The people managing youtube and similar services are doing lots of harm to humanity. Not sure if more than those who push drugs or cigarettes, but in the same league for sure. An entire generation of kids is growing up that can't read a book or do anything that requires focus and attention.
I think its only a matter of time where legislation, lawsuits and fines will follow.
> I think its only a matter of time where legislation, lawsuits and fines will follow.
That depends where you are. In the US and anywhere where it can exert political force that won't happen. The US administration acts as a de facto lobbying arm for big tech giants like Google, and any attempt to regulate is met with threats of embargo.
Just yesterday my wife was asking me if there is a way she can disable YouTube Shorts on the YouTube iOS app. I was surprised to learn there is no (simple) way!
How to do it: Click on uBlock Origin Lite extension -> Settings (cog icon) -> Filter lists -> Custom filters -> Import / Export (bottom of page) -> Paste in the list
That plus hiding everything I've already watched from the feed has somewhat improved Youtube for me. The problem I have now is that it's so adamant on showing me shit I've already watched that I'll come to the main page and frequently get only 2-3 video options.
Youtube's increasing hostility to how I want to use it singlehandedly made me reinstall Firefox just so I could use uBlock on it.
Speaking of which, what the fuck is wrong with product managers at big tech these days?
When I try to express:
> I don't want to see ANY shorts
instead, I get:
> show me fewer youtube shorts
when I want to say:
> NO
I'm only allowed to say:
> mAyBe LaTeR
Do the people behind these design decisions not realise they're monsters by gagging their users into only being able to express notions that appease them?
This is the point. Youtube mobile has even started opening straight into shorts on occassion rather than opening to the home screen. Intentionally dragging users into shorts ups engagement and watch time. Letting users opt out or avoid shorts is exactly counter to their goals and metrics.
From what I can tell, if you close the app while a short is playing, you’ll be dumped back into shorts when opening the app again. I’ve made it a point to always go back to the home tab before closing the app, which seems to avoid the issue.
I assume their goal is to make YouTube feel like TikTok, for those who want that.
Personally, I think there should be a setting so I can pick which page the app opens up to. I’d like it to open up to my Watch Later list, or subscriptions.
And YouTube doesn't really provide the option of showing less shorts. Try it. See if it really shows you less shorts there months later. Spoiler: it won't.
"Yo, the customer be a virtual crack addict, the customer be fucked up and take whatever we be slinging. Yellow top, blue top, shit be weak, shit be strong, they be coming back.." free after the Wire.
This is why I am more critical of Google vs Facebook. If I go to instagram, I know I am wasting my time. YouTube has the only video on how to replace the fuse on my toaster and will try to get me addicted to shorts in the process. It like pushing drugs on you in the grocery store without a way to say no.
I have liked Kagi’s approach. If I add a question mark to the end of my search string it will show the AI results… or there is a button to display them. I almost always do this, because I find it helpful, but I like that I am opting into it as needed, rather than it feeling forced on me.
I'm more baffled by how you're baffled. The incentive chain is very simple: employee needs to have metrics demonstrating lots of users, so they can get promoted, so they make it hard to opt out. Boom, lots of users in the metrics, promoted
I would never be a slave to metrics like this, certainly never on my own dime. A long term refrain of mine is that businesses tend to over-optimise what they can measure and under-optimise what they cant. This is just orgs outsourcing their thinking into a black box so they don't have to consider the ethical ramifications of chasing "number goes up" like a government A/B testing themsleves into "kill all the poor" as a strategy to cut welfare.
It doesn't matter whether they realize it. Even if they do, they just don't care. Most corporate leaders have high degrees of psychopathy. They are exclusively focused on their profits and nothing else. If gagging their users makes them more money than not gagging their users, they will gag their users and they will spare zero thought on how the users might feel about being gagged.
For a while last year and into this, NextDoor would allow you to reset your "presentation preferences", with the proviso that they would reset them back to their default every month or thereabouts. WTFF!?!?
YouTube shorts baffle me, in a way. "We've spent 20 years developing the perfect user interface for watching videos...now let's throw it all away and remove almost every feature so that it's more like TikTok."
This could be applied to most of technology nowadays and the continuous decline of software quality. A lot of UI/UX problems were effectively solved 20 years ago.
The problem is that since then technology shifted from a tool to help the user achieve a certain task to an ad delivery vehicle where success (and profit) directly correlate to the the amount of user time wasted, and it turns out bad UI/UX wastes more time and is preferable in such a scenario.
Try this: "we've spent 20 years developing the perfect user interface for watching videos, and our users are abandoning it for TikTok. What to do, Product Manager?"
This view is myopic and wrong. YouTube doesn't need a different format, it just needs a better algorithm and a better mobile client. Making a new format is ruining what is one of the most amazing sites on the internet.
I dont think Youtube is losing users to Tiktok. I thnk Tiktok is growing with new potential youtuber users and youtube cant accept that and must throw everything away to capture them.
It's successful in a really unhealthy kind of way though. I'm in my late 20s and in at least one group chat I'm in I've got 4+ friends who together we try to avoid shorts because they are such a time sink.
You don't enjoy your time on it but it's engaging and it's hard to get out of once you get sucked in. My friends literally keep track of how long they've been away from shorts and regularly "relapse" into sinking hours into shorts "against their wills" even when they uninstall the app but eventually end up on the mobile website stuck in shorts.
It's very much intentionally addicting and takes advantage of basically every dark pattern they can to maximize your time spent in the app.
> My friends literally keep track of how long they've been away from shorts and regularly "relapse" into sinking hours into shorts "against their wills"
Statements like this makes me feel like I'm a different species entirely.
I enjoy a lot of YouTube content, I watch it daily. And some shorts are nice. But I've never ever had a anything remotely like a "craving" for either.
Gambling is also extremely successful but you could argue it's a net loss for society to have it.
The argument that money == correctness is basically what we've been trained to believe by armies of MBAs, but it's not right. It's sad that the state of philosophical and moral discussions in our society has basically been usurped by a kind of thoughtless reductionism.
Some of it is artificial. If I’m watching a Short on my TV and I miss a word, I can’t go back to hear the word again. I have to finish watching it and watch the whole thing again. People making the shorts do this on purpose so people re-watch.
90% of the Shorts in my feed aren’t original content, it’s some random nobody stealing someone else’s content and clipping it up for easy money, usually overlaying some random other content so avoid a copyright strike. They are the drop shippers of the YouTube world. They add very little value, and just milk it for profit while they can.
Some slight improvements to the main video experience would make most shorts irrelevant. Let me share a clip from a longer video with a start and end time. Then have a way to seep popular clipped content. This would keep the views with the original creator, give the viewer an easy way to keep watching to get the full context, eliminate all these bottom feeder accounts, and unify the experience so YouTube doesn’t feel like two different sites mashed together. This seems like it would be better in every way.
They're addictive, they're "popular" in the way slot machines are popular and require controls around. It's just so easy to watch another, which miiiight be amazing!
I can absolutely argue about what measure of success to apply. If you're only focused on what makes you money, then you're successful according to this one metric, but you're a psychopath and you're hurting your users. And it's millions of users because you're maximizing for that.
If you instead make a great product that is liked by a select audience, and that doesn't cause them brainrot, then you have succeeded on a different metric.
Which metric is more conducive to a successful society?
Well, at least they made it incredibly annoying with the auto translated AI voice. At first I didn't even find the setting on youtube shorts to switch to the actual audio track.
They should keep going though. Maybe someday I will be so annoyed that I finally stop using this website
I think auto-translate applies to all types of video, though? I once clicked on a 20+ minute Luisito Comunica video and found him speaking in very weird, stilted English. Can't even remember how I disabled it but it was a surreal experience.
you just described almost ever product ever :) I used Jira when it was first released and it was ridiculously amazing. facebook was fire too… but quarterly earnings are you know, once per quarter… :)
I wish there was something for the app. I haven't tried it recently but you could kind of stop the shorts being displayed for a brief period of time before it re-asserted itself. And I already pay for ad-free youtube wish it was at least a premium feature but obviously makes no sense from corporate point of view.
I wish there was something for the app on the AppleTV.
I’m a Premium subscriber as well. In theory, they have nothing to gain from pushing shorts on me or increasing my engagement. It should be all about making the user happy. Yet paying users seem to have to deal with these decisions that are driven by ad-funded users.
I tend to want videos that are about 4 minutes long (what used to be the norm). Now it seems like most of the videos recommended to me are 10-60 minutes long, with the average one being 15-20 minutes. When I’m looking for something shorter it seems like Shorts are the only option. However those are usually either too short, or too long to be in the Shorts format without having control over the video on the TV.
Their perverted incentive structures created this mess. They should just have the one normal format for videos, have auto-play that people can opt-in to if they’re into that, and let people making videos of whatever length is best for the content without forcing videos to either be artificially long or short in an effort to optimize for the monetization algorithm.
Not quite true AFAICT. You'll have to register as an android developer and use your own signing keys, or use some sketchilly acquired/disseminated signing keys. The apps don't have to be actually published/acquired through the app store, but their authorship signature has to be able to be tracked back to _someone_ in Google's big DB. Someone may even just decide to include their keys into Revanced manager to allow it to keep working; we don't know what Google will do if someone just brazenly says "sure, I'm a registered android developer, and yeah, my signing keys are used to sign tons of apps that all seem to be named 'Revanced' on many people's phones. What of it?" Maybe Google will try to ban them, maybe they won't. They've not released any explanation of what they'll actually do once all apps have to be signed.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, that was how I understood the recent announcements.
