There is a new Skip shorts switch in the list selector, alongside Skip watched and Skip ignored.
The problem it solves is arithmetic. A channel that posts one long video a month and a Short every day ends up with thirty times more Shorts than videos in your pool, so a random pick from that pool is overwhelmingly a Short. You did not subscribe for a different ratio than the one you got, but random sampling does not know that.
Watched and ignored videos have always been filtered out of your suggestions. That is the right default, and it is still the default — but it was also permanent, and it should not have been.
You can now split your channels into named lists and switch between them.
Until today every channel you added went into one pool, and a random pick came from all of it. That works until your pool contains both twenty-minute cooking videos and three-hour lectures, at which point “random” stops being useful — half the suggestions are the wrong shape for the time you actually have.
Two changes to the screen where you pick which channels to add.
Sync now. RandomYV keeps a copy of your YouTube subscriptions rather than asking YouTube every time you open the page, which is what makes that page load quickly. The cost is that a channel you subscribed to five minutes ago is not there yet. There is now a Sync now button that discards the copy and fetches your subscriptions again, so a channel you just subscribed to shows up straight away.
Every suggestion now shows the video’s length.
This sounds small and it changes the whole interaction. The question you are actually answering when a suggestion comes up is not “is this interesting” — it is “do I have time for this right now”. Without a duration you could not answer it without opening the video on YouTube, and once you are on YouTube, the thing RandomYV exists to help you avoid has already happened.
Adding channels has been possible since the first version. Taking one back out has not, which made the first screen a one-way door — you added a channel, and if it turned out to be the wrong call you lived with it.
Truly random is not what anyone actually wants.
Picking a channel at random on every press means the same channel can come up three times in a row, and a channel you added months ago can go weeks without ever being chosen. That is exactly how random behaves — it just does not feel like a fair shuffle, because it isn’t one.
The first version of RandomYV is live.
The idea behind it is a small one. You already subscribed to channels you like. You do not need another feed telling you what is popular; you need one of those channels’ videos that you have not watched yet.