Honestly, it’s the terrible content moderation policies that are going to kill YouTube, not a certain type of video.
Bingo. I don't find shorts all that appealing (especially since I can't cast them to a TV! Wtf, seems like core function there) but I agree, the REAL problem with YouTube is how much creators have to top toe around demonization.
"Demonetization" is just what YouTube's promises to advertisers look like when they affect video creators.
Money on YouTube flows from advertisers. The revenue from charging advertisers to show ads is split between YouTube/Google and the video creator. If your video is not shown with ads, then there is no revenue to split.
YouTube gives advertisers a very small control over what videos their ads are shown on. They have a few different classifications of videos, and advertisers can choose which ones they want to be seen with. Advertisers are paying for the service of YouTube putting their ads on videos — but only the videos that YouTube thinks the advertiser does want to be seen with.
If your video is fully "demonetized", that means YouTube has decided that no advertisers want to be seen with it; or that they are not willing to take revenue from showing ads on that video. But they're still hosting it, making it available to viewers.
Video creators' revenue is a share of the ad income from YouTube showing the video (and accompanying ads). A "demonetized" video is one that doesn't show any ads — so there is no revenue to split. It's not that YouTube is taking all the revenue and leaving none to the video creator. They're not making any, because they don't think the advertisers would be okay with being charged to be seen alongside that video.
However, the creator of a "demonetized" video is still receiving value from YouTube. It is not free to host that video — especially if it is popular. Network bandwidth, data storage, and transcoding of video for viewers' browsers are not free; YouTube covers the cost of these. YouTube is willing to host a lot of videos that they make zero money from, at their expense, rather than censoring those videos by taking them down.
YouTube is willing to host a lot of videos that they make zero money from, at their expense
That's just not true...they're hosting it because they data-farm the living shit out of both the creator and anyone that gets tangentially close to their site. More content = more people visit = more data on these people = more money...They make a lot of money on this data, even if no ads are shown on a video, and are by no means doing it out of the goodness of their heart.
Yeah, but they aren't making nearly the amount of money on the video as they would with the ads, and no where near enough to compensate the creators beyond free hosting.
You can still publish demonetized content, just don't expect to make money from it on YouTube.
They use that data to sell ads at you across the entire internet. Google is making plenty of cash off those “demonitized” videos.
I didn't say it's charity. I said the video creator (who wants people to see their video) is receiving a service from the video host for no charge, which otherwise the creator would have to pay for. Hosting your own video on your own storage and network bill is not free. If you don't believe me, go try doing it yourself.
If the creator didn't think they were receiving any benefit, they would just take that video down. They sometimes do, but usually they don't.
Publishing a book costs money. Someone has to buy the paper from the paper makers, and the ink from the ink makers. Someone has to line up the print on the page. Those people have to get paid, so they can go buy a sandwich and pay their rent. So, publishers exercise some judgment in not printing books that they don't expect to sell, because they've gotta pay their bills, including parts and labor.
Same goes for video. Hosting a video costs money. Servers cost money. Power costs money. Network connectivity costs money. The people who run those services need to get paid so they can buy a sandwich and pay their rent. If YouTube is hosting your video, even if they're not paying you a share of any ad revenue (because they're not getting any), they're paying bills that otherwise you would have to pay.
I'm not saying you've gotta be grateful or something. I'm saying if you want to understand what's going on in the world, you can't do that without understanding the actual bills that people are actually paying.
To put it simply: The hosting costs of demonetized videos are paid for by the hosting of monetized videos.
Don't believe me? Take your video and store it on a server that you pay for, with network connectivity you pay for. That's a thing you can do. You can even do it with Fediverse technology. However, it will in fact cost you some amount of money.
Hosting your own video on your own storage and network bill is not free. If you don’t believe me, go try doing it yourself.
I know this is true but why do I see so many people on lemmy pushing for self-hosting and even talking about it like its some low rent hobby?
It's not exactly an expensive hobby, but it's also not free.
YouTube hosts a lot of videos.
And — by the fundamental theorem of financial calculus that I just made up — "not free" times "a lot" equals "big bucks".
And — by the fundamental theorem of financial calculus that I just made up — “not free” times “a lot” equals “big bucks”.