I don’t get shorts at all. They’re just such a bag of shite. Like at least reels and TikTok have decent content sometimes. YT shorts are always so crappy.
For me it didn't take long for the algorithm to zero in on what I find interesting and only show me that. Part of the reason I disabled history, I find shorts waaaay too addictive. I blink twice and two hours went by, no thanks.
YouTube has gotten so bad recently, I started to watch it in Firefox mobile instead. On Android, I have Tampermonkey with GoodTube installed, and it not only blocks ads, but also removes Shorts, and a few other annoyances.
seriously. there is nothing more infuriating then an app (which you pay a subscription for) gaslighting you into feeding you more slop even if you click "i dont want to see this" a thousand times. nice placebo button.
i can imagine the smug face on some manager at google that gets himself off to engagement metrics at night because his life is so miserable. i wish these people could be named and shamed, but they hide behind a faceless corporation
i think my situation is quite niche - i host a lot of social gatherings for friends at my place and most of the time we like to play music videos on the TV either in the background or actively sharing our music tastes with each other
adblocking YT on a TV is a PITA. i'd rather have it just work, to not interrupt the vibes
If you have an android smart tv, you can install TizenTube. Takes a couple of hours to figure out the installation (poorly documented), but works flawlessly after that.
https://github.com/reisxd/TizenTube
Pretty easy if you just hook a laptop to the TV. Honestly way nicer ux queueing up videos with an actual keyboard vs tapping out single characters at a time with a remote.
Just do as the other commenter pointed out and install an alternate youtube frontend on your TV. I'd recommend https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube. Then you'll never see another ad again (including those sneaky ones that are embedded in the videos).
And you can use the youtube app on your phone to search for videos and prepare playlists.
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
As a teen I attended a school with a curriculum focused on classical studies (Italian "Liceo Classico") and reading your comment I immediately thought "Oh, this commenter must be from the Epicurean School" LOL
Some quotes by Epicurus:
> Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
> The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.
And this absolute banger:
> Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.
Death is not a concern. Dying is. For most of us, dying is an extended (often multi-year) process, not some instantaneous transformation from existence to non-existence.
Yes, exactly, thank you! I have a terrible memory for names and specific quotes, but those ideas stuck with me quite well from my days of studying philosophy. The last one definitely heavily impacted my thoughts on death and dying back when death was a dreaded, distant destination.
Then consider what you may regret for the last 10 years of your life, when your mobility, sight and hearing capabilities are all degraded either a lot or a little, and you look back and realize that you spent 3000 hours on youtube shorts.
> Then consider what you may regret for the last 10 years of your life, when your mobility, sight and hearing capabilities are all degraded either a lot or a little, and you look back and realize that you spent 3000 hours on youtube shorts.
I don't watch a lot of shorts, I don't find them that compelling. But I do watch a lot of shows and youtube videos, both of which many people would put in the same bucket. If I'm old and my sight and hearing suck, I'd hope I'll be happy that I watched the shows and movies I could while I had the chance.
To be clear, I don't even disagree with the original quote, I just think that there's many (hopefully mistaken, but I don't know the author) interpretations of it that come down to "no having fun, you'll regret it!"
Absolutely. I hope the author of the quote would agree. There are (many) days I waste even by my own judgement, which is something I try to get better at, so I certainly agree strongly with my own interpretation of the author's words.
2000s Era Historical Bro Movie Edit with a film grain filter and nu metal hip-hop music imploring the viewer to embrace the opportunity to die in battle and then you scroll down and it’s a Peter Explains Subway Surfers video.
Shorts are better than many long-form videos. The ones that start with some neckbeard with a big microphone blithering about something. Then there's a demand to "like my channel". Then filler historical material on the subject, probably involving zooming and panning over old public domain stills. Then an ad for NordVPN. Then a bit more historical material. Then, finally, about three minutes of new information. Then a recap of the history. Another "like my channel and ring my bell" demand. Then neckbeard fades out.
Interspersed with this are Google ads. The padded length allows for more ad time and increases revenue.
I can live with the shorts. They just show as stills for me unless I click them.
It seems like Shorts keep getting worse, at least the Shorts that I get presented with. For a while the most popular format was a clip from a movie or TV show with annoying royalty-free music slapped on top and a badly chosen title. Now I'm seeing clips shrunk down into a tiny content box within the Short while the background is some guy watching you watch the clip. Why is that popular?!
The plugin "Unhook" lets you granularly block many different features of YouTube. I'll often turn off recommendations when I know I don't want to get pulled down rabbitholes.
It has made YouTube much healthier in my life. Imagine if YouTube themselves let you turn these features on and off.
No, they're worse. Nothing like doing a search for a serious topic related to a class I'm teaching and having unrelated garbage shorts come up over and over, each taking up six times the space of a real video. I'm sure YT has someone analyzing data saying this is better. That person should be fired because they have no idea how to analyze data.
I find it slightly ironic that that statements ends with "YouTube Shorts" and not just "YouTube". What in particular makes the shorts so much worse compared to regular videos? If life is short, shouldn't one try to avoid spending too much time on YouTube overall?
attention required: 10 minute video > 10 second short
When the written word took over with the printing press, the same concern was levied. The amount of attention required to listen and memorize a story/poem is a lot more than just reading it.
The change with smart phones is just one of access/time spent on these things. There are people who are spending ~5 hours/day watching this content. There is a big difference between someone listening to 5 hours of a single poem, to reading 5 hours of a single book, to reading 5 hours of blog posts, to watching 5 hours of a youtube video, to watching 5 hours of random videos, to 5 hours of <10s videos.
Short form algorithmically curated content is an order magnitude more addictive than long form videos from creators you intentionally click subscribe to
Shorts and full length videos have similar attributes. Both have good, life enriching stuff (tutorials, performances) and both have the downside of being addictive and often hollow (or downright empty).
The difference is the Shorts format tips the scales. Somebody might want one and not the other.
I don't click on shorts, so removing them from the UI improves the recommendation feed for me. My recommendations are mostly good educational content, but shorts are never interesting.
For some others, shorts are too much of a temptation. You can find a lot of comments even on HN from people admitting that short-form video content on any platform (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) can pull them into a time warp where they've wasted more time than they wanted to spend on videos. I suppose there are some people who can manage long-form YouTube use but struggle with shorts, but I suspect a better solution for people with self-control challenges is to disable recommendations completely (which will also make YT shorts disappear)
Well, you’ve more or less described the issue yourself.
I don’t need YouTube shorts to exist, at all.
Youtube itself, is actually helpful for certain things, so I’m happy it exists. Even if it’s incentives don’t really align with my use of it as a sleep aid / radio station / university lectures and conference talk video portal.
I don't disagree, but they really are a different beast. Have you used the shorts feature? It's 95% brainrot. Where as you can use youtube intelligently to watch interesting things if you choose to. Obviously you could use regular youtube and watch brainrot/slop too, but there is no way to use shorts to watch good content.
Yeah the feeds are totally different. My main youtube front page shows electronics projects, science/educational content, world news, etc. While the shorts feed is all AI slop and random cuts from movies with weird editing added or some guy on half the screen staring at the camera.
Short form content always leaves me wondering whether what I just watched is true or factual, I can’t bring myself to not be skeptical of every short form video I watch because there is never enough context to tell otherwise.
I only get what the creator wants to communicate, which is almost always misleading or missing details.
It’s an awful medium for communicating and I feel like I’m being misled every time I see short form content, which is rarely since I avoid it at all costs. At least with a longer video there is more substance to evaluate to tell whether the creator is worth trusting.
They are infuriating. They hide the scrubbing controls for whatever reason, I’m not sure. I guess to make it look like instagram. Usually the shorts I am served are straight up widescreen videos cut to smartphone narrow width which is disgusting when all my youtube consumption happens on an actual computer.
I don't think short videos are bad, per se. I am bugged mostly by the vertical format and the annoying player interface that loops and switches to other videos.
Some of the youtube shorts stats are seriously eye-popping. The first one that ever came across my feed was an asian woman trying on different skimpy clothes, it had 5 million views after being posted for like 9 hours.
I watch a lot of YouTube, and I also recommend the extension UnTrap for YouTube (Firefox [1], Chrome [2], more [3]).
Besides hiding Shorts, it offers many options that give you more control over the YouTube interface. Specially clean up the search results page from unrelated suggestions, mixes, and more stuff, the current deafult search is horrible.
You can also block any arbitrary page element and that block will persist between page loads. I think it’s in right click menu. I used this to permanently block the YouTube chat feature.
I simply add "0.0.0.0 youtube.com" to the (network wide) hosts file on my router. Problem solved. I'm simply do understand why the problem is just with "shorts", most of the "longs" are not worth wasting time with either. :-)
The other day, I was home with my kids, who then asked me to show them how Japanese schools look like, I fired up my YT app on my Android phone, turned incognito mode and searched "Japanese schools", and the results were beyond imagination: the first result was an ad, the following results were ten successive shorts, two per row for five columns!!
Serious question: why is watching YouTube shorts a worse way to spend your time than eg debugging CUDA problems?
The answer is "opportunity cost". But who really believes in that?
