When I open the main page of Youtube, it shows me a bunch of clips, arranged in rows. Various subjects, of various time lengths, and like all youtube clips I can use the tools under the picture (ie. glance at the time stamp to see how long it is, then skip ahead , or turn volume up, save the video, or save it’s url to link to it,etc)
And then a few rows down, Youtube displays some suggested “shorts”…
These are , well, short (about 1 minute). And they are in portrait mode,and have no controls at the bottom.
What’s the point?
Who posts these “shorts”, and why are they different than any other one-minute clip on youtube?
I think that’s right. Technically, they are not any different than regular 1 minute videos, but presentation matters. It’s easy to watch many of these videos after another, and by enforcing limits to the format, they are encouraging people to create exactly this kind of content.
Twitter could also just be Facebook posts with a short text and no pictures.
YouTube shorts are made for mindless viewing. They’re short (< 1m), generally more entertaining than edifying, and easy to move quickly from one to the next. Click on one, then move your mouse hand back to the keyboard. Don’t like what you’re seeing? Hit the cursor-down key and move to the next short. Don’t like that one? Cursor-down again.
Youtube is FORCING content creators to create exactly this kind of content. If you don’t produce enough shorts, youtube stops recommending your videos, your channel views plummet to almost nothing, and your channel dies. A lot of the channels I watch complain about this. They don’t like making shorts, and their viewers would prefer it if they spent their time making full-length videos. But they are forced to make shorts just to appease youtube’s almighty algorithm.
Personally I prefer videos with some actual content to them. You can hide the Shorts shelf on your main page, but only for 30 days, then it comes back. There is no “go away and stay away” option. You also can’t stop youtube from littering your search results with shorts, which is really annoying when you are searching for videos with some in-depth discussion about topics.
That, plus they sell ads for each short, and since shorts are, well, short, you end up being served significantly more ads if you watch shorts than if you watch full-length videos.
They ads are interspersed through the carousel of shorts, so you might begin watching one and not notice it’s an ad until a few seconds in. Then you just swipe and move on to the next one. For me, the ads are mostly some stupid new iPhone/iPad RPG, castle-defense type, or puzzle game and, lately, for some reason, some dude wanting me to pray with him. No idea who The Algorithm thinks I am, but it ain’t that.
Yeah, I get absolutely none of those. I suppose it’s due to NoScript. Ads on regular videos don’t play automatically for me, either. I have to start them manually or wait for them to time out.
I don’t have NoScript, but I do have uBlockOrigin, SponserBlock and a PiHole. I’m not sure which is doing the heavy lifting, but between them I get literally zero ads on youtube.
FWIW, SponserBlock gets rid of the in-video ads by skipping over them, though I don’t know if the content producer still gets paid for those ones.
PiHole gets rid of most (but not all) the ads on my phone as well. About half the time one of the ‘video will start after the ad’ ones get through on my phone, but never seen one on my computer.
I believe there’s a browser extension that allows you to watch youtube shorts as if they were normal videos (with all the controls and on a ‘normal’ screen), but I haven’t tried it since the shorts really appeal to me in the first place.
This is the only thing I have and I never see YouTube videos (for regular videos or shorts). I tried PiHole for a while, but it didn’t block YouTube or Hulu ads on my Chromecast so I didn’t see the point.
I’ve noticed that quite a few of the shorts I see from my favored creators are 1-2 minutes taken out of one of their longer videos. Which would help with that requirement, but I can certainly see where it would be annoying.
I did recently start following one channel that is almost all shorts, but then, judging from dates on videos, I suspect that was the favored length all along for that person so they’re most likely fine with it. One out of about 50 I follow.
I also am among the people who think this is YouTube trying to capture some TikTok audience.
Exactly the same for me. I see no ads on my Windows and Chromebook due to uBlockOrigin. I tried the Pihole for our Chromecast but it didn’t seem to help. Guess which device I don’t use to view Youtube videos? What a pain!
Wouldn’t know - I’m not and never have been on TikTok. I have some friends who have shown me stuff that they like on the app, but honestly, I already spend too much of my time on line, I don’t need another time sink.
I had never heard of uBlock, so I just added it to my Chrome browser,Windows10.
It works fine to block ads, but it also blocks the comments section.
Which I find irritating, because sometimes a quick read of a few comments gives me an idea of what the video contains, and whether I’ll want to spend the next 4-5 minutes watching it.
So I removed uBlock, but now the comments are still blocked. Does anybody know why?
While we’re on the subject of recommending ad blockers, I recommend Revanced app for Android devices. It’s a little tweaky to set up but see a guide to do so, and then you can completely block Youtube Shorts among other things.