Not sure how this is clickbait? The article reads a bit like a PR post, but the headline isn't an exaggeration and there's no bait and switch. In fact, it's relatively dry.
> YouTube is getting rid of Stories, a feature for temporary posts, beginning in June. Users won’t be able to post Stories starting June 26th, and existing posts will expire after seven days.
I feel like an old man, but I wonder, what's wrong with just using regular youtube to post a video of any length that you want and then deleting it if for some reason you really don't want it up anymore?
I see - I suppose my problem is that I see disappearing videos as a problem rather than a feature. What's even more annoying to me are the spots on youtube lists I've created over the years that just say the video has been removed, but doesn't even tell me what it was that is gone.
Stories are short videos that are only available for a limited amount of time (from a few hours to a couple days), while Shorts are regular videos with limited length. Instagram has both as well.
Dammit, I hate Shorts and I was hoping they were killing that.
I exclusively use YT on a desktop computer so it's really annoying watching vertical video, not to mention the constant attempts to get me to start doomscrolling random content
Sucks to not be the target demographic then. Theres literally billions of people who use youtube every day on mobiles. Shorts is here to stay. Make peace with it I guess.
I think you miss the point. Shorts aren't really suited to the desktop yet they're crammed in there. The format isn't really suited to YouTube in general. If they really wanted to compete with tiktok they'd spin shorts off to a separate app and tune their algorithm to those users without continuing to make YouTube worse while pandering to shorts.
I wish shorts would die. YouTube and TikTok are entirely different kinds of products.
If a creator wants to make a short video, they can just make a short video. If the audience wants short videos, they'll preferentially watch them. That will show up in the creator analytics, and then they'll make shorter videos.
Instead this artificial construct some product manager at YouTube came up with is showing up all over the place where it isn't wanted. It takes up valuable real estate and infests search results.
What I would prefer seeing YouTube do is improve their search. You may get 15-20 relevant search results before they start mixing in shorts, other videos I've already seen, "suggested videos", etc.
They also recently removed the ability to order a channel's videos from oldest to newest. Now there's just "popular".
Give us back the dislike counts.
At least on mobile web, say you scroll down a bit and go to a video. Most of the time when you go back the entire page reloads and you get an entirely new set of videos. This is incredibly frustrating in that you both lose your scroll position but also any other videos you might want to see that may never be surfaced to you again.
And please oh please stop recommending videos I've already watched. That's what watch history is for.
The worst part is that the Shorts interface on the desktop web is awful. I hate having to watch a Short there because all the buttons and UI are all completely different. I accidentally scroll down to view comments to see the pause button and instead just get to another video.
I'm sure some PM made that so that they can increase "next view" viewership, but all it does is insult me.
Yes, I know Shorts can be viewed with the regular video viewer by changing the URL, but that's a pain to do that on every video. Just give me my regular UI controls back and stop enforcing this silly vertical video format on a desktop.
Again, I understand why vertical videos are being promoted; mobile is indeed king, content is now made for mobile. Fine. But desktop is not mobile so give me my standard 16:9 controls back.
The worst part is Joe Rogan. Nothing against him, but Shorts carpet bombs me with video clips of him. It's so annoying. I think I've watched one of his videos, the one with Elon hittin' the blunt, and now YouTube thinks I'm a Joe Rogan stan. Ugh!
For my money, the worst thing about shorts is how it automatically turns a short video into a "Short" which will crop a video shot in landscape to make it play in Portrait mode.
Generally I like YouTube shorts (at least compared to my tiktok feed which is not tailored to my tastes at all) but I'm really annoyed by the lack of a volume slider in the desktop shorts player.
I have found that I gain almost nothing from YouTube shorts at best, and at worst they are a blackhole for my time. I added these[1] filters to uBlock and it hides shorts and brings back the vanilla YouTube experience
> What I would prefer seeing YouTube do is improve their search. You may get 15-20 relevant search results before they start mixing in shorts, other videos I've already seen, "suggested videos", etc.
Worse yet, the other content mixed into search results isn't even visually distinct from the rest! If you overlook the header, there's no way to tell why it isn't showing you what you searched for.