I call it the batman fallacy. Many people (young men in particular) say to themselves "if I was more disciplined, I could dedicate my whole life to martial arts (or programming, or art, or w/e) and become batman (or John Carmack, or Van Gogh)". But it's not true, of course.
And it's the same with many managers. "Instead of spending x% on task A and y% on task B, why dont you spend (x-z)% on A and (y+z)% on B?" It's absurd.
Brute attempts to capture opportunity costs are doomed to fail. You squeeze one end (block youtube shorts) and it comes out the other (eg you argue with coworker). It's really much easier to stop punishing yourself for lost time and find happiness in who and where you are.
There seems to be something about the "short" approach that makes it easier to actually spend more time than you would with "longer" videos. Too much of anything is bad though, one should try to avoid large amounts of passive entertainment (my reminder to get off HN for today).
I also don't think I could ever spend 2 hours watching shorts and feel like I left with something worth having spent the time on, but I can tell you some movies or long form videos which had enough impact to carry in my memory through today.
If you want something which removes Shorts more thoroughly, or alternatively gives you other options for using them intentionally, like redirecting to the normal video player so you can't get sucked into the scroll (e.g. if you only want to watch specific Shorts from a channel's Shorts tab), try Control Panel for YouTube [1]
It also recently got new options which let you disable or improve the new video player UI, and has options for removing other sources of algorithmic suggestions.
I'm a bit sad that they got rid of 'trending'. I used to discover new content that way. Now I only (rarely) lookup channels I'm familiar with. It was nice to see what's popular/new. I don't understand the move, I suspect they just want you to sign-in or use a trackable device so they can tailor recommendations instead of let you discover what other people like?
I would love a legal policy that requires developers to allow users to opt out of algorithm-generated feeds. A "right to control consumption" or something that like.
One can also use an extension etc to redirect the shorts url https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xyz to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyz which displays it as normal video, thus no endless scrolling etc. I have found no issue with this, but only with the shorts scrolling feature.
It's interesting how everyone seems to hate YouTube Shorts, and even the creators know everybody hates them. But apparently there are also a lot of people who like them.
The classical guitar channel "Sor Hands" started posting a daily Short a couple weeks ago and yesterday he commented on what effect that has had [1].
Here's a transcription:
> Man, I’ve been posting those YouTube shorts. Its been like reviving my channel. Its been so good. Like let me actually see uh that graph right there.
> (Holds up phone showing views graph)
> Look at that. Like how do you invest in Sor Hands? That’s the kind of graph you want to see when you’re investing right there.
> I don’t know if you’re like a small YouTube person or something like I swear to God like 2 weeks ago my views for the 48 hour thing it was at like 25,000 which means I was getting like 13,000 views a day. Like in total throughout my whole channel and now ever since doing daily shorts we’re at 80,000 views on the 48. 40,000 views a day. That’s pretty crazy. And even for videos it’s like doubled.
> I don’t know man. Shorts are a thing. I’m just going to keep doing that forever. I don’t know. Sorry if they’re annoying, but also, you know, it’s my channel.
ha funny, I built a similar thing to hide suggestions, so it hides all the algorithm feed on homepage, that is my weakspot. still lets you see subscriptions and search etc. then added hiding shorts too
waiting for extension to get approved but its so slow. seeing yours is already more popular you should include this! i also added a menu so you can config what to show/ hide.
Controversial take but short form video content is the best thing that ever happened to the internet and if you disagree your memory is failing you or you’re nostalgic for a time you didn’t live through.
I have noticed the people who don’t like it are usually highly neurotic to begin with and then blame their neuroses on social media. People were talking this way about Instagram before Reels even existed, and the platform was awesome back then. If you’re seeing things that make you upset, you take a break and wait for the algorithm to reset.
It's just this generations equivalent of rock and roll. It's just so silly cause the reasons for hating it have to get ever more complex and nonsensical. Before it was temptation+satan, now it's temptation+fake_brain_science_woo. Ironically societies collapse when the current structure become unsustainable and the younger generation can't adapt quickly enough.
In an information dense world with very little shared context you need a short attention span to get anything done. Breadth over depth. Previous generations, on the whole, lack the shared cultural empathy to thrive in the modern world. At best they could conquer their enemies and force them to consume their cultural artifacts. The new generation lives in tens of thousands of disparate cultural contexts. In many ways the "deep" knowledge is handled for you by the algorithm, in the way that a village elder would handle it for you in the past. The amount of deep though necessary goes down when an AI can translate every language, dialect and lingo even drawing. This makes gatekeeping much harder which lets be honest, is the main reason people "think deeply" in the first place.
How YouTube Shorts get me is that I will navigate to one from a link someone posts, or a search hit, and (if I'm not on guard), 10-30 minutes later I will realize I've been in shorts-scrolling zombie mode.
And IME video shorts almost never have any value beyond: (1) mindless junk food; or (2) awareness of what other people are seeing.
So I'm going to try just blocking YouTube Shorts entirely, by URL.
I've been using Leechblock, a more generalized blocker for all kinds of sites that might otherwise be unobjectionable, to do this. It doesn't hide links/thumbnails for shorts, but prevents me from visiting them (since I have leechblock set to block them "24/7 and until the end of time"). I got some sanity back.
12+ years ago, I wrote a Chrome extension that blocked comment sections on youtube and blogs. It was time well invested. Eventually everything became social apps, so my little extension got less and less effective.
I’m not looking forward to the near future where Youtube will pretty much be entirely shorts
Oh great another HN thread where everyone breathlessly moralizes meaningless bullshit. I watch them sometimes, they're fun. Often I learn new things about cooking or woodworking or brewing or whatever random hobby I'm interested in (or I laugh at comedy skits - not everything has to be productive). I get bored and go do something else after scrolling for a while. It's not that deep.
And before you start writing the reply about dark patterns and hijacking my attention and so on. THAT'S ALL ENTERTAINMENT. FOREVER. Arthur Conan Doyle was writing short stories that "exploited your attention mechanisms" in the fucking 1900s.
If you're going to complain about YouTube, complain about their opaque business practices when it comes to paying creators, not the medium.
Denigrating "breathless moralization" and promply using ALL. CAPS. AND. EXCESSIVE. PUNCTUATION. topped off with gratuitous profanity was a masterstroke.
Maybe I have my feed tuned really well or I subconsciously just ignore the slop, but these days I find that a lot of the time Shorts are more helpful than full length videos which, I guess for ad reasons, are so heavily padded out that it can be a chore to get to the meat of it. Also the little short "previews" of full length videos let me know if I should bother with the full length one or not.
There is definitely some slop there, but I've overall found it more useful than not.
This year, one of the best things I did for my mental health and productivity was deleting the YouTube app. It's mostly slop and the algorithm will push the most inane click-baity content in the world to get you hooked up. And now Google is even encouraging AI slop. All sprinkled with crypto/investment schemes, gambling, or whatever immoral kind of ads Google can legally get away with.
The handful of good channels remaining are not worth the massive waste of life.
TikTok will soon be mandatory to be installed on every device. IRS will police it, you’ll have to add TT handle to 1040 and show a proof of minimum daily activity ;)
It's just such an incredible amazing human thing that the web lets us do this, gives the user some modicum of power.
There's a weird zenith point coming where the AI fully intermediates on our behalf, where a lot of times we don't interact with the software at all, where our agents do.
I don't love AI at all, but I feel like software has done us very little favor by commanding the interface, by making us use what it offers and nothing more and nothing less. The extension here is a wonderful simple & crafted way of going further for ourselves, and that kind of opportunity is rare, something software could maintain it's relevance for more vs AI if it worked harder to amplify & enrich.
This "YouTube shorts are killing our attention" take is just the latest instance of a moral panic that's as old as writing itself. The only reason we're OK with novels or TV is path dependence.
The interesting question isn't "is this new media bad?" (it's almost always shallower), but "what structural change in society created the demand for it?"
My thesis is that the progressive "rationalization" of civilization has automated away the need for most people to have a long attention span. For the median worker, society is "running on autopilot." Your incentives are: Go to work. Do what the boss says. Come home. Consume. Sleep. Repeat.
In that environment, a long attention span isn't just useless, it's a liability. It's a bug that makes you miserable and non-compliant. You're not paid to think deeply; you're paid to execute predefined tasks and be there to report edge cases to your superiors.
"Shallow" media like Shorts are just the market's efficient response. They're a way to "exercise" atrophied cognitive faculties in a way that doesn't threaten the underlying system.
This isn't new. This pattern is a clear regression. Every new layer of media abstraction is met with the exact same complaint.
To wit:
Novels:
> 'Were it not for this consideration, it is an open question whether the novel traffic ought not to be dealt with as stringently as Mr. Bruce proposes to deal with the liquor traffic; whether it would not be well to enable the ratepayers of a district to limit the number of the circulating libraries, or even to close them altogether; and to place the "habitual" novel-reader under some such paternal restraint as that to which Dr. Dalrymple wishes to subject an "habitual drunkard." It is too clear, unfortunately, why it is that so many women thus waste their time and rot their minds. They read novels exactly as some young men smoke and drink bitter beer—for sheer want of something to do.' -- The Sabbath School Magazine, 1872
On the Printing Press:
> "He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of holy Scripture... Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance. The simple reason is that copying by hand involves more diligence and industry." -- Jonathan Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes, 1494
On Writing Itself:
> "...this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory... You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant..." -- Plato, the Phaedrus, 370BC
This isn't an argument for YouTube shorts. They're junk.
