the youtube people who work on shorts should feel ashamed of themselves. They have a platform with a certain reputation and acclaim by users for providing - and supporting- all sorts of quality content, yet they push hard (very hard) an awfully trivial form of (not even) entertainment where you can't even seek the video back and forward. you should at least adjust your messaging to say how sorry you are for shoving shorts on our faces
inb4 it's just showing me what I like. In icognito mode go to YouTube and watch a single video that might suggest you are an 18-45 year old male, and then look at your suggested shorts.
This is a silly and stupid argument. I was searching for some programming tutorials and it showed suggestive content in search results in maybe you might also like section or something like that. WTF is that.
let's not pretend like youtube has some heights of quality it's upholding. "all sorts of quality" is really more like all sorts ranging from good to bad to awful. and short-form comedy is in there too, and was there all along, right on the regular youtube.
they're mostly doing nothing. they're sleeping on every emerging video category. they got a video podcasts section only this year. their gaming catalog remains barebones. it's like they just don't want to make any "controversial" content curation decisions, even if it means that the platform is stagnating.
let's not confuse creators and creator communities progressing and evolving, with state of platforms they happen to be on.
What has gone down is my ability to even tell what a video is even about since YouTubes algorithm/metrics/ad distribution
Encourages creators to make absolute garbage titles and thumbnails in order to be discovered.
This has absolutely negatively affected my YouTube view time since I am annoyed at having to guess the topic and whether it is worth suffering an ad for it.
I put this in YouTubes court since they control what is shown to users and what isn't.
The most awful thing that it defaults in shorts.
I am so far that I am actually looking into feature phones as I am convinced my life would be better without social media and attention-seeking-lowcontent offer like shorts.
I keep clicking the "not interested" X button that closes the shorts section oh the homepage, but no matter what it just keeps coming back. Unkillable zombie style.
Perhaps, but that's the consent that they certainly don't want me to revoke. The part where my preferences are customizable is meant to be a mutually beneficial arrangement, because it prevents me from leaving.
Lol sure I want a 90% worse experience on an Android tablet just for that?
This is like me complaining about gas mileage on a 1000km car trip and someone saying "you could always walk there!"... Yes I could but it's such a worse option overall.
I can only assume that shorts increase ad revenue by decreasing the time between ad views and that's why they push them on users and creators.
The government needs to step in and regulate ads, because ads destroy content and at some point , quality content is a societal good that needs to be protected.
Yeah but scale matters. The number of people who are on the Internet now, and therefore the cost to serve them (at least for major or popular platforms) is much higher than it was back in the early days of the web.
I too long for those days, trust me, but it's just not a fair comparison.
Yeah sorry I just don't agree with that reasoning.
Even if cost per user hasn't gone up (which I would actually bet it has, if we had a way to measure it), the total cost has gone up, and for a distributed non-commercial Internet you need to have a total cost, not a per-user cost, that is affordable for lots of people, not just for large market leaders, like it is today.
To be fair, I don't agree with the original statement that the Internet started without adds, there were and still are some sites ran not for profit; but people always look to monetize.
What I don't agree with is that the current state of affairs is necessary due to scale.
We have adverts thrown in our faces and tracking everywhere we go, even on sites that could be profitable without it, simply because it is easy to do and almost all sites do it.
> The early days of the internet didn’t facilitate trillions in economic value like it is now.
Neither does ads. The “trillions” in economic value are what's driven by the businesses using the internet for their business (say to order food, taxis, hotels, online games, etc.).
The ads-based internet generate only a tiny fraction of that value. In fact, it only generates the low-quality value for which people aren't willing to pay anything. Youtube is probably the only exception here, and in fact if they decided to go fully paid, then many people would probably still pay for it, like they pay for Netflix.
I've found it very relevant in the post Reddit and Twitter era. Instead of seeking out direct replacements for those sites I remember how much better the smaller, authentic internet was and break the habit of depending on the most popular sites just to go along with the crowd.
It might be neat if there was a top level domain that required no ads or paywalled content.
i.e. anyone can register a domain, but if an ad or paywall is found on a site there's a warning -> suspension -> domain unregistered. Only donation links accepted but they cannot provide extra content.