Happily, it's possible to fix this with a CSS rule:
Does that CSS rule let you browse through all the results for a particular search? For example, if I wanted to watch, say, all 50,000 videos of people reacting to the new Zelda, I could just keep scrolling?
All of the recommended videos on my front page are wrenching, welding, carpentry, fabrication, or related. For some reason, my recommended shorts are all women with heavy makeup, cleavage, and nice legs. Yeah, you're definitely going to be working on a running engine with that long hair dangling into the fan.
1. Subscriptions are essentially useless. The UI focuses entirely on recommendations and doesn't show me videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I actually dig into the `library/subscriptions` UI.
2. Shorts. Shorts are everywhere and I don't want to see them, ever.
In summary, the platform is turning into a way to force-feed me content that I am not interested in. If I wanted that, I'd sign up for tiktok.
It's kind of an extreme measure, but there is an extension called "Unhook" that you can use to remove recommendations, and only show your subscriptions. It has a bunch of other tweaks and has made the Youtube UI tolerable for me, personally.
What platform are you watching on? In the mobile app there is a subscription tab on the bottom navigation bar. On the browser and at least on the Roku TV interface there is a Subscriptions tab on the side navigation bar. No need to dig into your library.
>1. Subscriptions are essentially useless. The UI focuses entirely on recommendations and doesn't show me videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I actually dig into the `library/subscriptions` UI.
I don't think Subscriptions are useless, the Subscription feed only show the published videos from your subscriptions, and in reverse chronological order, with no algorithmic shenanigans.
> Shorts. Shorts are everywhere and I don't want to see them, ever.
I don't understand why "digging" into the subscriptions UI is a big deal. It's one click away from the home page and is where I normally start when visiting youtube.
My favourite part is that you can't play shorts on a Chromecast. Old vertical videos work just fine, but if they are tagged as a short they refuse to play.
There is one thing I really hate about shorts in particular. I watch YouTube mostly via Chromecast and if you attempt to play a short it will show a dialog on your phone saying you have to disconnect from Chromecast first. It is bogus and stupid. So here I am playing videos on Chromecast and this stupid app shows me videos I can't play in this mode. For some reason some searches now return me mostly shorts and it makes me mad.
I imagine they just shipped it and if someone raised the Chromecast issue they said "fuck it". How hard can it be to just send the URL to the Chromecast if you don't want to work on this stupid Shorts UX for Chromecast?
> Instead this artificial construct some product manager at YouTube came up with is showing up all over the place where it isn't wanted. It takes up valuable real estate and infests search results.
Even if it was a good product I refuse to use it because of how hard they were pushing it.
I watch a lot of YouTube from my TV using my subscription page. The shorts clutter it up so much that I am about to unsub from accounts that post too many.
Another incredibly annoying part of Stories is that if you do flip through them, each time a new one loads, it counts as a view in your viewing history. This of itself, would not be a bad thing, but here's the problem:
It tries to routinely recommend low quality, low effort, small YouTube channels. I routinely get YouTube channels that have 5-10 subscribers, bot comments, and uploaded videos of uninteresting gameplay clip, and a mic with audio clipping. The more I watch, the more these low effort channels are recommended to me because I've already "watched" so many of them, even if it was only for 1 or 2 seconds.
I make a point of hitting "Do not recommend channel" and not interacting with the channel, because I don't want that to count as a metric of "interaction", but the view itself seems to increase the problem. There are way too many low effort, terrible content channels out there for me to block them all.
So, the more I use Shorts, the worse the quality becomes.
One might think, "Okay, so remove it from your view history." Not a bad idea! But the problem is that these are shorts. Videos have to be under 60 seconds. Most are around 15-30 seconds. In 10 minutes I could probably watch 20 videos, give or take. This means, unless I break out of the loop of watching shorts - remove myself from the interface they want me to be using - I cannot keep any sort of handle over these low effort channels clogging up my viewing habits.
It's incredibly bad and I really despise it.
