You can disable autoplay at https://www.youtube.com/account_playback, then uncheck "Video previews". It resets itself every 15 days or so, but at least one can have some peace in the meantime.
Are you saying that YouTube just alters your preferences?
I'm fearing the day they'll just remove that toggle for good.
I suspect that the managers in charge of some of these features are lobbying for it as a way to artificially increase the engagement stats for their features, but spinning it as actually being good UX instead of a user-hostile move because it's important for "discoverability" or something like that.
Absolutely no sites, including YouTube, honour the parameter. But you can at least tell the site that you'd prefer it another way.
My preferences change all the time, regardless of Youtube. For example, when I was a kid, I hated mustard.
On the other hand, my Youtube configuration may change independent of my actions.
Unfortunately there's no way to set this per-site, at least in Chrome. Similarly, if you disable animations in Windows, you also disable all animations and transitions in websites that support prefers-reduced-motion, causing some sites to feel janky as a result.
They really need to add a per-site toggle for that, and a browser-level option to ignore the OS' setting. Turning off animations in Word shouldn't turn them off in Google Calendar.
Even while pretending they've not recorded your viewing history they could still make recommendations from your subscriptions or give you the same glurg that they give viewers they know nothing about... but instead they break the site.
It's still better than having shorts on the screen.
Then it was "hide shorts for X days" (I think 30?).
Now it is "show fewer shorts".
A year ago, I had a serious YouTube habit, once I replaced my trash Jellyfin server with a Plex server I can listen to my music collection on my phone anywhere… so no more music from YouTube. I got tired of asmongold and all his imitator gaming YouTubers, fell out of the habit of watching Ukraine warbloggers, etc. I saw other people who got into toxic rabbit holes in YouTube so bad that they decided to physically destroy their computers…
Don't. Nowadays we can just re-introduce it, at least all who read this. iOS, macOS, Windows, Android... All have browser extensions, all can be modified.
Chrome: command line switch:
--force-prefers-reduced-motion --force-prefers-no-reduced-motion
It's also just stored in a cookie/session, so you have to do it in each client and every time you wipe your cookies. Very frustrating.
Surely you don't expect YouTube, a company that doesn't store any data at all actually, to be able to store a single boolean value somewhere in your account, do you? This would be impossible for a company as broke and small as YouTube.
This is unacceptable to me. I've turned this setting off more times than I care to count. I've submitted feedback a couple times as well. I don't remember doing it lately, which is good. But I should have only ever had to do it once. I have a Google account, there is no reason this setting shouldn't be saved with my accounts, synced to all my devices, and only set once. I pay for YouTube Premium; I shouldn't be subjected to all these tactics which I assume are there to increase engagement and watch time. The price I pay is fixed and they don't earn ad revenue off me... why the games?
Like a relative commentor said -- a product manager on the "Shorts" team is doing a helluva job boosting their team's stats.
The few of us who go "ew" and recoil are vastly outnumbered by the billions who just watch.
Every complaint about ads on youtube is someone who can't even be bothered to download an adblocker before Chrome killed it. It was one click, but that didn't dissuade the vast majority of eyeballs.
this is quite bad behaviour.
they should not sneakily change our preferences behind the backs. similarly, all notifications, advertisements, et cetera, should be opt in, not opt out.
many of these cos. do this sort of thing, of course.
they excuse it under the protect of company policy.
Google the ant letter as an example.
for some people, like me, for example, it turns them away even in the short term, and also in the permanent term, so to speak ha ha, not only in/after the long term.
because, you know, we know our rights and likes. and we wrong and dislike people who disrespect them! :) choice of rhyming words used for effect, but the point is also true.
sorry, pretext, not protect. an autocorrect error.
Lately the option to disable ambient lighting around video has been reseting to ON for me on every video I open.
I cant even formulate how I feel about that without breaking some rules somewhere
That's your mistake. Never pay someone to remove the same obstacles they've been putting in front of you. It's the definition of racketeering.