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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
They should keep going though. Maybe someday I will be so annoyed that I finally stop using this website
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
drops the hopepage recommendatios completely, and also suggestions from the right sidebar
make youtube pull-only ; no push
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?
Chances are you'd do the same thing
Whichever two initials you’d like to extrapolate SA out to, both of them still fit just perfectly here.
Youtube's increasing hostility to how I want to use it singlehandedly made me reinstall Firefox just so I could use uBlock on it.
Appreciate the UBO share!
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 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.
And what's worse is the infinite scroll.
The difference is the Shorts format tips the scales. Somebody might want one and not the other.
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)
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.
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.
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
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long if You Know How to Use It
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.
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.
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.
Parents/ guardians.
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.
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.
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.
I'm curious at what points, and in what ways, do you choose depth?
At this point I think I owe all my hobbies to YouTube.
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.
It’s all perspective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(Shorts are not completely gone - they are still visible on channels subscribed to - but the toxic homepage thing is empty. Big thanks!)
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/...
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.
home redirecting to /subscriptions, removing shorts, removing comments, removing autoplay suggestions
its super nice now
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.
And, as this person blitheringly confirms, that race is a race to the bottom.
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.
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.
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_ad1de47f-9c9d-4c9d...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It has made YouTube much healthier in my life. Imagine if YouTube themselves let you turn these features on and off.
Never looked back, it’s such a waste of time
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...
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.
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.
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’m not looking forward to the near future where Youtube will pretty much be entirely shorts
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.
``` youtube.com###items > ytd-item-section-renderer.style-scope.ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer:last-child youtube.com##[is-shorts] youtube.com###secondary ```
Meanwhile TikTok is striving to embrace STEM and trying to go for more quality over pure engagement.
Perhaps they should just trade companies at this point.
There is definitely some slop there, but I've overall found it more useful than not.
The handful of good channels remaining are not worth the massive waste of life.