It's an argument that complaining about them is a waste of time. You're complaining about a symptom, not the disease.
At some point in the dark recesses of time, there was an antediluvian hominid upset that self-awareness and transcendence in the children deprived them of the immanence of being.
Self-actualization is a balancing act. Though many may not reach the heights of solace within their own skin, that’s no reason not to wish for better for ourselves and for each other by proxy.
We are what we continually do. Not all who wander are lost, but many are only chasing safety. Any port in a storm, so they say. It’s only good that we want the best for those who can’t do for themselves, and a moral panic is an irrational externalized response to a perceived lack of shared internalized values, but the desire for equanimity is ultimately a rational one borne of a desire for peace, within and without.
Short form content is just the newest expression of cultural touchstones, and like all ways of being seen by seeing, being known by knowing, it is a boon to some, and a millstone to others.
All roads lead to Rome, but you can’t get there from here, if the path you seek leads you to moralize on behalf of others when one doesn’t offer a better way. In as many words, I agree that shame is unlikely to bear fruit.
We have to separate the good from the bad, and many aren’t able to thread that needle on their own, so for those folks, abandoning short form content entirely may be the best avenue to reconnecting with themselves and with each other. Intermediation can only get us so far, and can only bring us so close.
I concur that moral panic is an irrational response and that shame is an ineffective tool.
The point of divergence, however, is in the diagnosis. Abandoning the medium is an individualist solution prescribed for a structural deprivation. And paradoxically, it only works for socially disaffected individuals, who don't need the solution.
You can't treat a systemic nutritional deficiency by moralizing the choice to eat junk. The craving for junk is the operative symptom. The craving only exists because the primary diet is devoid of the necessary nutrients.
In the same way, you can't expect the individual to "reconnect with themselves" by merely removing the novum pabulum. The mental escapism they seek exists precisely because their rationalized role in society has already disconnected them. "Any port in a storm" implies that the storm ends, but the storm is the baseline condition of their life. It never ends.
For the masses, ontological escapism is a necessary compensation for a cognitive function that has been rationalized out of existence but still demands exercise. The "equanimity" you speak of is what the media provides, but in a way to pacify the parts of the brain that are no longer required for survival but still monkey-mind around. It's the difference between scratching an itch and waiting until the urge passes. The former inflames while notionally palliating while the latter abandons agency and thus blows out the inflammation. The latter unbinds. The former is binding.
The desire for "a better way" is itself a form of nostalgic escapism. It is a wish for some point between today and the pre-rationalized state where some dimension of individual cognition and attention were necessary.
This "better way" cannot be offered, because it would require dismantling the very structure that provides the economic and biological security that, while being fundamentally precarious, provides the ontological ruts that the masses fall into. It is asking them to take the path of most resistance and favor two birds in the bush.
Reconnection to immanence is a pre-rational state. It is that very state of being that was lost to self-awareness. The masses cannot regress to it by an act of individual will because what they lack is individual will. That lack is total and reinforcing. Certain socially alienated or schizoid individuals can (and do) reach immanence, but the hegemonic end of transcendence will come when humans have exhausted all possibilities of avoiding it, but not before.
TikTok is worse. It’s pretty shocking how addictive these rapid fire algorithmically driven video feeds are.
I got into scrolling shorts once. Once. An hour and a half later I felt fried. It was literally an icky brain dead feeling like a hangover. Couldn’t focus for another hour. It’s like a drug, a bad one.
Never again. I banned TikTok at the pi.hole level but unfortunately YouTube is sometimes useful. I just refuse to click on shorts.
This stuff is really gross. Congratulations people. We found a way to deliver opioids by computer screen.
I have my browser set to clear cookies and site data automatically, so I'm not sure if my experience of YouTube shorts is typical, but I have a pet theory about why the feelings you describe are so common. It seems like a big part of the addictiveness is not that the content is eye-catching, although this clearly has an effect. The platform gives you a quick way to move onto something else by scrolling/swiping, which means I find myself caught in a cycle of:
1. seeing AI slop or a unoriginal 'comedy' sketch,
2. thinking "eww get this off my screen",
3. scrolling down to the next video; jump to step 1
On the rare occasions that the algorithm does show something genuinely interesting or creative, I watch to the end of the video and feel a lot more satisfied about spending time on it. That's not to say that long-form videos can't be distracting and addictive, but I would posit that 'shorts' engagement is actually driven by disgust rather than curiosity. I now avoid YouTube shorts like the plague, because life is too short to experience that volume of disgust in it.
The most annoying thing about shorts is that they seem to have more of the "old" YouTube algorithm back. The one that actually clustered around what you had watched. I often see a thumbnail, realize it's a short, then go and find the long version (often off YouTube)
The people managing youtube and similar services are doing lots of harm to humanity. Not sure if more than those who push drugs or cigarettes, but in the same league for sure. An entire generation of kids is growing up that can't read a book or do anything that requires focus and attention.
I think its only a matter of time where legislation, lawsuits and fines will follow.
> I think its only a matter of time where legislation, lawsuits and fines will follow.
That depends where you are. In the US and anywhere where it can exert political force that won't happen. The US administration acts as a de facto lobbying arm for big tech giants like Google, and any attempt to regulate is met with threats of embargo.
Agree with everything else.
Just yesterday my wife was asking me if there is a way she can disable YouTube Shorts on the YouTube iOS app. I was surprised to learn there is no (simple) way!
Add this to your uBlock Origin Lite filter list.
I haven't seen a short since :)
https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts/blob/master...
How to do it: Click on uBlock Origin Lite extension -> Settings (cog icon) -> Filter lists -> Custom filters -> Import / Export (bottom of page) -> Paste in the list
That plus hiding everything I've already watched from the feed has somewhat improved Youtube for me. The problem I have now is that it's so adamant on showing me shit I've already watched that I'll come to the main page and frequently get only 2-3 video options.
Youtube's increasing hostility to how I want to use it singlehandedly made me reinstall Firefox just so I could use uBlock on it.
For a more thorough block list, see: https://gist.github.com/robleh/583165b8e3da40ad0f04154aefa75...
drops the hopepage recommendatios completely, and also suggestions from the right sidebar
make youtube pull-only ; no push
Speaking of which, what the fuck is wrong with product managers at big tech these days?
When I try to express:
> I don't want to see ANY shorts
instead, I get:
> show me fewer youtube shorts
when I want to say:
> NO
I'm only allowed to say:
> mAyBe LaTeR
Do the people behind these design decisions not realise they're monsters by gagging their users into only being able to express notions that appease them?
This is what hostile software looks like. When you dominate a space, the choices you give to your users are: "Yes" or "OK". Choose wisely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45559023
This is the point. Youtube mobile has even started opening straight into shorts on occassion rather than opening to the home screen. Intentionally dragging users into shorts ups engagement and watch time. Letting users opt out or avoid shorts is exactly counter to their goals and metrics.
From what I can tell, if you close the app while a short is playing, you’ll be dumped back into shorts when opening the app again. I’ve made it a point to always go back to the home tab before closing the app, which seems to avoid the issue.
I assume their goal is to make YouTube feel like TikTok, for those who want that.
Personally, I think there should be a setting so I can pick which page the app opens up to. I’d like it to open up to my Watch Later list, or subscriptions.
And YouTube doesn't really provide the option of showing less shorts. Try it. See if it really shows you less shorts there months later. Spoiler: it won't.
"Yo, the customer be a virtual crack addict, the customer be fucked up and take whatever we be slinging. Yellow top, blue top, shit be weak, shit be strong, they be coming back.." free after the Wire.
itS Our PlatfORM, wE do wHAT We waNt
This is why I am more critical of Google vs Facebook. If I go to instagram, I know I am wasting my time. YouTube has the only video on how to replace the fuse on my toaster and will try to get me addicted to shorts in the process. It like pushing drugs on you in the grocery store without a way to say no.
Same with AI at the top of search, I just want to to go away permanently. I will go to an AI app when I want to use AI
“We have invested in the ai, so the peons will _use_ the ai and we will get that ROI” - the PM’s, I imagine.
Their hard pushing makes me use it less. I've ended several subscriptions citing this
(and I like ai and find it generally useful, but not in ever f'n little space they can find to make back their overspending during a hype cycle)
I have liked Kagi’s approach. If I add a question mark to the end of my search string it will show the AI results… or there is a button to display them. I almost always do this, because I find it helpful, but I like that I am opting into it as needed, rather than it feeling forced on me.
You can make it go away, there was hn post showing how to configure browser to not use it.
I'm more baffled by how you're baffled. The incentive chain is very simple: employee needs to have metrics demonstrating lots of users, so they can get promoted, so they make it hard to opt out. Boom, lots of users in the metrics, promoted
Chances are you'd do the same thing
> Chances are you'd do the same thing
I would never be a slave to metrics like this, certainly never on my own dime. A long term refrain of mine is that businesses tend to over-optimise what they can measure and under-optimise what they cant. This is just orgs outsourcing their thinking into a black box so they don't have to consider the ethical ramifications of chasing "number goes up" like a government A/B testing themsleves into "kill all the poor" as a strategy to cut welfare.
Good for you then. Everyone says that, but talk is cheap. I hope you're one of the very few who would actually follow through.