Most of the channels I actually subscribe to or care about will apologize for having to include a link for a "real" video because of the stupid 60 second limit. Some of them might be able to get by with 90 to 120 seconds, but 60 seconds is just such a tiny amount of time. It actively discourages any sort of meaningful content. It's just quips, nonsense, and poorly cut video clips. It's just bad.
What I'm going to say is purely from the user experience perspective and will - for the moment - completely ignore that YT Shorts, as well as TikTok, are basically drugs and should be treated like that. Also, I have no inside knowledge of any of the products working and algorithms, it is just my personal experience as a user trying out both products in parallel.
With that out of the way: YT shorts is terrible compared to TikTok for the following reasons:
1. In my experience the TikTok algorithm adapts very fast.
I usually watch tech but occasionally dabble into music. When I watch piano videos for like 20 minutes TikTok treats me like I was a musician. Back to tech, also very quick. YT seems to adapt much slower.
2. The TikTok algorithm doesn't mess around.
My daughter likes to watch dance videos. As she has no TikTok herself we watch together on my account. Again TikTok adapts to that very fast and treats us like a teenager. But even before the algo is tuned in it never showed me anything inappropriate.
My armchair suspicion is that while TikTok finds a local maximum of what I want and reliably sits there until I nudge it out, YT has the idea to probe me from time to time if another local maximum might be better. This might be good in theory but when it tries to figure out if a latest dance craze video watcher would also like to see some naked raunchy twerking ladies it has failed miserably.
3. The TikTok algo is fine-grained.
Apart from tech and music I watch the occasional extreme sports video and I have my own taste there. I like physical skill but not so much strength. I like bicycle tricks but no motocross. Cars are generally not my thing except for Gymkhana.
This is no problem for TikTok. It is like the sports I don't like would not exist. YT on the other is all over the place with its suggested videos.
The worst thing on YT is that it occasionally shows me videos where people got hurt badly. One of these videos is enough to kill all the fun for me because I can never be sure not to see gore the next time. TikTok never let me down there.
4. YT moderation is terrible, TikTok's decent
My general impression is that TikTok's limits are wider but fairly well-defined harsh lines. YT 's limits are narrow, fuzzy and inconsequential.
5. YT is basically a TikTok rip-off when it comes to content.
Many of the videos on YT shorts are either copies or recreations from TikTok. I believe for videos that use content from the TikTok library it is infringement, but YT seems to look the other way.
Finally, if all of this sounds like TikTok advertising: It's not. I think both TikTok and YT Shorts are harmful products. The later is just lame too.
Can't agree more. I hate YouTube shorts, hate YouTube monetization despite the constant praise it gets on HN, hate the search results when looking for videos, hate I can't see dislikes, hate that I constantly am suggested videos I've already watched and content I've already flagged I don't want to see, especially content flagged annoying. Maybe an a/b test, but it was bonkers to have a survey prompt "Why is this not interesting?", I flagged "this is annoying" and sure enough that very popular creator was suggested again later.
YouTube is so bloated and Vanced made it tolerable, so of course they killed it.
YouTube search is so bad. I assume it's on purpose considering Google of all people should be able to figure out search. If the video you're looking for isn't in the top five results search is pretty much useless.
Finally! Now kill Shorts. They take up a bunch of space on desktop, yet the player is super annoying to use. As far as I can tell, you can't scrub videos. They do a poor job of hijacking scrolling and clicking. Very unintuitive UI.
I have a userscript that redirects shorts to watch?v=XXXXXX, the short video id is playable using the regular YT video player. Eliminates all the annoying UI features of shorts.
I'm old and so probably spend more time on youtube than all of you young guns with your Insta and TikTok and whatnot... But I've got to admit, to this day I've never heard of Stories. So they won't be missed, at least not by me.
All the comments here asking to kill Shorts because "vertical video looks shit on my desktop", like who do you think YouTube is made for? A HN nerd running Linux on a desktop or the average person who has likely never touched a desktop in their life?
