The absolute worst YouTube short (so far)

The BBQ Pit
1

So anyway, a while back I find out that YouTube is having this feature called “shorts”, and is very actively encouraging users to make them, as many as possible. The concept (based on TikTok) is that a narrow, vertically-oriented video, in the style of a phone, plays automatically, with no progress bar on the bottom and only tiny play and mute buttons in the upper corners. These are the only controls, and they require clicks as keyboard controls don’t work. There is no way to get to a certain point on the video, and after it ends it automatically starts over from the beginning; i.e. you have no way of knowing how long the video is until it repeats. There is no theater mode or fullscreen option. Below the short that you click on are an indefinite succession of other shorts, apparently chosen at random, each of which also starts playing automatically and repeats indefinitely.

Well, I probably don’t need to tell you what a phenomenally bad idea this is. If I want low-quality TikTok garbage, I’ll go to TikTok. I don’t see any educational or entertainment value in these largely aimless snippets. The worst part is that creators who have had tremendous success making elaborate high-quality videos (properly formatted for a freaking computer monitor :angry:) now need to crank out these to make a living. Believe me when I say that Moviebob, UrinatingTree, and the Battlebots organization have far better things to do than zero attention span dreck.

But the worst part is that there is zero information going in. Meaning that you can click on something that looks and sounds innocuous and get something unbelievably horrifying.

Case in point: What True Friendship Looks Like.

Three words…HOHHHHLEEEE FAWWWWKEEEEEENG SHEEEEEEIIITTTT.

All right, I’ve made it very clear that I will never willingly deal with complete fucking assholes. Never. I was swimming in them for the first 18 years of my life, and as far as I’m concerned that’s more than any human being should have to deal with in a thousand lifetimes. I know there’s a prevailing attitude in America that friendship means you have to put up with complete fucking assholes (who get 100% impunity, of course :rage::fu:), to which I say fuck that shit. If the choice is between spending the rest of my life alone in a cabin in Alaska and living with complete fucking assholes, give me a winter coat and a space heater. I tolerate zero bullshit from my friends. No teasing. No ribbing. No dishonesty. No emotional abuse. No physical abuse.

So I’m watching this nuclear meltdown of a short, and these steaming balls of slime are tormenting this poor sap, and it just goes on…and on…and on…and on…AND ON AND ON AND ON AND FUCKING ON. And no, it’s not some weird work or test; the guy is clearly distressed. And then it ends and starts over.

I said “so far” because I’m well aware that it could get worse, but…holy fucking hell, this is disturbing. Shorts were just a complete mistake, goddammit. :angry:

2

Clicked on them once by accident. Now I ignore them completely.

3

I keep hiding the Shorts section on my youtube main page, but it only lets you hide them for 30 days. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to stop youtube from showing the horrible fucking things on the list whenever I do a youtube search.

4

I’ve seen good shorts from Kitboga and Legal Eagle among others. I stick to my subscribed channels.
A couple from @Mangetout (Atomic Shrimp)

5

I’ve used shorts at times, when I’m feeling lousy and want to zone out. I mostly get good ones, but you have downvote the bad ones so it learns not to give them to you. (And swipe past the ads which don’t let you downvote them. No, I’m not interested in “the ice diet.”)

I’m more concerned about how my dad keeps being fed clearly edited crap from Fox News and similar. And he watches stuff like the Young Turks or those anti-cop “auditors.” I worry that (older) liberals disdain for shorts and Tiktok and such is leading them to cede ground on this medium.

But to avoid stuff that pisses you off, you kinda have to not watch them. If you don’t swipe away or at least downvote, YouTube thinks that’s what you want to watch.

6

Amen to the OP. Youtube recently started cluttering up the videos it suggests for me with “shorts.” I ignore them, but they take up real estate on my computer screen, so they piss me off.

7

Some of the channels I follow have been producing nice shorts, like Atomic Shrimp, Dan Povenmire, and the Vlogbrothers.

Early on, I found a way to work around that stupid tiktok-like interface they created for shorts: Add any short I’m interested in watching to a playlist, and then watch it via the playlist menu. When you go that route, it’s played in a standard youtube video window, with a progress bar, and all the controls. The part that might be a downside for some people is that youtube will automatically play the next item in your playlist, no way to turn that off that I know of. I’ve gotten used to pausing videos right before the end of each one. so I can remove them from the playlist.

A few months ago, youtube freakin’ took away most of the options that made it easy to add shorts to playlists, which pissed me off greatly. The only remaining easy option is to do it in your subscription feed, which has its own limitations.

8

If you’re referring to that short, that’s not what that’s about. That’s called “giving someone shit” which is just joking around with friends. This is the kind of thing you can only do with people you’re close to. It’s not serious, it’s a kind of joking around, sarcasm. Because in reality they are your friends and of course you’d be there for them. The fact that they’re going so far in the opposite direction with their reactions and laughing their asses off is a clue that this is what is happening.

It made me smile and chuckle because this is exactly how I am with friends, friends I’ve known for decades, where each others’ kids call us aunts and uncles because they’ve known us their whole lives and we consider each other family (not by blood, but by choice). I’ve gone out of my way to make time to go to funerals of my friends” relatives just to support them, we always know we have a place to stay, we drop anything to help each other. I was doing Zoom calls every day to a friend in the hospital as he was in a coma and then after he woke up but was still recovering and couldn’t talk. These were my groomsmen at my wedding. They are closer than most of my blood relatives.