It doesn't matter whether they realize it. Even if they do, they just don't care. Most corporate leaders have high degrees of psychopathy. They are exclusively focused on their profits and nothing else. If gagging their users makes them more money than not gagging their users, they will gag their users and they will spare zero thought on how the users might feel about being gagged.
Same with Apple News. If I block a news channel, it still shows it to me but darker font. It’s actively hostile
Product managers keep taking the… “SA” approach to consent.
Whichever two initials you’d like to extrapolate SA out to, both of them still fit just perfectly here.
steve austin?
Giving you a stone cold response?
Post-consent computing. Welcome to the 2020s.
For a while last year and into this, NextDoor would allow you to reset your "presentation preferences", with the proviso that they would reset them back to their default every month or thereabouts. WTFF!?!?
Gonna need to expand it for the new "Ask for videos any way you like BETA" section
Appreciate the UBO share!
This didn't work for me after importing.
Make sure you're adding it to the "My Filters" section, not the Import section under "Filter Lists". This fixed it for me.
YouTube shorts baffle me, in a way. "We've spent 20 years developing the perfect user interface for watching videos...now let's throw it all away and remove almost every feature so that it's more like TikTok."
This could be applied to most of technology nowadays and the continuous decline of software quality. A lot of UI/UX problems were effectively solved 20 years ago.
The problem is that since then technology shifted from a tool to help the user achieve a certain task to an ad delivery vehicle where success (and profit) directly correlate to the the amount of user time wasted, and it turns out bad UI/UX wastes more time and is preferable in such a scenario.
Try this: "we've spent 20 years developing the perfect user interface for watching videos, and our users are abandoning it for TikTok. What to do, Product Manager?"
Maybe but why make the experience worse for the actual users who are not abandoning for TikTok?
This view is myopic and wrong. YouTube doesn't need a different format, it just needs a better algorithm and a better mobile client. Making a new format is ruining what is one of the most amazing sites on the internet.
I dont think Youtube is losing users to Tiktok. I thnk Tiktok is growing with new potential youtuber users and youtube cant accept that and must throw everything away to capture them.
Youtube Shorts are apparently very popular; so even if they aren't our cup of tea, you can't argue with success.
It's successful in a really unhealthy kind of way though. I'm in my late 20s and in at least one group chat I'm in I've got 4+ friends who together we try to avoid shorts because they are such a time sink.
You don't enjoy your time on it but it's engaging and it's hard to get out of once you get sucked in. My friends literally keep track of how long they've been away from shorts and regularly "relapse" into sinking hours into shorts "against their wills" even when they uninstall the app but eventually end up on the mobile website stuck in shorts.
It's very much intentionally addicting and takes advantage of basically every dark pattern they can to maximize your time spent in the app.
> My friends literally keep track of how long they've been away from shorts and regularly "relapse" into sinking hours into shorts "against their wills"
Statements like this makes me feel like I'm a different species entirely.
I enjoy a lot of YouTube content, I watch it daily. And some shorts are nice. But I've never ever had a anything remotely like a "craving" for either.
What kind of content is so addictive?
Gambling is also extremely successful but you could argue it's a net loss for society to have it.
The argument that money == correctness is basically what we've been trained to believe by armies of MBAs, but it's not right. It's sad that the state of philosophical and moral discussions in our society has basically been usurped by a kind of thoughtless reductionism.
Some of it is artificial. If I’m watching a Short on my TV and I miss a word, I can’t go back to hear the word again. I have to finish watching it and watch the whole thing again. People making the shorts do this on purpose so people re-watch.
90% of the Shorts in my feed aren’t original content, it’s some random nobody stealing someone else’s content and clipping it up for easy money, usually overlaying some random other content so avoid a copyright strike. They are the drop shippers of the YouTube world. They add very little value, and just milk it for profit while they can.
Some slight improvements to the main video experience would make most shorts irrelevant. Let me share a clip from a longer video with a start and end time. Then have a way to seep popular clipped content. This would keep the views with the original creator, give the viewer an easy way to keep watching to get the full context, eliminate all these bottom feeder accounts, and unify the experience so YouTube doesn’t feel like two different sites mashed together. This seems like it would be better in every way.
They're addictive, they're "popular" in the way slot machines are popular and require controls around. It's just so easy to watch another, which miiiight be amazing!
So is gambling and crack cocaine.
You can argue with success because part of that success is bad interface design forcing shorts
There was a period of time when Crack was also very popular.
i specifically block them because they were too addicting
I can absolutely argue about what measure of success to apply. If you're only focused on what makes you money, then you're successful according to this one metric, but you're a psychopath and you're hurting your users. And it's millions of users because you're maximizing for that.
If you instead make a great product that is liked by a select audience, and that doesn't cause them brainrot, then you have succeeded on a different metric.
Which metric is more conducive to a successful society?
Well, at least they made it incredibly annoying with the auto translated AI voice. At first I didn't even find the setting on youtube shorts to switch to the actual audio track.
They should keep going though. Maybe someday I will be so annoyed that I finally stop using this website
I think auto-translate applies to all types of video, though? I once clicked on a 20+ minute Luisito Comunica video and found him speaking in very weird, stilted English. Can't even remember how I disabled it but it was a surreal experience.
In what mythical world is YouTube bad interface perfect?
It used to be very good maybe 5 years ago.
you just described almost ever product ever :) I used Jira when it was first released and it was ridiculously amazing. facebook was fire too… but quarterly earnings are you know, once per quarter… :)
I wish there was something for the app. I haven't tried it recently but you could kind of stop the shorts being displayed for a brief period of time before it re-asserted itself. And I already pay for ad-free youtube wish it was at least a premium feature but obviously makes no sense from corporate point of view.
I wish there was something for the app on the AppleTV.
I’m a Premium subscriber as well. In theory, they have nothing to gain from pushing shorts on me or increasing my engagement. It should be all about making the user happy. Yet paying users seem to have to deal with these decisions that are driven by ad-funded users.
I tend to want videos that are about 4 minutes long (what used to be the norm). Now it seems like most of the videos recommended to me are 10-60 minutes long, with the average one being 15-20 minutes. When I’m looking for something shorter it seems like Shorts are the only option. However those are usually either too short, or too long to be in the Shorts format without having control over the video on the TV.
Their perverted incentive structures created this mess. They should just have the one normal format for videos, have auto-play that people can opt-in to if they’re into that, and let people making videos of whatever length is best for the content without forcing videos to either be artificially long or short in an effort to optimize for the monetization algorithm.
For Android, you can hide all shorts stuff by patching the apk via ReVanced Manager.
Not to worry, you soon won’t be able to do that in the next version
not to worry i have been running custom roms since 4.2.1 and you should too
Not quite true AFAICT. You'll have to register as an android developer and use your own signing keys, or use some sketchilly acquired/disseminated signing keys. The apps don't have to be actually published/acquired through the app store, but their authorship signature has to be able to be tracked back to _someone_ in Google's big DB. Someone may even just decide to include their keys into Revanced manager to allow it to keep working; we don't know what Google will do if someone just brazenly says "sure, I'm a registered android developer, and yeah, my signing keys are used to sign tons of apps that all seem to be named 'Revanced' on many people's phones. What of it?" Maybe Google will try to ban them, maybe they won't. They've not released any explanation of what they'll actually do once all apps have to be signed.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, that was how I understood the recent announcements.
How many developer accounts can you register, once Google starts requiring enough personal information including callback to phone numbers?
Because the banhammer is coming down, sooner or later.
You can just install APKs via adb and it will work like before without fiddling with keys or verifications.
Thanks for clarification, but it sounds quite true to me if I'm reading "Maybe Google will try to ban them, maybe they won't." correctly...
If you turn off history and disable the few toggles under privacy related to your usage, it disables recommendations (including shorts)
I’ve had to do this but miss recommendations now.
I don’t get shorts at all. They’re just such a bag of shite. Like at least reels and TikTok have decent content sometimes. YT shorts are always so crappy.
For me it didn't take long for the algorithm to zero in on what I find interesting and only show me that. Part of the reason I disabled history, I find shorts waaaay too addictive. I blink twice and two hours went by, no thanks.
Yeah Shorts seems to be the most filled with AI slop, its not even the funny/edgy AI slop. But mundane fake stories.
YouTube has gotten so bad recently, I started to watch it in Firefox mobile instead. On Android, I have Tampermonkey with GoodTube installed, and it not only blocks ads, but also removes Shorts, and a few other annoyances.
I've installed ScrollGuard a month ago. Great success in preventing doomscrolling.
https://scrollguard.app/
seriously. there is nothing more infuriating then an app (which you pay a subscription for) gaslighting you into feeding you more slop even if you click "i dont want to see this" a thousand times. nice placebo button.
i can imagine the smug face on some manager at google that gets himself off to engagement metrics at night because his life is so miserable. i wish these people could be named and shamed, but they hide behind a faceless corporation
Begs the question - why don’t you stop paying for it?
Youtube with ads would be even worse
i think my situation is quite niche - i host a lot of social gatherings for friends at my place and most of the time we like to play music videos on the TV either in the background or actively sharing our music tastes with each other
adblocking YT on a TV is a PITA. i'd rather have it just work, to not interrupt the vibes
If you have an android smart tv, you can install TizenTube. Takes a couple of hours to figure out the installation (poorly documented), but works flawlessly after that. https://github.com/reisxd/TizenTube
What you linked is for Tizen (Samsung) TVs, not for Android.