I remember few years back when it was genuinely cool to make fun of and take moral high ground over people taking vertical videos. How times have changed indeed! Even back then I felt vertical videos were the future (on a mobile device it was the natural filming pose, and the videos looked more immersive and personal). The UI just had to catch up (and we have to credit tik tik for discovering that).
Vertical works fine for like, a video of someone talking. But majority of scenarios it just doesn't make sense. Film aspect ratios evolved the way they did for a reason. If you're trying to fit a lot of "things" into frame, due to the nature of gravity they're probably gonna be sitting horizontally next to each other. Not stacked on top of each other vertically.
If I want to take a picture of my desk I need to shoot in landscape. If I really want to do it in portrait I'm gonna have to either use a fish-eye lens to warp the shot, or take several steps back, leaving a bunch of useless space on the top/bottom.
I've heard that reasoning given, but I'm not convinced that makes much of a difference. Unless you're watching in one of those giant theatres where the screen wraps around the edges of the walls, the screen you're viewing something on probably isn't taking up your entire field of view. You're usually moving your eyes around to look at different points of the screen anyway, and if you can comfortably see all parts of a vertical screen it shouldn't make that much of a difference. Furthermore, if you close one eye it's not like it balances out to make horizontal and vertical video equal, nullifying the reasons I mentioned.
I think the issue is just in capturing the content. There's more useful things in the real world you can capture with a wide view than a vertical one.
Those hating on shorts need to watch old people use YouTube. They have no idea what TikTok is, but they get suckered into shorts so fast when they open "YouTube".
An interesting thing that no one (I think/hope) has mentioned: Shorts are just glorified videos. Mind you, I have only watched less than a handful of them, more than a couple of months ago but here it goes: The URL is something like youtube.com/shorts/w12jfk. That last part is the random ID YouTube assigns. If you change the link to a video link, youtube.com/watch?v=w12jfk, then you get the normal interface. (The ID is randomly typed)
Maybe a bookmarklet, or something, could make things bearable, but there still giving clicks to Shorts, probably.
Edit: But the post is about Stories, huh... A thing I hardly remember it existed. So much for a first comment.
>In the absence of Stories, YouTube wants creators to instead post content to other surfaces on the platform: Community Posts and Shorts. The company recently expanded access to Community Posts, a text-based updates feature, and added the ability to have posts expire after a certain period.
YouTube seems really dedicated to Community Posts and pushing creators to use them, except that they don't seem to plan on ever making them viewable in the iPad app where a huge portion of the audience is. Virtually every other feature, including Stories, was added on iPad at about the same time as iPhone, except Community Posts are years behind. Weird.
Yes, let's focus on content for the ADHD crowd. Let's create a situation where videos crop out relevant bits and end mid sentence. Let's incentize channels to post videos that end before the payoff promised in the title and let them end with vapid promises that it will be in a part two that doesn't and will never exist.
YouTube and YouTube shorts should be two separate apps/sites sevibg two distinct types of content not one where shorts in crammed into a format it isn't suited for.
I'm truly surprised no one has leapfrogged the short-form war (especially with ads) and started inserting blipverts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert
This is exciting! This is the inverse of my rule of thumb:
An app is past its peak once a stories feature has been added. After that point, it has become overly bloated and will shift towards no longer be worth using.
Over time, I have watched stories be added to multiple apps that make no sense such as Uber Eats. Whenever an app has added a stories feature unnecessarily, I have uninstalled the app because it has lost focus and no longer delivers a quality experience for me. I wonder if this means that YouTube will now increase in quality. We shall have to wait and see!
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] thread> YouTube is getting rid of Stories, a feature for temporary posts, beginning in June. Users won’t be able to post Stories starting June 26th, and existing posts will expire after seven days.
There's a difference between YouTube Stories and YouTube Shorts!? What's the difference? I legit thought they're the same thing.
i've upvoted this article and encourage it
2) Viewers understand that the video is only temporarily available, without your having to tell them.
I exclusively use YT on a desktop computer so it's really annoying watching vertical video, not to mention the constant attempts to get me to start doomscrolling random content
If a creator wants to make a short video, they can just make a short video. If the audience wants short videos, they'll preferentially watch them. That will show up in the creator analytics, and then they'll make shorter videos.
