558
More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds
(www.theguardian.com)
At least another 50% are actual humans narrating AI slop.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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Honestly, Youtube was already pretty shit with all of the obvious monetization schemes and paid “influencer” content. Even though I never watch reaction videos I feel like they are always recommended to me. Their algorithms were already busted to prefer user-created slop. This is just another step towards complete enshittification.
It’s probably going to get worse before it gets better. The YouTube algorithm favors low effort frequent posting, so AI slop is perfect for the platform.
Every algorithm is based around frequent posting and farming engagement. Everything is optimized to ruin the internet.
It’s almost as if there is a financial incentive to enshitify everything.
Wait that means YouTube might be dying? Im actually mildly happy with that, maybe it ruins their Monopoly and opens the web for smaller niche platforms (not sure how they would survive AI but if they don't reward low effort high freq it might be something?)
For it to die there has to be an alternative for the content. I don't see anything that could replace it at the moment.
Pornhub
Peertube comes to mind.
Peertube still needs improvements to start looking attractive.
While it is technically federated, using it still feels like it's just a bunch of small disjointed sites.
That's fair. I just hope mentioning and drawing more people to the platform helps (or provides incentive) for it to improve.and become a viable YouTube replacement. Or at least a supplement to something better than YouTube.
I tried to upload a video to a Peertube instance once.
Took me a solid hour to figure out how to do that.
The link to it 404d the next day.
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It will never get better.
Not until we make our own video hosting site - with blackjack and hookers!
I mean peertube exists, and it actually integrates into the fediverse...
But does it integrate blackjack and hookers?
In fact, let’s forget the video hosting site.
I’ve stopped watching YouTube shorts because of this, and the removal of the downvote count makes it harder to tell.
0 people liked the removal of the dislike button.
Wdym
No one disliked the removal of the dislike button, how would they if it's removed
Why would you ever watch shorts in the first place? First thing I did when they appeared was make a ublock filter to hide them.
Considering a lot of the full YouTube videos are full of padding, taking over ten minutes to get to the point, I can understand why the shorts would have appeal.
Problem is one way or another people are being incentivized to target a specific runtime regardless of whether they have the material to fit.
I just skip those. There's almost always a better one that was easy to find.
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I will never pay for youtube while the downvote count is gone. Absolute anti consumer bullshit.
I do use the add-on to bring them back, but fuck those assholes for doing this.
Am I the only one who sticks to subscriptions? It feels like everyone is just consuming whatever the algorithm feeds them
You're not the only one, but you are a tiny minority.
Technology Connections did a really good video on this topic specifically, and while you can't extrapolate his numbers to every channel, seeing that less than 5% of all your views come from people using the subscriptions feed is very telling about how most users operate on platforms like YouTube.
Nobody wants to build their feed anymore. They want an AI/algorithm to do the legwork for them. This is ingrained in modern culture at this point. All the people I know who use any kind of social media site tell me that they just scroll through their home feed and only like stuff or follow creators to improve their home feed recommendations, not to create a dedicated follow feed.
Can't find new content just sticking to subscriptions unfortunately
You can find new content by asking for channel recommendations on lemmy.
Fuck the algorithms, talk to real people. That's how it used to work.
True, but you eventually reach a point where your subscriptions fill your feed with more videos than you know what to do with.
I do branch out occasionally and find new channels to subscribe to, either on youtube or through other sources. Crossovers between channels are also helpful.
Not when I'm listening to videos 4 hours a day at work, not really
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And hiding the date the video is from, Youtube is getting worse.
Go to FB where it must be around 40%
Tell your favorite content creators to get over to Nebula. Or are there better options?
Peertube, but requires taking care of monetization/donations themselves, and possibly needing to run their own instance(?). Discovery sucks (I think Peertube may be anti-algo similar to Mastodon) so they'll have to take care of promoting themselves as well.
I think Nebula is a creator-owned platform, so very hard to get into. I've also seen that their privacy policy is not good.
They don't need to run an instance
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I use freetube to kinda help deal with it but it is still a real issue. Even something like internet browser comparison videos are filed with AI voice overs and no real human input.
For YouTube, I've switched to Grayjay and I just subscribe to creators I like. I ignore the home feed.
This has removed AI slop, ads, and shorts, which is awesome, but I the tradeoff is jot having a useful recommendation feed. Its not as good as YouTube of old, but worlds better than YouTube of the last few years.
Manosphere fanfic everywhere.
2 years ago I went to youtube without logging into my account. The amount of right wing manosphere crap being recommended to new accounts was frightening. Within 5 minutes there was a video playing of how women should be subservient to men because their role is basically a house cleaning baby factory with no free will.
I genuinely think google should be sued the everliving shit out of them for allowing this crap to be pushed. They looked at what facebook did and went "Oh, that's great. Let's do that as well!"
I just went there after years of avoidance because my kids are there are lot. I needed to see. They're not there anymore. Manosphere, I hate those different than me, racism, outright hatred. It's fucked.
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Blocktube is a necessity now. I had to swap back to firefox, despite preferring Brave a lot more, because without the ability to block channels, Youtube quickly becomes unusable.
“Generating” $117m, or allocating ad revenue and watch hours to these videos? Because it sounds like businesses will pay for advertisements to see numbers go up, and if numbers go up then people think ads are working. This whole economy is stupid because unless the money is coming from a consumer then it’s false. If the only thing being consumed is content, the ads are simply a hurdle that people love to keep throwing in the way and propping up this shit content. At some point market economics needs to win and balance things out and advertisers need to check their ROI, but that will never happen because new metrics will be made to justify the marketing teams or 3rd party consultants these companies are paying to put out these ads.
If there was a filter for “unmonetised” this house of cards would fall on its ass. Real people uploading real content to share for real consumers to enjoy and view.
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