FocusTube: A Chrome extension that hides YouTube Shorts

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?

I watch tons of long form educational content on youtube and entirely ignore shorts

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.

Many shorts are just AI cuts from bigger videos made to draw attention.

And what's worse is the infinite scroll.

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!"

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.

Short form algorithmically curated content is an order magnitude more addictive than long form videos from creators you intentionally click subscribe to

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.

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 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.

Many shorts are just many different moments from a regular video indeed.

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.

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.

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)