PSA: If you do not like seeing YouTube video threads on DU's Latest page, do this

[EarlG]

We have long provided tools which will allow you to hide most of these videos from your view. If you would like to avoid most political videos while signed in to DU, simply do this:

Trash the Liberal YouTubers forum: Click here

Trash the Cable News Clips forum: Click here

That will remove the vast majority of political YouTube videos from your Latest Page. If you want to see those forums again in future, you can do so from My DU > Trash Can.

I stated in my new year message that this year we will be focusing on the rise of AI content and how better to manage clickbait-style videos on DU, but in the meantime, you already have quite a lot of control over whether most of these videos appear for you or not.

[markie]

1. Thank you

[murielm99]

2. Done.

Thank you.

[jmbar2]

3. There are good vids and bad vids

Don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I pretty much know which ones are bad now just by the ALL CAPS and aggressive words.

I love the Catbyte vids, music vids, Robert Reich, humor, and good discussion vids.

[wolfie001]

31. Yes. I love some of the content creators

I'm a Boomer. Some old dogs you can't teach new tricks to.

[dalton99a]

4. Kick

[Fiendish Thingy]

5. I have done that, and it helps, however...

There are still a ton of videos posted in General Discussion- including some of the most controversial and egregiously false ones that have gotten attention in the past few weeks.

Since the last DU upgrade, many folks don’t know where to look to post videos in Cable News Clips or Liberal YouTubers- it does take a few more clicks to get to those forums, where GD is just one click.

I applaud your efforts to manage AI and clickbait videos, but until/unless all videos are banned from GD, I expect the problem will continue.

Thanks for all you do!

[chia]

6. At least in GD there's still the red square identifying a video OP, which I rely on a lot and am thankful for,

so I can bypass by those OPs. On the other hand I don't mind clicking on an OP with a blue square, so it's nice to see the blue.

I too trashed both the Cable News Clips forum and the Liberal YouTubers forum a while ago, and it does help a lot. I've developed an aversion to seeing large yellow arrows even if I don't actually click on the videos.

[EarlG]

11. But could this be a perception issue?

As I write this post, these are the current videos on the first three pages of General Discussion:

UN meeting re Venezuela on now
AgendaFree channel covering live breaking news: UN Security Council Meeting
Excerpt from "Keeper of the Flame" 1944. Katherine Hepburn speech
Tod Maffin videos- why Canada and the World do not trust USA
This. So much this.
Donald Trump's War in Venezuela (Congratulations to the Winners of the "Fell for it Again Award&quot - Jamelle Bouie
At first I was thinking Hitler and the Sudetenland in 1938
What are we to make of all of the scenes of Venezuelans celebrating last night's SMO?
Brilliant parody of Karoline Leavitt! by Canada TV!
Movie night tonight...
Ohh That's Rich
Heather Cox Richardson on the Venezuela attack
So, it was Maduro's dancing all along
Is UNFTR an o.k. source? - "The Truth Behind Maduro's Capture/sic"
I started watching "Shock and Awe" last night thinking there'd be some parallels.
Does anyone recall the late 60s movie "Wild in the Streets?"
Heather Cox Richardson connects the dots.

That is just 17 threads with a video in the OP, out of a total of 240 threads.

Of those 17 threads:

* 2 are of a live news event
* 5 are movie clips or trailers intended to emphasize or provide context for news events
* 1 contains videos sourced from a mainstream news service
* 1 is a political comedy video
* 8 contain commentary-style videos by YouTubers (2 of them are by Heather Cox Richardson)

Of those 17 videos, none have what I would consider to be a "clickbait" title. There's nothing there by MeidasTouch or some of the other liberal YouTube channels which are the main offenders when it comes to clickbait.

In fact, on the first ten pages of GD (800 threads), I only found two videos which I think could be considered to have the kind of clickbait-style title that would be more appropriate for the Liberal YouTubers forum:

GOP Gov CAUGHT IN $35 MILLION SCAM that COULD END HIM
According to TACO Don, Mexico is NEXT. Venezuela was just a practice run.

So I'm not saying that clickbait style videos never show up in GD, but given the above, is it really that much of a problem?

[littlemissmartypants]

13. I deeply admire you for bringing the receipts. And I'm not joking.

[Fiendish Thingy]

14. Yeah, I did a count after I posted and was surprised at the low number

But I encourage you to periodically do a recount - I’m sure after significant events like the Venezuela incident, there is a short term spike in videos posted to GD.

Before Christmas week, my perception is the volume of videos posted in GD was much higher than it is at present.

[EarlG]

17. Sure -- this small sample may not be indicative of the entire issue

I expect that the number of videos does fluctuate, and there may certainly be more during certain new events or at other times.