Hobbyist/amateur sites would thrive there as there would be attraction due to visitors being confident they won't be met with ads or paywalls.
It would be awesome until the registrar inevitably caves and gradually bends the rules to increase revenue.
I 'member ads from the very first days of the net. Just that they were in people's sigs, or in the little grey button images that cluttered up the bottom of every websites, and tended to be ads for geek things so maybe they didn't feel like ads. But they were.
Then of course almost immediately once bandwidth got fast enough there were image ads and an explosion of GeoCities sites.
That's like saying that I should not be required to pay for Office 365 because I'm already paying the power company for the electric power to run Office.
Perhaps, but this must not be falsely equated with a situation where every user must either tolerate ads or pay for content. The non-obvious distinction lies in that it is actually quite feasible for a small subset of dedicated fans to support a creator through services like patreon, allowing at least the primary body of the creator's content to remain freely available without requiring it to be ad-ridden. It may even be beneficial in generating more fans than the creator would have generated if they'd simply paywalled their content.
Would Youtube make financial sense without a "free" tier that includes ads? Would people use it? Would creators on Youtube even be found?
The few people donating money will never donate enough to sustain the platform that also serves non-donating users. And those same people that donate will never even find any platform that hasn't already become popular thanks to the free ad-supported tier. There's no way out. The griftnet is here to stay
In addition to that, traditionally the Ad Market has been willing to pay more than Consumers.
Ads generated more revenue.
Then Netflix came along, and their core value prop was that there were no Ads, it was subscription only. Like their DVD service. This obviously fundamentally changed online consumer viewing habits and revenue sources.
Until of course Netflix decided to look into Ads as a way to feed to the beast that is Revenue Growth.
Attempts at a Netflix for other types of media seem to have largely failed to capture and change the market in the same way.
Apple News is a ghost town. Maybe old Media and Magazines are just mostly dead anyway?
Don't forget the defensive strategic play against other similar products. If that's where the audience goes, and you are not there, your competitors now get ad revenue that could have gone to you.
I've seen an argument that while that's true, people pay less attention to the ads, which are also shorter.
YouTube Shorts is an obvious TikTok knockoff, a platform heavily optimized for mindless consumption. Problem is, it is so mindless that people forget the ads. There is so much stuff happening so fast that nothing sticks, neither content nor ads. And advertisers are starting to realize that their return on investment is not that great despite the high number of views.
From my perspective, it already has. Some of my favorite long form creators have switched to shorts for the money. As a result I just no longer bother going to YouTube anymore and just stick with podcasts.
As they said, I think it might be good for discovery. My personal habits back that up, I'm aware of some channels I wouldn't otherwise be without shorts.
I found the opposite true. Shorts lowers the barrier of entry and generates a large volume of garbage content. You’d have one original video, followed by thousands of other either lip syncing to the original or just nodding their head (aka reacting) to it. It is very easy to get annoyed by it and leave the platform.
Personally, I can’t stand Shorts because they don’t let me scrub through the video. I actively avoid watching them because I feel like I’m being forced to watch the whole thing.
It is crazy, even tiktok lets you scrub if it is longer than a really short loop. And youtube so closely copied the UI that they don't let you even adjust the volume of shorts on desktop browsers.
You can redirect to /watch?v=<contentid> and then scrub, which is what I always change the URL to if I need to send a link to someone else, but this is a pain to change manually.
(Auto-Redirect Short To "Normal" Video URL would be a good extension if I knew how to do one or had time to learn.)
It seems to be mostly driven by what you click on. Like, my shorts will always include Hank Green, Vsauce, some entertainment like VLDL or dropout.tv. Just click "not interested" on stuff you don't care about.
All I found on shorts was an attractive young lady playing guitar really badly but still having millions of views and comments saying how good she sounded.
I'd forgive her if she was a beginner, but she's been uploading videos for years.
If I'm someone who's watching Shorts, I'm probably viewing 10-30 videos in a 10 minute span. That's 10-30 creators who are getting a view out of me.
If I'm watching proper long-form content for that same 10 minute window, then maybe 2-3 creators are getting a view out of me.
