I can advise anyone to install DeArrow.
Instead of having every thumbnail screaming at me, YouTube is now much calmer in general. Even the clickbait titles are replaced by crowdsourced alternatives.
No more “TOP 5 Reasons Why You SHOULD use/not use something ❌❌/✅✅”, but “review of something” instead.
I have a different approach, for me the idiotic title is a red flag that I shouldn’t watch the video in the first place. But for thumbnails it seems like the only way to survive on youtube is to make a youtube face in thumbnail pointing at something, even the respectable and interesting channels are doing it
YouTube made changes, and the YouTube reps who deal with creators have given them marching orders that they need to follow or else no money. Every one of the creators I sub has dedicated a video to how things have to be now, and they know we hate it, and they hate it. But there’s nothing they can do because YouTube is their source of income.
I’m torn cause I use smart tube & revanced to avoid ads, but I really want something like this but not enough to deal with the bullshit 3-5 ads every five minutes.
Smart Tube has Darrow, you just need to turn it on.
Thank you so much! I don’t do a whole lot of exploring if the stock experience is killing it(which smart tube nailed).
Revanced has dearrow built in. It’s in the alternative thumbnails menu
My revanced died a few months ago, have you experienced any issues?
Working ok for me now after updating
Try patching with the latest build, that’s what normally works for me.
Sweet! Makes sense now why my tv experience is so different
You have to explicitly enable it though
you can use DeArrow with revanced, I do.
Someone just told me it was already built in. I just never noticed.
There is this blocklist:
Thank you very much!
Thank you !
Does that do anything beyond disabling DuckDuckGo’s own AI answering box at the top? Because I still get AI generated results on sites.
Kagi.
It’s not perfect and it’s not free for unlimited use, but I think it’s worth paying for.
It doesn’t feel as dated as Duck Duck Go feels to me. It kinda feels like using Google without the enshitification that google has gone through.
I like the option to filter results. Here’s an image of some filter options:
I also did a search for the term “verify email” like in the OP. I did not see nearly as many AI video results. At least not as many obvious AI results.
It’s not perfect tho and it’s hard to escape AI slop.
Interestingly, Kagi has an option to filter out AI videos in the result, but I felt like changing that gave me more AI results than without it.
However, searching with and without, the first ten results did not appear to be AI. After the tenth option, most options were AI regardless of the filter settings.
Youtube is pretty much unusable now, more than half the videos are low effort Ai slop, and the rest is just irrelevant, leaving the real content buried deep down in the algorithm.
Edit: I forgot to mention that I don’t use an YouTube account and haven’t used for years for privacy reasons. I’m mostly speaking about using the search function without an account.
If you use it with an account and have watch history its really quite good at recommending relevant stuff.
I think it also depends on what you’re searching for though, like if I search for a guide on changing fork seals on my motorcycle the results are pretty much fine.
YouTube has a great algorithm, in that it mostly seems to show you stuff you actually want to watch, and let’s you say you don’t like stuff.
You can train it with a little effort to show you what you want.
You just can’t make the shorts go away, even with premium!
You can use uBO on shorts to make them dissappear.
For Android, 7 helieve revanced has an option for that.
You can on mobile with modified client and I belive there’s browser extensions that remove shorts on pc
They added a shorts limit though. It prevents you from watching more than 15 minutes of shorts a day. Experimentally afterwards it seems to recommend slightly fewer shorts in your feed.
Try FreeTube, turn off all recommendations and subscribe to the channels you like. It’s great.
Used to be I’d scroll through the suggested videos, and find new content creators based on my interests.
Now? I don’t trust clicking on a new unheard of youtuber channel. 90% of the time it’s just AI crap.
I don’t use an YouTube account and haven’t used for years for privacy reasons.
Same here. Trick is to not use the YT search function. My strategy changes depending on specifically what I’m looking for, but in general for anything factual I start with a no-AI text search on DDG and then go to YT once I know what I want to see, or just use DDG to trawl through the videos. It’s not perfect but it cuts out a LOT of the slop.
For entertainment, if my current list of “known good” seems exhausted, I keep my subscriptions in FreeTube and go with the recommendations there where I can hide channels more effectively, but that’s pretty rare because I collect what look like promising channels as I go along in regular browsing, like Lemmy or news articles, and not from any algorithm.
It’s gotten so bad the past year especially. I often open an incognito tab to look something up or watch a video without affecting my recommendations, and every time I do, the logged out YouTube recommendations are worse and worse. Genuine bottom of the barrel fuck shit dog ass slop. If it was illegal to produce slop like this I genuinely think the world would be a slightly better place (or even just making it illegal to monetize it).