Ultimately I guess the question comes down to whether we should completely ban videos in GD. When I checked just now, it appeared to me that the problem -- at least over the last few days -- does not seem serious enough to enforce a complete ban on videos in that forum. But I agree that this is something that it is worth keeping an eye on.

I truly do believe though that folks who are having major problems with the videos will be able to resolve most of them by trashing the two forums in the OP. (Maybe even just the Liberal YouTubers forum, in fact, as I think the Cable News Clips videos tend to be a bit less clickbait-y and a bit more informative.)

[yellow dahlia]

41. .

[Trueblue1968]

47. I vote for removing videos from General Discussion. In my view videos aren't discussion. It is listening.

Just my opinion.

[awesomerwb1]

7. A lot of those videos are ridiculously bad

Thank you for the info.

[SCantiGOP]

26. Agree

The hyperbole and just the ridiculous nature of the “Trump totally destroyed…….” and “Russia on verge of collapse….” type of threads are really irritating. And I don’t know why the same 2-3 people enjoy spending all day putting this material up here.

[wolfie001]

32. Something about the YT algorithm that the thumbnail has to scream, "Attention!"

I've heard content creators complain about having to do that. It helps with monetizing their YT page.

[Kali]

37. I agree some of the thumbnails are obnoxious

but I do appreciate at least 2 or 3 of the posters that regularly post some of the videos in question, partly because they also regularly post videos of other content I always watch.

[Easterncedar]

8. Thanks, Earl

Your excellent management of this place is something I appreciate every day. Many times a day!

[Wounded Bear]

9. I just don't open many threads with the little red square on them...

I don't have time to watch all those vids.

[JoseBalow]

10. Now if only we could remove trashed/ignored stuff from the Homepage

That would be great!

[jfz9580m]

12. Thanks EarlG

I decided just now to kill the “bot” in my own head (after reading a post on Yasha Levine’s Substack).

I shall control and then kill the “bot” (by which I mean the ADD riddled loss of behavioral control which results in a futile chase of where stray thoughts lead causing detriment to my real work in routine science) by starving it of attention and food. That sounds rather bot like itself.. whatever..Gah. I hate bots.

I shall only use the internet on Saturdays and Sundays I have decided. I would rather be offline entirely. But I have to engage with society some and everyone is online and I don’t enjoy it but to extricate myself from the net, I have to use the net. It is all making me very whiny ;-/. But oh well.
I really hate bots.

It is kind of tragicomic that you are dealing with bots and ai online and I with ones affecting my unruly mind/overly taxed free will. It is somewhat relevant, since I blame poor education systems and these junk fueled economies which I suspect will churn out many more students and adults like me in coming years. And a low tech, tech and exploitative industry free personal fix as a proof of concept.


I will delete this post as it sounds like a bot wrote it. But I will take the actions in it. That should kill the bot in my own head. After i see how those things make associations, I feel more distaste than ever for ai. A human brain can identify that as trash since no one would invest in an employee whose thoughts are like that - in real science anyway. But these rubbish internet companies use this lame rot to build empires. It is such fucking charlatnry (that sounds more like me, except that is fracked out since that stuff you think and don’t say).
These things are parasites that copy your lamest behaviors with lame associations and then they turn you into a self cannibalizing paransite who destroys their own resources now mimicking these horrible things. This is junk tech and the fixes thrown at it are insults to human intelligence.

Oh well..;-/. We are all be predated on by these useless things. I shall delete this post, but going forward just as an exercise I shall post botty posts before later deleting them. I haven’t thought about how to turn myself back into a normal human rather than a solitary person who turned into a person who sounds like a horrible bot.

The profanity was all mine ;-/. It does relieve ones feelings. Posting it is I think what corporate shrinky types would huffily cite as “poor impulse control”. I will tell them where they can stick their impulse control.

Sorry ;-/. Life eh…

[Wednesdays]

15. For what it's worth,

No bot would write anything like, "I am going to delete this because it sounds like it was written by a bot."

[jfz9580m]

29. Thanks Wednesdays

It started happening after this confusing job I had in 2011 in one of those Si Valley adjacent places.

I have always liked science, but till then I didn’t really notice tech much. I had this view of the net as localized to online spaces and had I thought about IOT, Smart Homes etc, I would not have been interested since personal use tech never struck me as important or necessary.

All these photo and music apps. Who needs them? I am disorganized enough in a low tech environment. Why would I want something that clearly and obviously makes attention and clutter worse? And for some lame thing like an online calendar.

