Hopefully this will curb that weird conspiracy theory right wing pipeline that the algorithm pushes people into, but I fear given how mature youtube is that the damage may have already been done.
Also I always love seeing them push short form content, when youtube used to have LOTs of shortform content but they adjusted the algorithm like 10 years ago to punish it. It screwed over a lot of the animators and comedy troupes that used to make up a lot of the site back then and ushered in the era of the video essay(as well as youtubers slowing down their speech and repeating themselves in order to get to minute 10).
The shorts dont bother me as much but the media player does. Like theres no playback controls, its portrait only, an it doesnt even let you fullscreen if youre on browser.
Minus one for that media player. Lack of controls is really irritating. I don’t care to be forced into vertical videos, either—despite what some puppets think.
Its funny because tiktock has a landscape mode now and full controls. The thing theyre trying to copy has more rich controls but they stay on track with painfully limited media player. I use an extension on browser that just opens them in a normal player.
I fear more that YouTube's harder push on forcing ads to users will result in a user-base exodus to Rumble.
The amount of comments I've seen on various YT videos about how YouTube is breaking adblockers and forcing ads on users while making it a TOS Violation, where the comment says something like "I'll just move to rumble, lol", is worrying.
I think this is a good thing. While I understand that mainstream news sources tend to be pro-capitalist/pro-state, it's still a step up from the unhinged fascist and nationalist conspiracy theories that run rampant on that site.
It is better than right-wing lunatics, but this will likely result in smaller progressive channels like Rational National, Majority Report, Humanist Report etc. being sidelined even more. And these are not conspiracy channels, they provide really important context that's often left out by "authoritative" media like CNN and MSNBC.
On its face it sounds like a good idea, but I just don't trust Google to be the one to decide what's authoritative and what needs to be weighted down, We've already learned that they have perverse incentives in that regard with the way they've remorselessly promoted extreme right-wing content for years because it made them a quick buck. For them to have a sudden change of heart and start talking about getting the facts straight is a bit sus to me.
Anyone who's media literate enough to care about such things do not rely on Google's algorithm nor monetized YouTube channels / "content creators" to keep informed.
I would appreciate it if my search results weren't listed with Indian trash news channels macerating as American.... "CNN news-18", "LiveNOW from FOX", "TIMES LIVE", etc etc.
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It also plans to spend $1.6 million to promote the creation of news content for its shortform Shorts service.
According to Google, the new watch page experience will initially roll out on mobile in around 40 countries and will expand to its desktop and living room interfaces in the future.
Meanwhile, the Google-owned video platform is also pledging to spend $1.6 million to promote the creation of shortform Shorts news content with over 20 organizations across 10 countries.
Meta has made it clear that it doesn’t plan to actively court or promote news content on Threads.
More recently, he added that Threads “won’t proactively recommend news content to people who don’t seek it out.”
Under his leadership, X no longer shows headlines on articles shared on the platform and has dismantled the system that verified journalists.