The Enshitification of Youtube’s Full Album Playlists
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I went with the article title, but I think this isn't enshitification in the traditional sense of the platform making bad choices from a user perspective. Instead this is about shitty use of the platform by malicious users.
This article talks about a practice the author has dubbed "Playlist Stuffing" where an irrelevant, long, and monetized video is added into a playlist, low enough to not show up in the search result for that playlist. The accounts engaging in this seem to be compromised and abandoned accounts from the early days of youtube.
From the article:
In recent months, however, countless tainted playlists have cropped up in YouTube search results. Engadget compiled a sample of 100 channels (there are undoubtedly many, many more) engaged in what we'll refer to as playlist stuffing. These had between 30 and 1,987 playlists each — 58,191 in total. The overwhelming majority of these stuffed playlists contain an irrelevant, nearly hour-long video simply titled "More."
The robotic narration of "More" begins: "Cryptocurrency investing, when approached with a long-term perspective, can be a powerful way to build wealth." You'd be forgiven for assuming its aim is to direct unwitting listeners to a shitcoin pump-and-dump. But over the next 57 minutes and 55 seconds, it meanders incoherently between a variety of topics like affiliate marketing, making a website and search engine optimization.
For all its supposed advice on making easy money online, its best example isn't anything said in the video, it's that "More" has amassed nearly 7.5 million views at the time of this writing — and it's monetized.
The vast majority of channels engaged in this activity were created in 2006, and the youngest was claimed in February of 2009. In all likelihood, these accounts were abandoned long ago and have since been compromised, either by whoever is behind "More" or by a third party which sold access to these accounts to them.
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I went with the article title, but I think this isn't enshitification in the traditional sense of the platform making bad choices from a user perspective. Instead this is about shitty use of the platform by malicious users.
This article talks about a practice the author has dubbed "Playlist Stuffing" where an irrelevant, long, and monetized video is added into a playlist, low enough to not show up in the search result for that playlist. The accounts engaging in this seem to be compromised and abandoned accounts from the early days of youtube.
From the article:
In recent months, however, countless tainted playlists have cropped up in YouTube search results. Engadget compiled a sample of 100 channels (there are undoubtedly many, many more) engaged in what we'll refer to as playlist stuffing. These had between 30 and 1,987 playlists each — 58,191 in total. The overwhelming majority of these stuffed playlists contain an irrelevant, nearly hour-long video simply titled "More."
The robotic narration of "More" begins: "Cryptocurrency investing, when approached with a long-term perspective, can be a powerful way to build wealth." You'd be forgiven for assuming its aim is to direct unwitting listeners to a shitcoin pump-and-dump. But over the next 57 minutes and 55 seconds, it meanders incoherently between a variety of topics like affiliate marketing, making a website and search engine optimization.
For all its supposed advice on making easy money online, its best example isn't anything said in the video, it's that "More" has amassed nearly 7.5 million views at the time of this writing — and it's monetized.
The vast majority of channels engaged in this activity were created in 2006, and the youngest was claimed in February of 2009. In all likelihood, these accounts were abandoned long ago and have since been compromised, either by whoever is behind "More" or by a third party which sold access to these accounts to them.
I use YouTube for music 8+ hours a day at work (usually full albums) and it was extremely obnoxious when it started happening.
The way around this for 95% of published albums is to not use user-created playlists. When you search for an album, YouTube usually shows it to you on the right side of the results. Click that instead.
A much bigger (imo) problem is the prevalence of AI albums. I hate when they auto play.
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I use YouTube for music 8+ hours a day at work (usually full albums) and it was extremely obnoxious when it started happening.
The way around this for 95% of published albums is to not use user-created playlists. When you search for an album, YouTube usually shows it to you on the right side of the results. Click that instead.
A much bigger (imo) problem is the prevalence of AI albums. I hate when they auto play.
Especially when the poster does not disclose that it's AI.
The perpetual Youtube rabbit hole occasionally lands on one of these for me when I leave it unsupervised, and usually you can tell from the "cover" art. But only if you're looking at it. Because if you just leave it going in the background eventually you start to realize, "Wow, this guy really tripped over the fine line between a groove and rut." Then you click on it and look: Curses! Foiled again.
And golly gee, I'm sure glad Youtube took away the option to oughtright block channels. I'm sure that's a total coincidence.
W/e. I'm a have-it-on-my-hard-drive kind of bird. Yt-dlp is your friend. Just use it to nab whatever it is you actually want and let your own media player decide how to shuffle and present it. This works great for big name commercial music as well, whereupon the record labels are inevitably dumb enough to post songs and albums in their entirety right there you Youtube. Who even needs piracy sites at that rate? Yoink!