How lazy do you have to be to cheerfully inflict all this on your neighbors while calling them Luddites, inefficient etc? And then I watched in indignation as the narrative around these obviously rubbishy things grew in the last 3 years. And finally after Trump’s inauguration with all those oligarchs, the 2022 overturn of Roe v Wade, EarlG’s post election analysis of how algorithms are driving this junk, the treatment of federal workers, that horrifying piece of brutality where Venezuelan immigrants were sent to that hell in El Salvador (all with reality tv mimicking choreography), I lost what scant patience I had.

And have been on the rampage online a bit - I am more sheepish and awkward offline unless anyone messes with me for real ;-/.

Altogether it has riled me up and I am not so lacking in self awareness that I can’t see it. A decent shrink I met at my last job also got the impression that I had poor impulse control. I don’t or not anywhere near this much. I used to have normal filters and control online and offline. I behave normally if I am not basically just told brusquely like Arthur Dent that “oh yeah all this is inevitable - deal with it”. Wait what? Why is it inevitable and how? Who made some guys in tech owners of everything? Why would I want the ugliest online ad filled spaces in my home and then allow all sorts of parasitic studies and tests while my own work suffers.

And at that scale it isn’t democratic. This is EarlG’s website. That is someone else’s lab. This is my home. You can be sure that no matter who agreed that all sorts of rot was inevitable, if it is my home rather than your lab or business or institution, its my rules because that is how reality works. I am willing to self-deport rather than see a shrink over a refusal to cooperate with such obviously flawed worldviews. Okay fine - I am a shit employee and don’t want to defend poor work or disorganization. But I will fix it myself rather than go see a shrink who thinks the humans surrounded by garbage tech should adjust to it.

Or have non-existent solidarity with sycophants of technocrats, who seem to be too daft to get that tech can be good or bad like anything else.

A rejection of worthless tech is not the same as being Amish. Such strawmen are all these guys have and its too lucrative a scam apparently for checks on second and third rate companies which deliver our homes/living spaces up to advertisers and special interests.

But the line in the sand is my home. Don’t come here and start telling me this is inevitable etc. My family has owned this home for 5 generations. Back off. Or that is how I see it.

Women will file complaints against these tech companies when they are women like me rather than “adjust” because some randoms agreed to this seeping offline. If it was all dark web and digital scams it would be one thing. But why is all this rot bleeding offline. Who agreed to this? It is not something to force without debate anymore.

This is not normal nor inevitable etc. It is a blatant grab of power and control without any debate by tech and it has gone on for far too long. An arbitrarily loony tyrant like Trump is very much the type of human who would rise up to harness an outlet to animal behavior when civilization drops the ball. This much undemocratic tampering with reality appears to end in chaos engulfing everything. Hell even Tim Cook admitted that these guys try to get away with too much. Though it doesn’t surprise me at all that he is one of Trump’s acolytes. I was in bot drag more a few years ago while trying to fake enthusiasm for an ass like Cook.

And all because of a little regulation by the brilliant Lina Khan. These guys are willing to completely break reality over accept democracy with all it’s imperfections and friction. And most risibly they used China, Russia etc as the excuse. The US looks like Russia right now. This is not acceptable at all. And it won’t work in my home. A future that refuses to learn from this past will suck more and more.

Nice dog in your icon..a yellow Hound of the Baskervilles ;-/?
This post I thought through more than usual. Edited out one tangential ramble.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

16. The videos only play if you click on them.

No problem here.

[EarlG]

18. That is definitely good advice, however...

I think the issue that a lot of folks are having is not necessarily the content of the videos themselves, but the screaming nature of the video titles.

Those titles are typically not chosen by DUers -- it is simply the prevalent (and awful, IMO) style on YouTube. But unfortunately, it's often the DUers who bring the videos to DU who get criticized for simply using the original video titles that someone else came up with.

Prior to the creation of the Liberal YouTubers and Cable News Clips forums, video was much more free-for-all on DU. We had a legacy forum which dated back to DU2 called "Video & Multimedia," and video content would often get duped between that forum and others on DU.

On DU4, we retired Video & Multimedia and created two new forums -- Liberal YouTubers and Cable News Clips -- to specifically host that kind of content. This was partially a response to complaints -- which date back several years now -- that too many clickbait-style videos were finding their way on to DU.

The idea was that by providing specific forums for people to post those types of videos, other DUers who didn't want to see them could easily trash the forums and make those videos go away. Unfortunately, it seems that many DUers either don't know how to trash the forums, or are making the deliberate decision to not trash them, instead preferring to complain about the videos or the people posting them.

That's why I posted this today -- to remind folks that we do have built-in solutions which they can use to help mitigate this issue, should they choose to.

[mike_c]

19. thank you!