Pretty easy if you just hook a laptop to the TV. Honestly way nicer ux queueing up videos with an actual keyboard vs tapping out single characters at a time with a remote.
Just do as the other commenter pointed out and install an alternate youtube frontend on your TV. I'd recommend https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube. Then you'll never see another ad again (including those sneaky ones that are embedded in the videos).
And you can use the youtube app on your phone to search for videos and prepare playlists.
Right, at some point shouldn't we shame the people giving money to these companies, enabling them?
“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
The heedless luxury and "no good activity" are some of the better parts of life.
Personally I live for the every day, I'm not worrying too much about what I will regret for a few hours on my last day(s) if I even make it there.
As a teen I attended a school with a curriculum focused on classical studies (Italian "Liceo Classico") and reading your comment I immediately thought "Oh, this commenter must be from the Epicurean School" LOL
Some quotes by Epicurus:
> Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
> The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all moments.
And this absolute banger:
> Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.
Death is not a concern. Dying is. For most of us, dying is an extended (often multi-year) process, not some instantaneous transformation from existence to non-existence.
Yes, exactly, thank you! I have a terrible memory for names and specific quotes, but those ideas stuck with me quite well from my days of studying philosophy. The last one definitely heavily impacted my thoughts on death and dying back when death was a dreaded, distant destination.
Then consider what you may regret for the last 10 years of your life, when your mobility, sight and hearing capabilities are all degraded either a lot or a little, and you look back and realize that you spent 3000 hours on youtube shorts.
> Then consider what you may regret for the last 10 years of your life, when your mobility, sight and hearing capabilities are all degraded either a lot or a little, and you look back and realize that you spent 3000 hours on youtube shorts.
I don't watch a lot of shorts, I don't find them that compelling. But I do watch a lot of shows and youtube videos, both of which many people would put in the same bucket. If I'm old and my sight and hearing suck, I'd hope I'll be happy that I watched the shows and movies I could while I had the chance.
To be clear, I don't even disagree with the original quote, I just think that there's many (hopefully mistaken, but I don't know the author) interpretations of it that come down to "no having fun, you'll regret it!"
If All my senses have been significantly degraded for the past 10 years I would probably regret not living in a country that allows assisted suicide.
Here's what I call significantly degraded: I can no longer read most books without reading glasses.
Assisted suicide for that? I don't think so...
On the plus side, your eyes would probably still be good enough to watch YouTube shorts.
You are your own judge of what activities are worthwhile. Spending your time on those activities which you value is not a given.
Absolutely. I hope the author of the quote would agree. There are (many) days I waste even by my own judgement, which is something I try to get better at, so I certainly agree strongly with my own interpretation of the author's words.
Bro never spent 2 hours watching Margin Call in 35 second chunks with a weird filter on top.
We are streaming to willing viewers at the current fair market price
2000s Era Historical Bro Movie Edit with a film grain filter and nu metal hip-hop music imploring the viewer to embrace the opportunity to die in battle and then you scroll down and it’s a Peter Explains Subway Surfers video.
Woman whispering in Thai in the background for some reason
Shorts are better than many long-form videos. The ones that start with some neckbeard with a big microphone blithering about something. Then there's a demand to "like my channel". Then filler historical material on the subject, probably involving zooming and panning over old public domain stills. Then an ad for NordVPN. Then a bit more historical material. Then, finally, about three minutes of new information. Then a recap of the history. Another "like my channel and ring my bell" demand. Then neckbeard fades out.
Interspersed with this are Google ads. The padded length allows for more ad time and increases revenue.
I can live with the shorts. They just show as stills for me unless I click them.
It seems like Shorts keep getting worse, at least the Shorts that I get presented with. For a while the most popular format was a clip from a movie or TV show with annoying royalty-free music slapped on top and a badly chosen title. Now I'm seeing clips shrunk down into a tiny content box within the Short while the background is some guy watching you watch the clip. Why is that popular?!
You can also hide Shorts from the entire UI with this uBlock script: https://github.com/gijsdev/ublock-hide-yt-shorts
If you turn off saving history in YouTube, it disables shorts on both the web and the app
Oh man, thanks for that!
(Shorts are not completely gone - they are still visible on channels subscribed to - but the toxic homepage thing is empty. Big thanks!)
The plugin "Unhook" lets you granularly block many different features of YouTube. I'll often turn off recommendations when I know I don't want to get pulled down rabbitholes.
It has made YouTube much healthier in my life. Imagine if YouTube themselves let you turn these features on and off.
Are they really that bad? I've seen some great sketches through Youtube shorts. Case in point:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2zb7S2beKOE
> Are they really that bad?
No, they're worse. Nothing like doing a search for a serious topic related to a class I'm teaching and having unrelated garbage shorts come up over and over, each taking up six times the space of a real video. I'm sure YT has someone analyzing data saying this is better. That person should be fired because they have no idea how to analyze data.
I find it slightly ironic that that statements ends with "YouTube Shorts" and not just "YouTube". What in particular makes the shorts so much worse compared to regular videos? If life is short, shouldn't one try to avoid spending too much time on YouTube overall?
attention required: 10 minute video > 10 second short
When the written word took over with the printing press, the same concern was levied. The amount of attention required to listen and memorize a story/poem is a lot more than just reading it.
The change with smart phones is just one of access/time spent on these things. There are people who are spending ~5 hours/day watching this content. There is a big difference between someone listening to 5 hours of a single poem, to reading 5 hours of a single book, to reading 5 hours of blog posts, to watching 5 hours of a youtube video, to watching 5 hours of random videos, to 5 hours of <10s videos.
I watch tons of long form educational content on youtube and entirely ignore shorts
Short form algorithmically curated content is an order magnitude more addictive than long form videos from creators you intentionally click subscribe to
Shorts and full length videos have similar attributes. Both have good, life enriching stuff (tutorials, performances) and both have the downside of being addictive and often hollow (or downright empty).
The difference is the Shorts format tips the scales. Somebody might want one and not the other.
I don't click on shorts, so removing them from the UI improves the recommendation feed for me. My recommendations are mostly good educational content, but shorts are never interesting.
For some others, shorts are too much of a temptation. You can find a lot of comments even on HN from people admitting that short-form video content on any platform (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) can pull them into a time warp where they've wasted more time than they wanted to spend on videos. I suppose there are some people who can manage long-form YouTube use but struggle with shorts, but I suspect a better solution for people with self-control challenges is to disable recommendations completely (which will also make YT shorts disappear)
Many shorts are just AI cuts from bigger videos made to draw attention.
And what's worse is the infinite scroll.
Many shorts are just many different moments from a regular video indeed.
Well, you’ve more or less described the issue yourself. I don’t need YouTube shorts to exist, at all. Youtube itself, is actually helpful for certain things, so I’m happy it exists. Even if it’s incentives don’t really align with my use of it as a sleep aid / radio station / university lectures and conference talk video portal.
It's a pat on one's own back. "I might be hooked to whatever YouTube algorithm recommends me, but at least I don't watch shorts like teenagers today!"
I don't disagree, but they really are a different beast. Have you used the shorts feature? It's 95% brainrot. Where as you can use youtube intelligently to watch interesting things if you choose to. Obviously you could use regular youtube and watch brainrot/slop too, but there is no way to use shorts to watch good content.
Yeah the feeds are totally different. My main youtube front page shows electronics projects, science/educational content, world news, etc. While the shorts feed is all AI slop and random cuts from movies with weird editing added or some guy on half the screen staring at the camera.
Short form content always leaves me wondering whether what I just watched is true or factual, I can’t bring myself to not be skeptical of every short form video I watch because there is never enough context to tell otherwise.
I only get what the creator wants to communicate, which is almost always misleading or missing details.
It’s an awful medium for communicating and I feel like I’m being misled every time I see short form content, which is rarely since I avoid it at all costs. At least with a longer video there is more substance to evaluate to tell whether the creator is worth trusting.
They are infuriating. They hide the scrubbing controls for whatever reason, I’m not sure. I guess to make it look like instagram. Usually the shorts I am served are straight up widescreen videos cut to smartphone narrow width which is disgusting when all my youtube consumption happens on an actual computer.
I don't think short videos are bad, per se. I am bugged mostly by the vertical format and the annoying player interface that loops and switches to other videos.
For some time, I have been using a TamperMonkey script that at least redirects to the regular video player: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/439993-youtube-shorts-redi...
Some of the youtube shorts stats are seriously eye-popping. The first one that ever came across my feed was an asian woman trying on different skimpy clothes, it had 5 million views after being posted for like 9 hours.
I watch a lot of YouTube, and I also recommend the extension UnTrap for YouTube (Firefox [1], Chrome [2], more [3]).
Besides hiding Shorts, it offers many options that give you more control over the YouTube interface. Specially clean up the search results page from unrelated suggestions, mixes, and more stuff, the current deafult search is horrible.
Here are some screenshots I took for you: https://imgur.com/a/UawBCG5
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/untrap-for-yo...
[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/untrap-for-youtube/...
[3] https://untrap.app/
I'm also an UnTrap happy user.
It's an awesome anti doom-scrolling antidote for Youtube, with a lot of customization possible.
I would definitely recommend it.
At least try it to see how much Youtube's design & recommendations actually trick our brain into passive watching and dooming scrolling.