Maybe it’s just my algorithm but I don’t think I’ve been presented any slop videos. Surely not long videos, right?
Stop using the algorithm. Take your existing known likes and go search them out for their collaborators. Search out creators not single videos on a topic.
To get YouTube to work you need to curate your watch history. Any video you regret watching should be deleted from history so that it won’t be used for recommendations.
If your history is filled with these bad videos then you’re better off wiping your history entirely. Then start from scratch watching only videos that really interest you and your recommendations will all be based on those.
Like the internet itself, there is a TON of great content on YouTube. The trouble is finding it! For me, the internet has been gradually reverting to the situation I remember from the mid-90s (before Google existed). There were lots of search engines but they were pretty much all bad. I relied a lot on word of mouth (and site-to-site links) to find things.
have you used bitview?
I mean it literally doesn’t load. If you have been able to use YT in the past year, your browser is seriously insecure.
You can use uBlacklist with a list of AI websites to filter out a ton of crap in search results. It’s good for blocking out AI slop websites but probably won’t be too effective for individual YouTube videos.
Who is the target audience for that ? Who the fuck even neds instructions to verify a damn email address, much less a whole ass youtube video ?
People who have never been online before, people who don’t understand the meaning of the phrase (ESL etc), children
Why is OP searching for it?
I was looking for an image of reddit’s award/badge that they put on profiles
I’ll give OP the benefit of the doubt and say that perhaps they searched for something else but it had enough overlap with keywords that the slop is targeting that their seemingly more niche search is getting drowned out
DuckDuckGo has a “hide ai images” setting. It seems it also blocks these videos. I’m not getting any of those videos in your screenshot if I search on DDG.
It only partially works, still get ai images with that setting enabled.
Kagi too. https://blog.kagi.com/slopstop
But YouTube is basically just a slop bucket.
Wh arts so good about kagi? I looked it up once and I saw a subscription and a focus on ai and I noped out.
The search itself is great and accurate. Kagi doesn’t track you, show ads or manipulate search results to get you to buy something or because someone paid them to. You are their paying customer so they focus on making the service for you. You can actually manipulate the results to your needs by ranking (voting) domains up, down or completely blocking. Imagine search results without pinterest, quora or tiktok! There’s a lot of other settings and pre-made or custom filters to search the areas of the Internet you want.
Kagi is not focused on AI, contrary to Google, Bing etc. AI is optional and it’s not shoved in your face. You can chose to display quick AI summaries, hide them or have them appear if you finish your query with a question mark. Contrary to Google, Bing etc. these summaries are actually really good because they summarize (or give you an answer based on) search results and the search results are simply better the in the other search engines.
Couple of years ago I also noped out hearing I would need to pay for search. The truth is, with “free” search you’re paying for it with your frustration, your private information that they mine, use and sell. Searching is getting worse and worse and they won’t make it better because you’re not even their customer, you’re a sheep they shear to sell your wool to tailors so they can make cloths and sell them back to you. Maybe I drifted a bit with the metaphor but you know what I mean 🤣
Kagi lets you set up a free account without giving them your credit card. You get a small number of free searches that refill every month so you can try it for free. There are obviously Black Friday deals etc.
I also have this link that’ll let you try Kagi Pro for 90 days for free. Somone posted it on Kagi subreddit, seems to be working still even though it’s Thanksgiving promo.
That Kagi Linux browser they’ve been teasing for the last few months can’t come out fast enough! I wrote this comment on Firefox+ublock btw
I’m very happy with Vivaldi. Works great with Kagi on Linux and Android and in the android version they recently introduced an option to configure custom engines (like Kagi) right in the app (previously you needed to add it on PC and sync to android).
But more options is always better.
Ironically you need AI to detect AI output in the content offered to you and to block it. Though in theory some heuristics for the visuals in the thumbnails could work.
That really paints a dark future
“It seemed to me,” said Wonko the Sane, “that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”
No. Ublock blocks elements, it does not look at the contents.
If there were something in the elements indicating it, it could, but that seems unlikely.
It could block websites/CDNs that host them if such a list existed though.
Sooo… YouTube?
Problem solved!
If only they’d put all the slop under one sub domain!
before:2022 might work
Kagi has an LLM community register they automatically use to filter their results
But how do I verify my email on Reddit?
It’s a truly complicated task