Instead this artificial construct some product manager at YouTube came up with is showing up all over the place where it isn't wanted. It takes up valuable real estate and infests search results.
What I would prefer seeing YouTube do is improve their search. You may get 15-20 relevant search results before they start mixing in shorts, other videos I've already seen, "suggested videos", etc.
They also recently removed the ability to order a channel's videos from oldest to newest. Now there's just "popular".
Give us back the dislike counts.
At least on mobile web, say you scroll down a bit and go to a video. Most of the time when you go back the entire page reloads and you get an entirely new set of videos. This is incredibly frustrating in that you both lose your scroll position but also any other videos you might want to see that may never be surfaced to you again.
And please oh please stop recommending videos I've already watched. That's what watch history is for.
I'm sure some PM made that so that they can increase "next view" viewership, but all it does is insult me.
Yes, I know Shorts can be viewed with the regular video viewer by changing the URL, but that's a pain to do that on every video. Just give me my regular UI controls back and stop enforcing this silly vertical video format on a desktop.
Again, I understand why vertical videos are being promoted; mobile is indeed king, content is now made for mobile. Fine. But desktop is not mobile so give me my standard 16:9 controls back.
It actively is messing up video content.
There is a Chrome extension to do that automatically [1]. Here’s one for Firefox [2].
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-short...
[1] https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
Worse yet, the other content mixed into search results isn't even visually distinct from the rest! If you overlook the header, there's no way to tell why it isn't showing you what you searched for.
Happily, it's possible to fix this with a CSS rule:
(Or you can "display: none" the whole section if you prefer.)1. Subscriptions are essentially useless. The UI focuses entirely on recommendations and doesn't show me videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I actually dig into the `library/subscriptions` UI.
2. Shorts. Shorts are everywhere and I don't want to see them, ever.
In summary, the platform is turning into a way to force-feed me content that I am not interested in. If I wanted that, I'd sign up for tiktok.
(EDIT: Fixed formatting)
I don't think Subscriptions are useless, the Subscription feed only show the published videos from your subscriptions, and in reverse chronological order, with no algorithmic shenanigans.
> Shorts. Shorts are everywhere and I don't want to see them, ever.
Me too, you can remove Shorts (on a browser) using this uBlock Origin filter https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts
Why???
I imagine they just shipped it and if someone raised the Chromecast issue they said "fuck it". How hard can it be to just send the URL to the Chromecast if you don't want to work on this stupid Shorts UX for Chromecast?
Even if it was a good product I refuse to use it because of how hard they were pushing it.
P.S. if you use Signal, you can turn of Stories from the settings
It tries to routinely recommend low quality, low effort, small YouTube channels. I routinely get YouTube channels that have 5-10 subscribers, bot comments, and uploaded videos of uninteresting gameplay clip, and a mic with audio clipping. The more I watch, the more these low effort channels are recommended to me because I've already "watched" so many of them, even if it was only for 1 or 2 seconds.
I make a point of hitting "Do not recommend channel" and not interacting with the channel, because I don't want that to count as a metric of "interaction", but the view itself seems to increase the problem. There are way too many low effort, terrible content channels out there for me to block them all.
So, the more I use Shorts, the worse the quality becomes.
One might think, "Okay, so remove it from your view history." Not a bad idea! But the problem is that these are shorts. Videos have to be under 60 seconds. Most are around 15-30 seconds. In 10 minutes I could probably watch 20 videos, give or take. This means, unless I break out of the loop of watching shorts - remove myself from the interface they want me to be using - I cannot keep any sort of handle over these low effort channels clogging up my viewing habits.
It's incredibly bad and I really despise it.
Most of the channels I actually subscribe to or care about will apologize for having to include a link for a "real" video because of the stupid 60 second limit. Some of them might be able to get by with 90 to 120 seconds, but 60 seconds is just such a tiny amount of time. It actively discourages any sort of meaningful content. It's just quips, nonsense, and poorly cut video clips. It's just bad.