This is easy in Brave, just go to brave://settings/shields/filters and enable the "YouTube Anti-Shorts" filter list.
You can also block any arbitrary page element and that block will persist between page loads. I think it’s in right click menu. I used this to permanently block the YouTube chat feature.
I simply add "0.0.0.0 youtube.com" to the (network wide) hosts file on my router. Problem solved. I'm simply do understand why the problem is just with "shorts", most of the "longs" are not worth wasting time with either. :-)
YouTube has a massive amount of edutainment content that is absolutely fantastic. Content that could never make it onto mainstream television.
At this point I think I owe all my hobbies to YouTube.
And why do you need all these hobbies?
Why does this matter?
The other day, I was home with my kids, who then asked me to show them how Japanese schools look like, I fired up my YT app on my Android phone, turned incognito mode and searched "Japanese schools", and the results were beyond imagination: the first result was an ad, the following results were ten successive shorts, two per row for five columns!!
Serious question: why is watching YouTube shorts a worse way to spend your time than eg debugging CUDA problems?
The answer is "opportunity cost". But who really believes in that?
I call it the batman fallacy. Many people (young men in particular) say to themselves "if I was more disciplined, I could dedicate my whole life to martial arts (or programming, or art, or w/e) and become batman (or John Carmack, or Van Gogh)". But it's not true, of course.
And it's the same with many managers. "Instead of spending x% on task A and y% on task B, why dont you spend (x-z)% on A and (y+z)% on B?" It's absurd.
Brute attempts to capture opportunity costs are doomed to fail. You squeeze one end (block youtube shorts) and it comes out the other (eg you argue with coworker). It's really much easier to stop punishing yourself for lost time and find happiness in who and where you are.
Youtube shorts have resulted in buying an Apple Watch with eSim. Now my phone stays far away from person for most of the day.
So instead of wasting your life 30 seconds at a time, you can skip straight to wasting your life by minutes and hours?
There seems to be something about the "short" approach that makes it easier to actually spend more time than you would with "longer" videos. Too much of anything is bad though, one should try to avoid large amounts of passive entertainment (my reminder to get off HN for today).
I also don't think I could ever spend 2 hours watching shorts and feel like I left with something worth having spent the time on, but I can tell you some movies or long form videos which had enough impact to carry in my memory through today.
Depends how you define waste I guess, I loathe shorts, I enjoy hour long deep dives into naval armour.
It’s all perspective.
If you want something which removes Shorts more thoroughly, or alternatively gives you other options for using them intentionally, like redirecting to the normal video player so you can't get sucked into the scroll (e.g. if you only want to watch specific Shorts from a channel's Shorts tab), try Control Panel for YouTube [1]
It also recently got new options which let you disable or improve the new video player UI, and has options for removing other sources of algorithmic suggestions.
[1] https://soitis.dev/control-panel-for-youtube
I'm a bit sad that they got rid of 'trending'. I used to discover new content that way. Now I only (rarely) lookup channels I'm familiar with. It was nice to see what's popular/new. I don't understand the move, I suspect they just want you to sign-in or use a trackable device so they can tailor recommendations instead of let you discover what other people like?
I would love a legal policy that requires developers to allow users to opt out of algorithm-generated feeds. A "right to control consumption" or something that like.
One can also use an extension etc to redirect the shorts url https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xyz to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyz which displays it as normal video, thus no endless scrolling etc. I have found no issue with this, but only with the shorts scrolling feature.
i started using https://unhook.app/ recently, it changed my youtube habits in just a day
home redirecting to /subscriptions, removing shorts, removing comments, removing autoplay suggestions
its super nice now
Yeah, the Unhook extension is great. (I suggest also removing related videos.)
I prefer: <https://lawrencehook.com/rys/>
I started watching short like a year ago. Three months later I decided it was a net negative on my life and I stopped.
Never looked back, it’s such a waste of time
It's interesting how everyone seems to hate YouTube Shorts, and even the creators know everybody hates them. But apparently there are also a lot of people who like them.
The classical guitar channel "Sor Hands" started posting a daily Short a couple weeks ago and yesterday he commented on what effect that has had [1].
Here's a transcription:
> Man, I’ve been posting those YouTube shorts. Its been like reviving my channel. Its been so good. Like let me actually see uh that graph right there.
> (Holds up phone showing views graph)
> Look at that. Like how do you invest in Sor Hands? That’s the kind of graph you want to see when you’re investing right there.
> I don’t know if you’re like a small YouTube person or something like I swear to God like 2 weeks ago my views for the 48 hour thing it was at like 25,000 which means I was getting like 13,000 views a day. Like in total throughout my whole channel and now ever since doing daily shorts we’re at 80,000 views on the 48. 40,000 views a day. That’s pretty crazy. And even for videos it’s like doubled.
> I don’t know man. Shorts are a thing. I’m just going to keep doing that forever. I don’t know. Sorry if they’re annoying, but also, you know, it’s my channel.
[1] https://youtu.be/Xu8aXay5Xhk?si=joCWDKGk54UnvIsK&t=152
We optimize for what we measure, especially if our time/money is on the line.
And, as this person blitheringly confirms, that race is a race to the bottom.
ha funny, I built a similar thing to hide suggestions, so it hides all the algorithm feed on homepage, that is my weakspot. still lets you see subscriptions and search etc. then added hiding shorts too
https://github.com/Britnell/youtube-doom-blocker-extension
waiting for extension to get approved but its so slow. seeing yours is already more popular you should include this! i also added a menu so you can config what to show/ hide.
Controversial take but short form video content is the best thing that ever happened to the internet and if you disagree your memory is failing you or you’re nostalgic for a time you didn’t live through.
I have noticed the people who don’t like it are usually highly neurotic to begin with and then blame their neuroses on social media. People were talking this way about Instagram before Reels even existed, and the platform was awesome back then. If you’re seeing things that make you upset, you take a break and wait for the algorithm to reset.
My hot take. If all electronic entertainment just disappeared overnight most people lives would actually improve.
Both of these things can be true.
It's just this generations equivalent of rock and roll. It's just so silly cause the reasons for hating it have to get ever more complex and nonsensical. Before it was temptation+satan, now it's temptation+fake_brain_science_woo. Ironically societies collapse when the current structure become unsustainable and the younger generation can't adapt quickly enough.
In an information dense world with very little shared context you need a short attention span to get anything done. Breadth over depth. Previous generations, on the whole, lack the shared cultural empathy to thrive in the modern world. At best they could conquer their enemies and force them to consume their cultural artifacts. The new generation lives in tens of thousands of disparate cultural contexts. In many ways the "deep" knowledge is handled for you by the algorithm, in the way that a village elder would handle it for you in the past. The amount of deep though necessary goes down when an AI can translate every language, dialect and lingo even drawing. This makes gatekeeping much harder which lets be honest, is the main reason people "think deeply" in the first place.
I think the better analogy is newspapers vs tv.
In the old days, people who read newspapers looked down on the people who stared at the "boob tube".
People who consume long-form youtube videos are looking down on people who consume shorts.
Well put regarding Shorts and TikTok as the evolution of breadth-first cultural transmission.
I'm curious at what points, and in what ways, do you choose depth?
YouTube uses thousands of unfair methods, which represent algorithmic barbarism in action. Here are some of them:
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_ad1de47f-9c9d-4c9d...
Linked page gives me a barely readable error
How YouTube Shorts get me is that I will navigate to one from a link someone posts, or a search hit, and (if I'm not on guard), 10-30 minutes later I will realize I've been in shorts-scrolling zombie mode.
And IME video shorts almost never have any value beyond: (1) mindless junk food; or (2) awareness of what other people are seeing.
So I'm going to try just blocking YouTube Shorts entirely, by URL.
I've been using Leechblock, a more generalized blocker for all kinds of sites that might otherwise be unobjectionable, to do this. It doesn't hide links/thumbnails for shorts, but prevents me from visiting them (since I have leechblock set to block them "24/7 and until the end of time"). I got some sanity back.
Would really like some kind of legal policy that requires developers to allow users to opt out of algorithm generated feeds.
12+ years ago, I wrote a Chrome extension that blocked comment sections on youtube and blogs. It was time well invested. Eventually everything became social apps, so my little extension got less and less effective.
I’m not looking forward to the near future where Youtube will pretty much be entirely shorts
SocialFocus offers so much more than just shorts :-)
YouTube shorts now eat up like 2/3 of my UI. I hate them.
Oh great another HN thread where everyone breathlessly moralizes meaningless bullshit. I watch them sometimes, they're fun. Often I learn new things about cooking or woodworking or brewing or whatever random hobby I'm interested in (or I laugh at comedy skits - not everything has to be productive). I get bored and go do something else after scrolling for a while. It's not that deep.
And before you start writing the reply about dark patterns and hijacking my attention and so on. THAT'S ALL ENTERTAINMENT. FOREVER. Arthur Conan Doyle was writing short stories that "exploited your attention mechanisms" in the fucking 1900s.
If you're going to complain about YouTube, complain about their opaque business practices when it comes to paying creators, not the medium.
Denigrating "breathless moralization" and promply using ALL. CAPS. AND. EXCESSIVE. PUNCTUATION. topped off with gratuitous profanity was a masterstroke.
AppBlock for Android has a feature where you can specifically block YouTube shorts, but still watch regular YouTube videos.
i dont know how to block this on my kids tablet this is so frustrating and bad by google.
