Tired of those annoying cookie banners? They’re not just frustrating—they’re a lazy response to GDPR.
They’re not lazy, they’re maliciously compliant. The sites know how to comply with GDPR, but wanted to throw a fit instead. So they came up with the annoying cookie banners, to make users hate GDPR instead of hating the sites that were stealing and selling all of their data. And the worst part is that it worked. Many people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners, instead of the massive leap in privacy rights that it represented when it was passed.
They’re not lazy, they’re maliciously compliant.
Often times they’re not even compliant.
Excellent points, but the cookie banners were a response to the ePrivacy Directive, not GDPR. In fact the banners predate GDPR by about a decade! I know this because I decided to make my own banner that was slightly less annoying about five years before GDPR was a thing.
Funnily enough most of your points are still correct precisely because, as you say, “most people wholly equate GDPR with the cookie banners”.
I don’t remember seeing any banners before GDPR?
It’s a lot easier to dislike GDPR when you don’t live in a country that benefits from it, but it still annoys you.
GDPR doesn’t annoy anyone. The incompetent developers who made the banners do. There is absolutely no need for them.
no one benefits from it (at least from the part regarding cookies, which i am honestly not sure is part of gdpr)
before that, you just dealt with cookies with whatever cookie extension you preferred. now you would have to trust the site to store your rejection in a cookie, because guess what happens next time you visit the site when it doesn’t find any cookie.
and these fucking dialogs are hard to get rid off even with ublock origin.
so it is definitely the case of road to hell paved with good intentions.
uBlock Origin can also get rid of Shorts in Youtube, as well as the hover-play functionaliy, and annotations on videos.
Just paste this into your uBlock Origin settings/myFilters:
! Kill YT Shorts youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer youtube.com##.html5-endscreen-content youtube.com##.html5-endscreen youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element youtube.com###video-preview-container annotations_module.js$script,domain=youtube.com /endscreen.js$script,domain=www.youtube.com****Huh. I love shorts. I have a curated YouTube account that shows me very interesting shorts about science, music, gaming, comedy, PC building, web development, tech news, etc etc. I wonder why people don’t like shorts. Using YouTube without being logged in?
it’s mostly the interface, the layout, the clickbaityness the format encourages, and the fact that no useful information can fit in that short a video.
idk with the old shorts this was more true, but now if it’s like a quick tips thing or just a preview of a longer video, so long as you’re not scrolling shorts and only scarcely engage with the more informative ones, they seem to have a place. Youtube pushes them to be infinitely scrolled clickbait garbage though so that’s probably the experience for 95% of people.
This is the key. I never scroll shorts. I only click deliberately on the ones I know I want to see. Then back out. This way there is little to no pollution.
the fact that no useful information can fit in that short a video.
Have to disagree with the notion that this is a fact. I watch informative and interesting shorts all the time. Plenty out there if you have the right subscriptions and are careful with how you use the service.
E.g. you must never scroll shorts. Watch the ones you want to see, then back out, so you never see anything that pollutes your account history.
If you see something you don’t like, put a negative vote on it, maybe even click “don’t see this account again” or whatever it’s called. And vice versa, upvote and subscribe to stuff you like.
It requires some effort but for me it’s worth the interesting content.
Alphabet is known to mess around with the algorithms so you’ll always get disgusting Nazi shit in your suggestions sooner or later. Also, a lot of people can’t back out of doom-scrolling, because of bad impulse control (people with ADHD for example). And even if there’s something informative in there. It will always lack a lot of information. It’s like merely reading the headline of an article and then going into the comments, claiming you know everything about the topic (happens on Lemmy a lot).
It’s nice that you seem to have a grip on these shorts, but it’s even greater that you can use certain tools to eradicate them. On my mobile phone I use YouTube revanced and on Firefox/waterfox I use Tweaks for YouTube. With the latter you can also change the thumbnail size and grid the way you want so you don’t have to cope with the ridiculously large thumbnails.
I do not get Nazi content lol. Sometimes I’ll see some right wing shit on there but I just go in and press “don’t recommend this channel” on all those before even watching it. It’s been a long time now since I’ve seen a recommendation that doesn’t suit me.
But yeah, not everyone can control YouTube, or themselves, like I can. All I’m saying is that I like shorts. I do agree that they can be dangerous. 😅
Shorts are deliberately and effectively addictive. Once Google found out they could copy the TikTok paradigm without being sued, they forced it down everyone’s throat. Ever wonder why you can’t disable shorts? Because they KNOW it’s addictive. We are being farmed.
YouTube is a vital tool for news and information. It should be NATIONALIZED, and purposefully exploitative technology like shorts should be BANNED.
I agree with everything you said, to some degree. I’m just saying that shorts on my account are great, because I’ve honed my algorithm over many years so that it only gives me relevant stuff. I never see anything I don’t want to see, basically. My Watch Later list overfloweth. 😅
I’ve used uBlock Origin for years, but the dev doesn’t accept donations because he doesn’t want an obligation to support the software ongoing. This means I cannot support him even though it would come with no expectations, just thanks.
So thank you for your hard work Raymond Hill/gorhill You’re amazing, doing your part to make the world a better place.
Makes such a useful piece of software, and is also wise enough to set boundaries to protect himself from the toxic pressure of open source development.
What a G.