Multiply that across the millions of users of YouTube, and it's pretty lucrative to make content for Shorts. Your dollar-per-view is likely lower, but the massive amount of views you pick up end up working out in your favor.
I think they serve a purpose i.e. when I don't have time to watch a full video, I can just watch a Short.
Basically when I'm on my computer, I don't watch Shorts. When I'm on my phone, and I have a few minutes to kill, but still want to learn something I'm interested in, I'll watch a Short.
Shorts are not just videos that are short. It also come with a player where you can't go forwards and backwards, that autoplays through an algorithmically generated feed, optimized for retention.
The system isn't designed for you to watch a short, in fact, it discourages it, it is designed so that you watch an endless stream of shorts.
Didn't work for me either. My first reaction when I saw the new interface was "help, I want to get out!", and I have avoided even potentially interesting shorts for that reason. I ended up installing an extension that plays shorts like regular videos.
There are certainly many "weirdos" like us, but YouTube (and TikTok) don't care. As long as it turns on more people than it turns off, it is a win for them. If there are enough weirdos, some smaller company may get interested and cater to that niche.
In fact, I think it is how current tech giants may fail, by only focusing on the majority and dropping the niches, they may open themselves to a more nimble competitor that use these niches as a starting point to eat away their market share. Privacy is one such niche, but I think it is already an overcrowded market, plus, Apple is on it, so you can't rely on that alone. Maybe there is a niche for an anti-tiktok that can be exploited.
The removal of choice. I wouldn’t mind if there was just a new type of content but they keep pushing it unsolicited: it’s like half of the homepage with auto-playing garbage (at least show stuff with good production values to sell the concept rather than someone incoherently waving a 2007 camera phone around) and you have to turn it off separately on every device and they turn it back on every few weeks anyway.
I'm just not that interested in short-form content... in those spare moments I'm not even that interested in my phone.
The real aggravating part is that Google has tried nearly everything, short of switching videos under my cursor, to sucker me into this instant-gratification loop.
I'd be way less frustrated about the existence of Shorts if Google hadn't been so ham-fisted about them
"Shorts, may eat away at its long-form content, which has for almost two decades been its primary bread and butter"
Long form content which is artificially long, because of what platform rewards. Those videos cold easily be 2min long or less, but how would they justify placing a 30s ads before it? Also - majority of streaming takes place on mobile.
Short format is straight to the point and what Internet needs. No one has time to go through 10min of clickbaity spam chopped by sh*y YouTube ads.
This comment reduces several different concerns into a single opinion that long is clickbait and short is just right. At the end of the day, videos should be as long as they need to be to suit the type of content, the creator’s style, and their target audience’s taste, and it’s offensive for content platforms to assume or countermand your preferences or tastes.
The issue is that platforms are also forcing these reductive, drain-circling usage patterns motivated by competition and profitability, but it especially sucks when you do it to a well-established user base. Especially since it’s the easiest thing in the world to just let users decide if they want shorts or not.
You are in your right to think that long form videos are bloated click bait. I’m in mine to think that shorts are predominantly attention deficit trivialities for memes, influencer trash, and also clickbait. What sucks is that I can’t get away from shorts, and worse than that, shorts circumvent YouTube’s neutered, paltry search and recommendation algos and are constantly pushing even lower quality and uninteresting if not completely irrelevant (and sometimes inappropriate) rubbish higher than things I’m actually looking for.
You at least can go to TikTok. I will have to wait until a critical mass of my favorite content creators migrate to a less shitty platform.
If the video seems too long for you it probably is just not interesting. For example, videos on maths, or on music producing cannot be compressed to short format.
There is genuinely a lot of padding going on to make videos around 12 min long when they could have easily been a couple of minutes. Certainly some topics have enough complexity to produce a longer video, but a lot of YouTube is artificially padded these days for ad revenue.
Sadly not from the apps without sideloading modified versions. Not only is the quality absolutely garbage but I also noticed that my brain is susceptible to them and I tend to doomscroll if I ever land there. I really try so hard to excise all the short form content stuff from my life but even with extensions and everything, the web version is not great enough to replace the app completely.