I'm pretty confident it will.
What I'm going to say is purely from the user experience perspective and will - for the moment - completely ignore that YT Shorts, as well as TikTok, are basically drugs and should be treated like that. Also, I have no inside knowledge of any of the products working and algorithms, it is just my personal experience as a user trying out both products in parallel.
With that out of the way: YT shorts is terrible compared to TikTok for the following reasons:
1. In my experience the TikTok algorithm adapts very fast.
I usually watch tech but occasionally dabble into music. When I watch piano videos for like 20 minutes TikTok treats me like I was a musician. Back to tech, also very quick. YT seems to adapt much slower.
2. The TikTok algorithm doesn't mess around.
My daughter likes to watch dance videos. As she has no TikTok herself we watch together on my account. Again TikTok adapts to that very fast and treats us like a teenager. But even before the algo is tuned in it never showed me anything inappropriate.
My armchair suspicion is that while TikTok finds a local maximum of what I want and reliably sits there until I nudge it out, YT has the idea to probe me from time to time if another local maximum might be better. This might be good in theory but when it tries to figure out if a latest dance craze video watcher would also like to see some naked raunchy twerking ladies it has failed miserably.
3. The TikTok algo is fine-grained.
Apart from tech and music I watch the occasional extreme sports video and I have my own taste there. I like physical skill but not so much strength. I like bicycle tricks but no motocross. Cars are generally not my thing except for Gymkhana. This is no problem for TikTok. It is like the sports I don't like would not exist. YT on the other is all over the place with its suggested videos.
The worst thing on YT is that it occasionally shows me videos where people got hurt badly. One of these videos is enough to kill all the fun for me because I can never be sure not to see gore the next time. TikTok never let me down there.
4. YT moderation is terrible, TikTok's decent
My general impression is that TikTok's limits are wider but fairly well-defined harsh lines. YT 's limits are narrow, fuzzy and inconsequential.
5. YT is basically a TikTok rip-off when it comes to content.
Many of the videos on YT shorts are either copies or recreations from TikTok. I believe for videos that use content from the TikTok library it is infringement, but YT seems to look the other way.
Finally, if all of this sounds like TikTok advertising: It's not. I think both TikTok and YT Shorts are harmful products. The later is just lame too.
YouTube is so bloated and Vanced made it tolerable, so of course they killed it.
(Hopefully, Shorts will go next)
Original link: https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/217640760
I remember few years back when it was genuinely cool to make fun of and take moral high ground over people taking vertical videos. How times have changed indeed! Even back then I felt vertical videos were the future (on a mobile device it was the natural filming pose, and the videos looked more immersive and personal). The UI just had to catch up (and we have to credit tik tik for discovering that).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34547259
https://github.com/saitoha/FFmpeg-SIXEL
If I want to take a picture of my desk I need to shoot in landscape. If I really want to do it in portrait I'm gonna have to either use a fish-eye lens to warp the shot, or take several steps back, leaving a bunch of useless space on the top/bottom.
It's not just a concern of device form factor.
I think the issue is just in capturing the content. There's more useful things in the real world you can capture with a wide view than a vertical one.
Edit: But the post is about Stories, huh... A thing I hardly remember it existed. So much for a first comment.
YouTube seems really dedicated to Community Posts and pushing creators to use them, except that they don't seem to plan on ever making them viewable in the iPad app where a huge portion of the audience is. Virtually every other feature, including Stories, was added on iPad at about the same time as iPhone, except Community Posts are years behind. Weird.
YouTube and YouTube shorts should be two separate apps/sites sevibg two distinct types of content not one where shorts in crammed into a format it isn't suited for.
This joke only makes sense if you understand UK-type English.
An app is past its peak once a stories feature has been added. After that point, it has become overly bloated and will shift towards no longer be worth using.
Over time, I have watched stories be added to multiple apps that make no sense such as Uber Eats. Whenever an app has added a stories feature unnecessarily, I have uninstalled the app because it has lost focus and no longer delivers a quality experience for me. I wonder if this means that YouTube will now increase in quality. We shall have to wait and see!