And this is exactly how we talk to each other because it’s funny and we all know how we actually feel.

9

Paraphrasing some random short hosted on Facebook: “I can’t believe that just happened!”

Me: “What just happened? What the fuck am I supposed to be looking at?”

10

All of this right here. My friends and I were doing the exact same shit in the 80’s.

The OP sounds like the metaphorical old man screaming at the clouds.

Bet he’s a real hoot at parties.

11

While I’m with you guys, and didn’t find the short upsetting at all, but just taking general friendly shit-talking to a higher level, I’ve learned that lots of people do not really come from that type of background/culture nor find it funny at all. Especially if they have past experiences of being let down in their friendships. So I definitely can see it being triggering in this case. Like I cannot do the same sort of “playful teasing” with my wife that I could with most of my male buddies. So a case of wrong audience for the video.

12

At least some shorts do have a tiny inconspicuous progress bar at the bottom, non-interfaceable. Presumably short maker has to include it.

13

Just a WAG, but I wouldn’t be surprised if what you’re seeing is the progress bar from their vidcap of TikTok or some other service, and none of the uploaders went out of their way to include it.

14

If I watch the OP’s video on the Facebook app on my phone (which is how I usually watch YouTube shorts, anyway), there is a progress bar on the bottom.

ETA: Actually, I get a progress bar on my desktop, too. I just can’t control it (or at least can’t figure out how to control it.) In the phone app, I can scrub.

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Big T - I wasn’t aware that downvoting them was an option. (The layout is pretty confusing for a TikTok newbie; until a couple days ago I didn’t even know where to find the comments.) I did notice that after I shut down a lot of crappy videos and users, there was a marked improvement in my recommendations. Thanks; will definitely give it a shot.

Atamasama - Yeah, I’ve heard that argument before. I’d maybe believe it in this particular instance if it wasn’t incredibly obvious that he wasn’t cool with it and it wasn’t so completely, painfully ONE-SIDED. All I’m seeing here is a despicable pile-on. Maybe if it had more time to hammer out the nuances of friendship-by-abuse it’d make more sense. :roll_eyes:

Grrr - I freaking hate parties and had to be dragged to them for almost my whole life, so you nave no worries on that front. :roll_eyes:

pulykamell - For the record, the culture I grew up in was where complete unbridled flaming shitbags could go absolute hog fucking wild 24/7 and torment me with absolute impunity with the blessings of authority figures who were supposed to be keeping a lid on that bullshit. I’m aware that relationships where this kind of behavior is mutually enacted by and among all parties with full consent (kind of like S&M between two dominatrices) do exist, but I prefer to distance myself from them. And again, look at the poor bastard. He is hurting. There is no equal footing here.

16

That’s legitimately sad to me. If you’ve never reached that level of friendship in life then you’ve missed something special. :frowning:

17

What guy? You mean the animated guy who was drawn long after the original conversation had taken place?

Whenever you pull up one of those YouTube Shorts" videos, you can transition that video to the usual YouTube interface by doing the following:

  • right-click somewhere in the video
  • in the pop-up menu, select “copy video URL”
  • in the address bar of your browser, right-click and then select the “paste-and-go” option

When you do that for your video, you get this instead.

If you look into the description below the video, you find a link to the original video from which the audio track was lifted, which is this:

This Rainbow Six Siege Video is Hilarious

Fair warning, this video is ten minutes long and the language gets pretty raunchy after the first minute or so (and also doesn’t continue the sort of best-friends shit-talking under discussion in this thread).

It’s a recording of a multiplayer first-person shooter video game being played by the seven people who are having this discussion. there aren’t even the post-hoc animated faces anymore, there are no faces. So when you say the original speaker is distressed, or that it was incredibly obvious that he wasn’t cool with it, or that we can tell just by looking at the poor bastard that he is hurting, you really have no idea what his state of mind was during the whole discussion. In fact, it’s difficult to tell who is actually speaking most of the time. This is the clearest case of projection one could imagine, and your most recent post reveals why it’s happening:

I’m sorry you went through that. FWIW, I got plenty of that same treatment in grade school, and it definition affects my friendships now; it makes it hard to develop the kind of deep trust that enables a person to always know that there is absolutely no truth in the shit-talk being offered up. I’ve had a couple of very close friends with whom I could engage in the sort of shit-talk featured in the videos here, but it’s been pretty rare. And like @pulykamell, it took me a little while to learn that my wife, who grew up with a lot of awful bullying as a kid, really doesn’t like that sort of “playful teasing” at all.

I’m guessing you’re not a fan of roasts, at which the target accepts a series of horrific insults from their friends?

Like any other comedy event, some roasts are good and some aren’t so good. But the good ones are epic.

18

Hell, people have been killed over shit like that.

Cite:

19

Sounds potentially worse than Facebook shorts.

On my Facebook feed there’s been an endless succession of brief guinea pig videos featuring saccharine music soundtracks. There was one featuring a guinea pig wearing a tiny red knitted Santa hat while holding onto a miniature cart displaying itsy-bitsy red knitted gloves, while “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” played in the background. I made the mistake of showing it to Mrs. J., and now she has an incurable earworm.

20

This is important enough that it really should be a separate thread.

There are two polar opposite camps. I was raised in the middle: a milder “Make harmless fun of someone to show that you like 'em” (but had to be careful never to do that as a teacher).

The tougher “trash talk” would hurt… until I got a thicker skin and learned to trust my trashy comrades.