Personally I use UnHook to completely hide all recommendations, merch/music/offers/etc. ads, replace the default homepage with the subscriptions page and generally clean the UI:
In addition, I use the Stylus extension with a custom stylesheet to restore the UI to the roughly pre-2016 look. This has allowed me to essentially treat my Youtube experience as a RSS feed viewer, which I feel is a much healthier experience.
However, by doing this you do lose out on the discovery factor that Youtube is known for.
"Senior YouTube staffers are reportedly worried that its TikTok competitor, Shorts, may eat away at its long-form content,"
They are different forms of content, just on the same platform. Seems like a a non-sensical article for the click of driving engagement on The Verge - and I guess it worked.
Also, the Verge is just poorly summarizing a Financial Times article...in other words, The Verge is providing 'short-form content' of ft.com, except, ft.com isn't getting the ad revenue (not the same publisher, afaik).
And for FT...their article does not cite a single person from YouTube. Just "a staffer in a meeting said..."...according to "YouTube staff".
> They are different forms of content, just on the same platform.
Sure but if someone uploads short trailing / covering something they also cover in a long-form video (and I have seen several creators I follow doing this), there's a non-zero percentage of people who aren't going to bother with the long-form version because they'll have got the gist from the short. That's eating away at the long-form, no?
> They are different forms of content, just on the same platform
No there really is something to what they are saying. My husband is a HUGE youtube user and now on most of his devices his feed is 50% shorts. It completely changes the experience of consuming youtube content.
I am in a similar boat, I pay for Premium and I don't want to see Shorts anywhere in my feed, but I can't not have them.. I can snooze them for 30 days or something (I mostly use an iPad) but that's not what I want.
I must have a different experience somehow? My feed & recommendationa only has Shorts in one spot...2nd from the top, and I can see more if I swipe. Besides that all other recommendations are long form.
Everything has been downhill since they let people upload custom thumbnails honestly. That shit should pick a random frame from the video and attempts to game that (like re-uploading 1000 times until it happens to select the portion of the video with the desired thumbnail) should be flaggable. The thumbnails, which used to be indicative of average content of the video, have just become visual clickbait. Oh how I miss the early days of youtube when these were just random frames from the video.
Funny enough, creators can't upload custom thumbnails on YouTube Shorts, at least not without a lot of trickery. So if you dislike thumbnails that much, Shorts would probably appeal more than normal videos.
A month or so ago I started watching a comedian I thought was pretty talented. Youtube then started spamming me her Shorts. I unsubscribed because my brain associates her content with that annoying pattern.
Was it Taylor Tomlinson? A couple of months ago I suddenly got videos of her (both shorts and the longer 5-10 minute clips) recommended, and I'm normally not into standup at all.
(I did enjoy them, but not enough to actively seek out more.)
Wow that's wild, I'm not OP but I've also got this exact situation.
I watched a couple of old Dave Chapelle clips and then suddenly had a bunch of videos from the Taylor Tomlinson all recommended to me repeatedly, even though I had never heard of her before...
Yes, that's the weird thing. I've heard of Dave Chapelle, but I can't remember the last time I watched a clip of his or any other standup comedian. I'd never heard of Taylor Tomlinson before.
Seriously. I can’t imagine how trivial it would be to just add a flag to my YouTube account permanently disabling shorts but they’d rather make it per device, per 30 days. Forget what we want to watch, we will use YouTube they way their PMs want.
We can't ignore the fact that shorts - as a format - promote distinctly different content quality. It's a much more compressed, less thoughtful, more manipulative (have to keep only the most attention grabbing parts) video format.
Perhaps I am in a tiny minority, but the introduction of shorts has completely changed how I use YouTube. I have blocked all modules on the homepage, YouTube recommendation modules on other pages, secondary navigation, etc with uBO. Have only watched maybe 5 shorts in total, and even then only by accident when clicking links on other domains.
I watch Youtube on laptop and never watch Shorts. The videos I watch are usually in range of 5 to 30 minutes and cannot be shortened. Also, I don't like vertical format.
I don't understand what's good in short videos. Would you prefer to read 1 page book, watch 1 minute movie or go to a 1 minute concert?