I think you're tackling this in the wrong direction.
Encourage your kid to be a creator. Not a consumer.
If he's busy building things, he has less time to be consuming things.
Give them a drawing book. Play a sport. Legos. Teach them how to make their own game on Roblox etc.
It's not about blocking your kid from things. It's about enabling them to expand skill sets.
Or on the computer... the more tech we invent, the busier we get, paradoxically.
ublock origin filter that worked for me:
``` youtube.com###items > ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer:last-child youtube.com##[is-shorts] youtube.com###secondary ```
Also can use FreeTube, which lets you hide most distractions on YouTube.
Last I checked, shorts are disabled if you disable recommendations.
Are they also disabled in search results?
Any way to get something similar working on Safari?
uBlock Origin Lite is now on the App Store and supports custom rules.
this post will probably have the opposite effect on people watching more shorts to understand why they suck.
shorts are cancer, on any platform
YouTube/TikTok are in the business of digital drugs, really. They measure how addicted you are and manufacture new forms of content.
Maybe I have my feed tuned really well or I subconsciously just ignore the slop, but these days I find that a lot of the time Shorts are more helpful than full length videos which, I guess for ad reasons, are so heavily padded out that it can be a chore to get to the meat of it. Also the little short "previews" of full length videos let me know if I should bother with the full length one or not.
There is definitely some slop there, but I've overall found it more useful than not.
This year, one of the best things I did for my mental health and productivity was deleting the YouTube app. It's mostly slop and the algorithm will push the most inane click-baity content in the world to get you hooked up. And now Google is even encouraging AI slop. All sprinkled with crypto/investment schemes, gambling, or whatever immoral kind of ads Google can legally get away with.
The handful of good channels remaining are not worth the massive waste of life.
Ban TikTok which is the bigger problem
TikTok will soon be mandatory to be installed on every device. IRS will police it, you’ll have to add TT handle to 1040 and show a proof of minimum daily activity ;)
lol, you must be reading some next level conspiracy theories
The only shorts I've clicked were an accident.
Unhook
Thank you! I tried building this to r other day, but the side effects were breaking the rest of the YouTube results during scroll
It's just such an incredible amazing human thing that the web lets us do this, gives the user some modicum of power.
There's a weird zenith point coming where the AI fully intermediates on our behalf, where a lot of times we don't interact with the software at all, where our agents do.
I don't love AI at all, but I feel like software has done us very little favor by commanding the interface, by making us use what it offers and nothing more and nothing less. The extension here is a wonderful simple & crafted way of going further for ourselves, and that kind of opportunity is rare, something software could maintain it's relevance for more vs AI if it worked harder to amplify & enrich.
This is one of those problems that nobody actually has, but it's politically popular to say that it's a problem.
NewPipe
This "YouTube shorts are killing our attention" take is just the latest instance of a moral panic that's as old as writing itself. The only reason we're OK with novels or TV is path dependence.
The interesting question isn't "is this new media bad?" (it's almost always shallower), but "what structural change in society created the demand for it?"
My thesis is that the progressive "rationalization" of civilization has automated away the need for most people to have a long attention span. For the median worker, society is "running on autopilot." Your incentives are: Go to work. Do what the boss says. Come home. Consume. Sleep. Repeat.
In that environment, a long attention span isn't just useless, it's a liability. It's a bug that makes you miserable and non-compliant. You're not paid to think deeply; you're paid to execute predefined tasks and be there to report edge cases to your superiors.
"Shallow" media like Shorts are just the market's efficient response. They're a way to "exercise" atrophied cognitive faculties in a way that doesn't threaten the underlying system.
This isn't new. This pattern is a clear regression. Every new layer of media abstraction is met with the exact same complaint.
To wit:
Novels:
> 'Were it not for this consideration, it is an open question whether the novel traffic ought not to be dealt with as stringently as Mr. Bruce proposes to deal with the liquor traffic; whether it would not be well to enable the ratepayers of a district to limit the number of the circulating libraries, or even to close them altogether; and to place the "habitual" novel-reader under some such paternal restraint as that to which Dr. Dalrymple wishes to subject an "habitual drunkard." It is too clear, unfortunately, why it is that so many women thus waste their time and rot their minds. They read novels exactly as some young men smoke and drink bitter beer—for sheer want of something to do.' -- The Sabbath School Magazine, 1872
On the Printing Press:
> "He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of holy Scripture... Printed books will never be the equivalent of handwritten codices, especially since printed books are often deficient in spelling and appearance. The simple reason is that copying by hand involves more diligence and industry." -- Jonathan Trithemius, In Praise of Scribes, 1494
On Writing Itself:
> "...this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory... You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant..." -- Plato, the Phaedrus, 370BC
This isn't an argument for YouTube shorts. They're junk.
It's an argument that complaining about them is a waste of time. You're complaining about a symptom, not the disease.
At some point in the dark recesses of time, there was an antediluvian hominid upset that self-awareness and transcendence in the children deprived them of the immanence of being.
They were right.
Self-actualization is a balancing act. Though many may not reach the heights of solace within their own skin, that’s no reason not to wish for better for ourselves and for each other by proxy.
We are what we continually do. Not all who wander are lost, but many are only chasing safety. Any port in a storm, so they say. It’s only good that we want the best for those who can’t do for themselves, and a moral panic is an irrational externalized response to a perceived lack of shared internalized values, but the desire for equanimity is ultimately a rational one borne of a desire for peace, within and without.
Short form content is just the newest expression of cultural touchstones, and like all ways of being seen by seeing, being known by knowing, it is a boon to some, and a millstone to others.
All roads lead to Rome, but you can’t get there from here, if the path you seek leads you to moralize on behalf of others when one doesn’t offer a better way. In as many words, I agree that shame is unlikely to bear fruit.
We have to separate the good from the bad, and many aren’t able to thread that needle on their own, so for those folks, abandoning short form content entirely may be the best avenue to reconnecting with themselves and with each other. Intermediation can only get us so far, and can only bring us so close.
I concur that moral panic is an irrational response and that shame is an ineffective tool.
The point of divergence, however, is in the diagnosis. Abandoning the medium is an individualist solution prescribed for a structural deprivation. And paradoxically, it only works for socially disaffected individuals, who don't need the solution.
You can't treat a systemic nutritional deficiency by moralizing the choice to eat junk. The craving for junk is the operative symptom. The craving only exists because the primary diet is devoid of the necessary nutrients.
In the same way, you can't expect the individual to "reconnect with themselves" by merely removing the novum pabulum. The mental escapism they seek exists precisely because their rationalized role in society has already disconnected them. "Any port in a storm" implies that the storm ends, but the storm is the baseline condition of their life. It never ends.
For the masses, ontological escapism is a necessary compensation for a cognitive function that has been rationalized out of existence but still demands exercise. The "equanimity" you speak of is what the media provides, but in a way to pacify the parts of the brain that are no longer required for survival but still monkey-mind around. It's the difference between scratching an itch and waiting until the urge passes. The former inflames while notionally palliating while the latter abandons agency and thus blows out the inflammation. The latter unbinds. The former is binding.
The desire for "a better way" is itself a form of nostalgic escapism. It is a wish for some point between today and the pre-rationalized state where some dimension of individual cognition and attention were necessary.
This "better way" cannot be offered, because it would require dismantling the very structure that provides the economic and biological security that, while being fundamentally precarious, provides the ontological ruts that the masses fall into. It is asking them to take the path of most resistance and favor two birds in the bush.
Reconnection to immanence is a pre-rational state. It is that very state of being that was lost to self-awareness. The masses cannot regress to it by an act of individual will because what they lack is individual will. That lack is total and reinforcing. Certain socially alienated or schizoid individuals can (and do) reach immanence, but the hegemonic end of transcendence will come when humans have exhausted all possibilities of avoiding it, but not before.
TikTok is worse. It’s pretty shocking how addictive these rapid fire algorithmically driven video feeds are.
I got into scrolling shorts once. Once. An hour and a half later I felt fried. It was literally an icky brain dead feeling like a hangover. Couldn’t focus for another hour. It’s like a drug, a bad one.
Never again. I banned TikTok at the pi.hole level but unfortunately YouTube is sometimes useful. I just refuse to click on shorts.
This stuff is really gross. Congratulations people. We found a way to deliver opioids by computer screen.
I have my browser set to clear cookies and site data automatically, so I'm not sure if my experience of YouTube shorts is typical, but I have a pet theory about why the feelings you describe are so common. It seems like a big part of the addictiveness is not that the content is eye-catching, although this clearly has an effect. The platform gives you a quick way to move onto something else by scrolling/swiping, which means I find myself caught in a cycle of:
1. seeing AI slop or a unoriginal 'comedy' sketch,
2. thinking "eww get this off my screen",
3. scrolling down to the next video; jump to step 1
On the rare occasions that the algorithm does show something genuinely interesting or creative, I watch to the end of the video and feel a lot more satisfied about spending time on it. That's not to say that long-form videos can't be distracting and addictive, but I would posit that 'shorts' engagement is actually driven by disgust rather than curiosity. I now avoid YouTube shorts like the plague, because life is too short to experience that volume of disgust in it.
The most annoying thing about shorts is that they seem to have more of the "old" YouTube algorithm back. The one that actually clustered around what you had watched. I often see a thumbnail, realize it's a short, then go and find the long version (often off YouTube)