served ads), I don’t understand why they push Shorts to me too. Presumably they should want me to spend the bare minimum amount of time on YouTube necessary to keep me subscribed, as any further use just contributes to higher infrastructure and bandwidth costs.
I have done the same and it seems to have no consequence. I suspect YouTube only wants to track the opposition to shorts, not to provide a personal preference for their users. This uBlock filter is therefore much appreciated
For me, it does result in no shorts on the main recommendations list. They still appear on the recommendations shown while a video is playing (and there they don't have the "show fewer" option) but they eventually (maybe 7-10 days or so) reappear on the main list as well.
this is all in the iOS YouTube app, which is the only place I watch YouTube.
Door close button is supposed to cancel the door dwell time. But due to some disability codes in some regions all major manufactures allow it to be disabled (as required by some codes). i.e. The owners/managers/technicians can disable it.
I "Provide Feedback" every time anything annoys me, repeatedly. And I'm annoyed really easily. I have family premium, so I make sure to mention that.
- Hide all shorts, everywhere on the site, not just on my PC. uBO filters are amazing, but limited.
- The root page to show my Subscriptions instead of "Your History Is Turned Off..."
- I want links to go directly to the video and fill the window. I'll use the back button to go back where I came from, and native "Full Screen" if I want it to fill my screen.
All of it could be non-default settings available with Premium only.
Seriously though, do any of our German / French compatriots here on HN have different experience of corporations, versus the USA's "maximizing profit" purpose, given the "corporate social responsibility" mandate of those countries?
Greed (opportunism) is human and I wonder if that's "better" in the Germany or French corporate-world?
Mhhh although this is a bit OT it is also very interesting:
Germany has unions and works council.
It is required by law that companies allow works council to exist and if they exist they get certain rights.
> In Germany, they serve two functions. The first is called co-determination, through which works councils elect members of the board of directors of German companies. The second is called participation, and means that works councils must be consulted about specific issues and have the right to make proposals to management.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council#Germany )
Also Germany has good amounts of regulations for certain issues (sometimes too much regulation but oh well).
And Germany has many options to participate in local and regional politics that prevent the worst offenders.
But in the end a company is still a company that is forced to act in a way that maximizes it's profits. I think from my perspective we do not have such wild predator companies like you see them in the US but there are certainly a few very dubious things going on.
Except maybe the gGmbH and Vereine (clubs) which are companies and semi company structures that must act for the common good and without profit interest.
And one funny thing is that in Germany stock companies are required to act to the "best interests of the company" and not the "best interests of the stock holder" - in German law the company includes the worker, the future of the company and social aspects.
Agree with this. There are so many posts everywhere with breathless claims of AGI, and absolutely ZERO evidence of critical thought applied by the people posting such nonsense.
I like Hugo, but I’ve not found a nice workflow to automatically put the images on a CDN.
I was thinking of making a GitHub action that uploaded the image from a given branch, deleted it, set the URL, and finally merged only the md files to main.
If you're okay with the images being on a CDN, why wouldn't you also be okay with the HTML and CSS also being on the CDN? Just fronting the entire static site with a pull-through CDN is an easy solution that doesn't require any complicated workflow.
I’m talking about integrating with GitHub. Publishing to Cloudflare for instance is fine, but where do you put the images between drafting and publishing?
Or do you just check in images to GitHub and call it a day?
I wasn't suggesting publishing to Cloudflare, just that if you're concerned about the complexity of the workflow of getting images into the CDN, simply fronting whatever host you're using with a CDN of some kind (which could be Cloudflare) will solve that.
Usually you just store the images in the same git repo as the markdown. How you initially host the static site once generated is up to you.
The problem with storing binaries in Git is when they change frequently, since that will quickly bloat the repo. But, images that are part of the website will ~never change over time, so they don't really cause problems.
> You’re talking to me like a total idiot, having assumed I know nothing about this.
Sorry I tried to help? If that's the response I get for helping, good luck...
> All I meant was a way to avoid storing images in git, the rest is quite simple.
There is no good way to do that, and no way that I would recommend. Git is the correct solution, if that is where you are storing the markdown. No fancy git tools are required.
I commit the images alongside the markdown files in GitHub. My site is has numerous images and there are logical groups of posts. I make those logical groups of posts a git submodule, so I don't have all posts on my machine (or iPad) at one time.
Working Copy (git for iPad) handles submodules reasonably well, I have a few that I'm working on cloned on it and others are not so I don't use so much space.
> An FPGA, by contrast, defines data pathways specifying how signals change on each clock tick based on internal states and external inputs. In essence, we describe global per-clock-cycle behavior rather than an individual act of data manipulation per step.
I think that’s the clearest explanation of FPGAs I’ve ever seen.
They added it in the dev branch. There hasn't been a stable release since 2021 and there has been a lot of ongoing development in the meantime, many people use the development release since it's significantly faster.
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