Short videos work best when you want to show something that doesn't really need a lot of explanation, or justify a full length video. For instance, in the gaming world, a random glitch you encountered that sends your character falling through the floor, or an AI bug that causes an enemy or NPC to get stuck/repeat the same actions in a loop, or a really close finish at the end of a race could be great short material. It's amusing to watch out of context, but doesn't provide enough material for a full length production.
Other examples in other genres could be a meme based on a particular funny clip, outtakes/bloopers from a longer stream or video, part of a TV show or film that's somewhat iconic and can be enjoyed out of context, etc. Could be treated like an ad for the longer production, in the same way Nintendo thought their mobile games were a gateway product to their console ones.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 69.4 ms ] threadFor me that works with shorts, maybe it’s a recent change.
Also, if you are casting videos from your phone to a TV, and you accidentally (a well planned accident) click on shorts , it ends the TV cast
inb4 it's just showing me what I like. In icognito mode go to YouTube and watch a single video that might suggest you are an 18-45 year old male, and then look at your suggested shorts.
Not so much on tiktok or any fb property. They really force the onlyfans market-funnel jiggle videos into your face..
This is a silly and stupid argument. I was searching for some programming tutorials and it showed suggestive content in search results in maybe you might also like section or something like that. WTF is that.
let's not confuse creators and creator communities progressing and evolving, with state of platforms they happen to be on.
This has absolutely negatively affected my YouTube view time since I am annoyed at having to guess the topic and whether it is worth suffering an ad for it.
I put this in YouTubes court since they control what is shown to users and what isn't.
You can copy the video ID into the URL of the normal player and play it like any other video. There's a Tampermonkey script that changes the player automatically: <https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...>
Is that your idea of consent, youtube?
Even then: https://github.com/qnblackcat/uYouPlus has a "Hide Shorts Cells" options :)
This is like me complaining about gas mileage on a 1000km car trip and someone saying "you could always walk there!"... Yes I could but it's such a worse option overall.
The government needs to step in and regulate ads, because ads destroy content and at some point , quality content is a societal good that needs to be protected.
I too long for those days, trust me, but it's just not a fair comparison.
Clearly market forces often lead to a horrible product many of us don't like.
Even if cost per user hasn't gone up (which I would actually bet it has, if we had a way to measure it), the total cost has gone up, and for a distributed non-commercial Internet you need to have a total cost, not a per-user cost, that is affordable for lots of people, not just for large market leaders, like it is today.
What I don't agree with is that the current state of affairs is necessary due to scale.
We have adverts thrown in our faces and tracking everywhere we go, even on sites that could be profitable without it, simply because it is easy to do and almost all sites do it.
If all the time and money spent on figuring out tracking and ads had been put into micro-payments or distributed infrastructure, we'd be better off.
But people want stuff "for free" and big companies don't want to give up control, so here we are.
The early days of the internet didn’t facilitate trillions in economic value like it is now.
We can use that anecdote as inspiration but it really has no merit on the modern internet.
Neither does ads. The “trillions” in economic value are what's driven by the businesses using the internet for their business (say to order food, taxis, hotels, online games, etc.).
The ads-based internet generate only a tiny fraction of that value. In fact, it only generates the low-quality value for which people aren't willing to pay anything. Youtube is probably the only exception here, and in fact if they decided to go fully paid, then many people would probably still pay for it, like they pay for Netflix.
Trillions of dollars of shit is still shit, but shit is at least useful for compost where ads are useless at best.
With all those additional trillions there should be enough overall wealth for everyone to afford a completely ad-free internet now more than ever.
That lasted all of 5 seconds before banner ads and auto-playing ads became the norm. Bandwidth isn't free.
i.e. anyone can register a domain, but if an ad or paywall is found on a site there's a warning -> suspension -> domain unregistered. Only donation links accepted but they cannot provide extra content.
Hobbyist/amateur sites would thrive there as there would be attraction due to visitors being confident they won't be met with ads or paywalls.
It would be awesome until the registrar inevitably caves and gradually bends the rules to increase revenue.