[Sector 001]

20. I just put the people on ignore that post these garbage videos.

For the most part it works very well.

[EarlG]

22. That is another perfectly acceptable solution

which people are free to use, should they choose to.

[COL Mustard]

21. Thank You!

That is very helpful. I personally hate seeing vids, especially w/no context. I usually scroll past but now I don't have to!

[TBF]

23. Very helpful - ty! nt

[Endlessmike56]

24. Thanks.

I’m new (ish) and still figuring things out. Helps a lot

[Wicked Blue]

25. Thank you

My main reason for not viewing these is that on-screen movement makes me very dizzy. I have some kind of unfixable inner ear problem.

[1WorldHope]

27. My Avast VPN refuses to open any YouTube videos.

It prompts me to sign in to you tube. So I have to sit out off while on DU of I want to watch them. Any ideas for that, or are you tube videos inherently bad?

[EarlG]

33. This is a YouTube thing

Sometimes they require people to log in to view videos. I'm not sure how Avast factors in to this, but one suggestion would be to try opening the thread that contains the video, or the video itself, in an "Incognito" or "Private" window (the name of this will be different depending on what kind of browser you're using).

That may allow you to get past YouTube's login requirement.

[lamp_shade]

28. Thanks. Done.

[Uncle Joe]

30. Kicked and recommended

Thanks for the thread EarlG

[RockCreek]

34. Thank you!!

[usonian]

35. When I am really interested in the topic of a video, I make a transcript for my and others' skimming and saving.

Work in progress, since things change (surprise)

Get the video URL (link)
Paste it into this site:
https://www.tubetranscript.com/en
Alternate site
https://www.youtranscripts.com/

COPY the text. It's usually unformatted/unreadable.

So, go to Sentence Splitter (nobody splits paragraphs, sorry)
https://sentencesplitter.com/
Paste the text there. Get the result. Copy the result.
This will give you text (or just save a doc file, but you can't share that here)

SO go to pastebin.com
Paste the text and ask for "new paste"
Sometimes, it REFUSES to post the text (you said naughty things or cursed the Fuhrer)

So, in that case, use
https://rentry.co/

To paste text and get a permanent link that you can post here (the URL bar has it when you are done)

A DAMN LOT?
Well, I do it semi-frequently because I can't handle videos. They put me to sleep, and

• You can't skim
• You can't reasonably seek anything
• You can't save for search or future reference
• Videos typically cram 3 minutes of information into 30 minutes or more.

I'll update when things change.

There really are no hosting sites that are free and easy to use where I can post files like doc files and pdf's.
And I am Google-Free. Google is pure evil.
(They own youtube)

You're welcome!

[yellow dahlia]

43. Many thanks, u.

I have seen some of your work in bringing easily accessible info to the forum.

Your methods are masterful. Thank you for your tenacity and effort.

[usonian]

45. Glad that some good is coming from my long experience with computers.

"I find a way"

[FiveFifteen]

36. Best DU Advice!

Thank you, this is a great tool/suggestion.

[Martin68]

38. Thanks!

[IbogaProject]

39. Thank you

I am clicking both of those as I reflexively click rec to mark a thread read, I will also get more picky about my recs going forward.

[msongs]

40. video OP should have to post some deSCription with video

[IbogaProject]

42. Still seeing liberal youtube posts in the Issue Forums

And thank you for helping us push that stuff away as best we can.

[BidenRocks]

44. I don't trust anything.

I always second source anything important.
Everything else is entertainment.

[WmChris]

46. My solution

I don't open them if I think they are click bait and if do and they don'tget to the point I simply close the window. That at least works for me.

[jfz9580m]

48. I am conducting a personal experiment

And trashing all forums except Science and Environment and Energy for the next year. For 2026, till I finish a paper: it is strictly Quanta Magazine; E&E/Science/LBN/Regional and Other low traffic forums on DU; Chris Ketcham/Sam Miller/Yasha Levine/Chauncey Devega/Troy Farah/Current Affairs/Matt Stoller/Andrew Nikiforuk/Maria Bolotnikova/Alex Skopic/Population Balance/Ed Zitron/Alec Karakatsanis/Physics Stack Exchange/Wikipedia/Cleverbot/pubmed/Hyperphysics or other strictly uni science sites.

I will see if that works.
I used to really like Nicholas Carr’s writing, but these days I don’t feel it.

(And clean up my eyesore of a journal one page at a time. I reserve the right to be gloomy and negative without that being considered depressive..I have rights ;-/. I tried to be cheerful and optimistic with dreadful results. Never again…)

Totally different DU experience actually jumping straight to “Latest” with all the most popular/high traffic forums trashed. Very nice..