Recently anyways. The most egregious thing about Youtube, which is not terribly new, is the Shorts. If your video is short enough, it is auto-converted to a "Short", and the original aspect ratio gets cropped to be vertical orientation (for viewing on a phone, presumably).
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.
However with that also being said Google is a menace
Unless it’s Google’s price, and network effects you want.
In which case…well, they’ve already told you.
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 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".
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/shortsblocker-and-r...
The absolutely wild disparity in compute required to translate the Japanese text to English vs rendering an entirely new soundtrack in English blows my mind. I guess someone at Google thought it made sense because many people prefer dubs to subs, but that's on highly polished entertainment product vs 1-person-and-their-Japanese-vlog channels which are not aiming at a mass audience.
And apropos of nothing... there's another link on the front page at the moment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45850430 ) talking about Apple crossing the red line of customer satisfaction. This got me thinking... to Alphabet, you're not the customer, you're the product. YouTube is a sugary trap to lure eyeballs into the advosphere.
Only "sort of" though since they still use the same spammy algorithm-driven timeline and Shorts and stuff, and are clearly still trying to maximize your total watch time. Given that I just pay a fixed fee, I wish they'd use a different algorithm that only seeks to keep my engagement with YouTube from dipping too low, rather than the default which is clearly designed to turn a 23-hour-a-day user into 24.
I agree that the auto dubbing is the worst feature. It may have been HN where I read the above tip to turn that off, it seems to have worked for me so far.
YouTube is also applying "AI enhancement" to videos. Several people have had their videos replaced with a mangled version that flashes bright rapid flickering static through the background. It's a genuine epilepsy danger and the channel owner has no control. If they complain to YouTube the video sometimes is silently replaced with the original (until the bots get to it again). Otherwise they can only repeatedly re-upload the video.
It's insane how desperate all of tech is to quintuple down on the sunk cost of AI
I remember back when i had a site with Google ads on it (about 15 or 20 years ago) I could not change some selection to do with what ads were shown on my .co.uk site to UK because I was not in the UK at the time.
There were other issues with default language assumptions, which were worse as they changed over time. They really should respect browser settings.
Its not just Google. A lot of websites use national flags for languages, which has practical problems in countries that speak many languages, and frequently has political overtones.
More people speak multiple languages than just one
Anyway, my point is that people who speak multiple languages do not fit Google's world view.
At Google, you're not the customer, and you're not even the product; you're a metric in a promo packet. Your value in the "AI engagement" column vastly exceeds your value as a satisfied user. The system is working as intended.