Then of course almost immediately once bandwidth got fast enough there were image ads and an explosion of GeoCities sites.
The few people donating money will never donate enough to sustain the platform that also serves non-donating users. And those same people that donate will never even find any platform that hasn't already become popular thanks to the free ad-supported tier. There's no way out. The griftnet is here to stay
Ads generated more revenue.
Then Netflix came along, and their core value prop was that there were no Ads, it was subscription only. Like their DVD service. This obviously fundamentally changed online consumer viewing habits and revenue sources.
Until of course Netflix decided to look into Ads as a way to feed to the beast that is Revenue Growth.
Attempts at a Netflix for other types of media seem to have largely failed to capture and change the market in the same way.
Apple News is a ghost town. Maybe old Media and Magazines are just mostly dead anyway?
YouTube Shorts is an obvious TikTok knockoff, a platform heavily optimized for mindless consumption. Problem is, it is so mindless that people forget the ads. There is so much stuff happening so fast that nothing sticks, neither content nor ads. And advertisers are starting to realize that their return on investment is not that great despite the high number of views.
No way! How could greatest talents and best innovators of Silicon Valley make just a copycat of a Chinese app for kids?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/H6st2yl6jNE
As they said, I think it might be good for discovery. My personal habits back that up, I'm aware of some channels I wouldn't otherwise be without shorts.
Shorts will capture your attention for longer and display ads in-between more frequently.
I find musicians and naked ladies via shorts, but I rarely extend my science and programming channels via shorts.
(Auto-Redirect Short To "Normal" Video URL would be a good extension if I knew how to do one or had time to learn.)
I'd forgive her if she was a beginner, but she's been uploading videos for years.
In a way a commercial for the content except it’s a lie roof the content.
If I'm watching proper long-form content for that same 10 minute window, then maybe 2-3 creators are getting a view out of me.
Multiply that across the millions of users of YouTube, and it's pretty lucrative to make content for Shorts. Your dollar-per-view is likely lower, but the massive amount of views you pick up end up working out in your favor.
I think they serve a purpose i.e. when I don't have time to watch a full video, I can just watch a Short.
Basically when I'm on my computer, I don't watch Shorts. When I'm on my phone, and I have a few minutes to kill, but still want to learn something I'm interested in, I'll watch a Short.
Shorts are not just videos that are short. It also come with a player where you can't go forwards and backwards, that autoplays through an algorithmically generated feed, optimized for retention.
The system isn't designed for you to watch a short, in fact, it discourages it, it is designed so that you watch an endless stream of shorts.
Failed hard on me. Perhaps I am weird.
There are certainly many "weirdos" like us, but YouTube (and TikTok) don't care. As long as it turns on more people than it turns off, it is a win for them. If there are enough weirdos, some smaller company may get interested and cater to that niche.
In fact, I think it is how current tech giants may fail, by only focusing on the majority and dropping the niches, they may open themselves to a more nimble competitor that use these niches as a starting point to eat away their market share. Privacy is one such niche, but I think it is already an overcrowded market, plus, Apple is on it, so you can't rely on that alone. Maybe there is a niche for an anti-tiktok that can be exploited.
The real aggravating part is that Google has tried nearly everything, short of switching videos under my cursor, to sucker me into this instant-gratification loop.
I'd be way less frustrated about the existence of Shorts if Google hadn't been so ham-fisted about them
People have opinons, what's this nothing burger?
That explains why he vanished from my perception a while ago. Didn't even notice until now.
Better this than nothing, IMO.
Long form content which is artificially long, because of what platform rewards. Those videos cold easily be 2min long or less, but how would they justify placing a 30s ads before it? Also - majority of streaming takes place on mobile.
Short format is straight to the point and what Internet needs. No one has time to go through 10min of clickbaity spam chopped by sh*y YouTube ads.
The issue is that platforms are also forcing these reductive, drain-circling usage patterns motivated by competition and profitability, but it especially sucks when you do it to a well-established user base. Especially since it’s the easiest thing in the world to just let users decide if they want shorts or not.
