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."
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
It's not the content. It's the format. At least personally I find 99% of the content to be completely brain dead and un-entertaining however the format locks my brain into a "scroll loop" where I'm constantly subjected to new input rather than having downtime between videos to think "do I want to continue".
This is worsened by the fact that shorts decides "how much you enjoyed the content" by how long you spend looking at it so if it's not something you want to be actively watching you are incentivised to quickly scroll to the next video to prevent the algorithm from filling your feed with content you don't even want to see, let alone enjoy.
And a large part of this is that all of us (at least my group of friends who get stuck in shorts hell) have varying degrees of ADHD and while we function well in low-to-mid stimulation environments, the "maximum stimulation" design of shorts just short circuits most of the self control we have.
Thankfully youtube finally introduced a "timed break reminder" feature which makes breaking out of that scroll loop easier but it makes watching long form content absolutely miserable. Like I set mine to ~5-10 minutes but that means if I'm trying to watch a maths lecture, documentary, etc then rather than focusing on the material I'm getting any flow I have broken every few minutes. It'd be ideal if we could set that to only apply to shorts and not regular youtube but alas.
Like my ideal would be to disable scroll on shorts (just like I disable autoplay on videos) and disable looping of shorts as well. Shorts can exist but I want to be in control and not subject to a design pattern that just throws content at my face endlessly and mindlessly.
TLDR: The design pattern of shorts/tiktok/etc is the issue and it's sapped away a lot of time that I would have otherwise put towards watching long form academic content like lectures or documentaries instead towards mindless slop solely because of the interface w/ the occassional sprinkle of content I actually care about.