FocusTube: A Chrome extension that hides YouTube Shorts

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.