You are in your right to think that long form videos are bloated click bait. I’m in mine to think that shorts are predominantly attention deficit trivialities for memes, influencer trash, and also clickbait. What sucks is that I can’t get away from shorts, and worse than that, shorts circumvent YouTube’s neutered, paltry search and recommendation algos and are constantly pushing even lower quality and uninteresting if not completely irrelevant (and sometimes inappropriate) rubbish higher than things I’m actually looking for.
You at least can go to TikTok. I will have to wait until a critical mass of my favorite content creators migrate to a less shitty platform.
I would strongly disagree.
Short form encourages TikTok style click-bait/outrage-farming content.
I much prefer the much more thoughtful longer content you do find on Youtube.
I think that's the important bit.
Long form content that is artifically long does exist (see the trend of making videos exactly 10 mins or longer to maximise ad revenue).
But on the other end of the spectrum some of the best content I've watched on YouTube have had longer runtimes than some movies.
For every thousand click-baity creators on video platforms there are always a handful of people producing truly thoughtful, interesting content.
Luckily you can use ublock origin and letsblockit, or other browser plugins, to completely erase them from YouTube.
https://letsblock.it
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...
In addition, I use the Stylus extension with a custom stylesheet to restore the UI to the roughly pre-2016 look. This has allowed me to essentially treat my Youtube experience as a RSS feed viewer, which I feel is a much healthier experience.
However, by doing this you do lose out on the discovery factor that Youtube is known for.
They are different forms of content, just on the same platform. Seems like a a non-sensical article for the click of driving engagement on The Verge - and I guess it worked.
Also, the Verge is just poorly summarizing a Financial Times article...in other words, The Verge is providing 'short-form content' of ft.com, except, ft.com isn't getting the ad revenue (not the same publisher, afaik).
And for FT...their article does not cite a single person from YouTube. Just "a staffer in a meeting said..."...according to "YouTube staff".
I honestly expected better....from both.
Sure but if someone uploads short trailing / covering something they also cover in a long-form video (and I have seen several creators I follow doing this), there's a non-zero percentage of people who aren't going to bother with the long-form version because they'll have got the gist from the short. That's eating away at the long-form, no?
No there really is something to what they are saying. My husband is a HUGE youtube user and now on most of his devices his feed is 50% shorts. It completely changes the experience of consuming youtube content.
As a paying customer, it's infuriating.
The older ones go out of business and die.
Obviously investors and employees don't like going out of business. So they try to hop on whatever's becoming popular so they don't get replaced.
It may be confusing for consumers. But surely you can see the logic for app owners. And it also means competition is alive and well.
https://dearrow.ajay.app/
Created by the same developer as the wonderful SponsorBlock extension.
Replaces titles and thumbnails from videos with community-sourced, click-bait free versions.
(I did enjoy them, but not enough to actively seek out more.)
I watched a couple of old Dave Chapelle clips and then suddenly had a bunch of videos from the Taylor Tomlinson all recommended to me repeatedly, even though I had never heard of her before...
Yes, that's the weird thing. I've heard of Dave Chapelle, but I can't remember the last time I watched a clip of his or any other standup comedian. I'd never heard of Taylor Tomlinson before.
- not enough time to provide quality content
- dilution of engagement, because the lack of meaningful content you can produce and consume in a few seconds/minutes
- further promote short span focus which is bad for long term development
It's a bit like news is now often luck of the draw as to whether you're getting an article, an audio clip or a video. It's jarring.
If there was a simple toggle button between videos/short/both all this wouldn't be an issue.
Perhaps I am in a tiny minority, but the introduction of shorts has completely changed how I use YouTube. I have blocked all modules on the homepage, YouTube recommendation modules on other pages, secondary navigation, etc with uBO. Have only watched maybe 5 shorts in total, and even then only by accident when clicking links on other domains.
I don't understand what's good in short videos. Would you prefer to read 1 page book, watch 1 minute movie or go to a 1 minute concert?
No attention span required.
Other examples in other genres could be a meme based on a particular funny clip, outtakes/bloopers from a longer stream or video, part of a TV show or film that's somewhat iconic and can be enjoyed out of context, etc. Could be treated like an ad for the longer production, in the same way Nintendo thought their mobile games were a gateway product to their console ones.