Finally, someone who gets my idea of math.
they're all paying the bills by hawking raid shadow legends anyways, may as well not rely on youtube monetization anyways and host elsewhere
The video in question: The Forgotten Disaster of the SS Eastland. It's 43 minutes long, both well done, and respectfully done. Her team did a good job on it then some youtube automated system buried it for "violating community guidelines".
I'm not even sure it is bad policies. I am pretty sure that they just don't have moderators.
I doubt anyone reads 99.9% of reports.
So you get bigotry and hate, you get insane and deadly DIYs, you get 12yo girls being creeped while posting random 5s clips from their lives.
Not to mention just the vast amount of extraordinarily low-quality content YouTube serves up. It's amazing how bad a lot of the videos it thinks you will like are. The algorithm makes no sense.
But hey, here's 16 different Joe Rogan clips with sigma male music in the background.
The algorithm seems like it is optimized for profit, not for actually being a good platform.
That should mean engagement. It serves up such bad videos that I disengage.
Once in a while I'll realize I just spent 20, 30 minutes looking at a streak of pretty decent stuff. Rare enough to be remarkable. Usually after just 3 or 4 consecutive crap clips I'll close it down and get back to work.
I doubt anything disengages a user faster than low-quality content. I bet it does it even faster than the authoritarian politics and bigotry YouTube seems to inexorable serve you.
If that were true, it wouldn't be the way it is.
Just because it causes your disengagement, doesn't mean it causes disengagement with the vast majority of their userbase.
They're also more concerned with ad views and clicks, so if you're not the kind of person who gives a crap about ads... they don't really care that much about you.
This is predicated on the belief that Google/YouTube is run in a 100% hyper-competent way. I don't buy that.
Google does things the easiest way possible to make tons of money. They make unforced errors all the damn time.
They don't have to be 100% competent, but they are very competent at what they want to do... which is monetize the technologies and services they provide. They're not trying to make something that people can use well and enjoy... they're making things to make a shit-ton of money. The two goals are not generally mutually inclusive.
Yours, on the other hand, is predicated on the belief that they're all super-incompetent and have no capability of doing anything right ever... which is confusing considering they're a multi-billion dollar company and not just some guy in a shack banging rocks together to see how they sound.
Yours, on the other hand, is predicated on the belief that they're all super-incompetent and have no capability of doing anything right ever
Nope. It's only this specific thing that I necessarily think they're doing a bad job of. And I'm right; they are. Their algorithm is a struggling baby compared to TikTok and YouTube at large is not a major profit center (and indeed may not be profitable at all -- but they maintain it because abandoning it would be too costly for them).
TikTok is so good at doing this thing that it is a profitable business for them. YouTube is struggling, and we can clearly see why.
What specific thing? The entirety of YouTube? Just the algorithm? Either way their algorithm may not be designed to do promote videos you want to watch, in reality it’s most likely designed to promote stuff that will draw them the most ad revenue and not promote really good stuff all the time. If your content is always great people will expect that and there will never be a great video, on the contrary if there is a great video among mediocre ones at best people will engage more in those (especially if they are longer and even if they have more ads), and additionally will engage more in your platform. This means that even if they aren’t making as much per video they are still making more in the long-term. And that’s really all they care about, your experience means nothing to them.
This is a thread about YouTube shorts and its bad algorithm, dude.
What’s a YouTube short?
The literal subject of this thread.
You're in here arguing with people without even reading the headline of the article.
The terrible content moderation policies are what keep it alive. No one subscribes to youtube so it's primary customers are the ad agencies. And they want content moderation
This Shorts issue seems to have measurable, constant and immediate effect in ad revenue and therefore platform profitability. Bad content moderation may or may not decrease engagement but in the end Google is a commercial enterprise that's looking at the numbers at hand.
If shorts were simply a separate section of YouTube with all of its functionality, then that's understandable. But as they stand, shorts are just YouTube with both reduced functionality (forced vertical aspect ratio, no seek bar, time limit) AND all of the existing flaws (bad recommendation algorithm, reposted content, etc. )
Unless you are some kind of tech contrarian hipster, I don't think there is one thing that YouTube shorts does better than TikTok, or heck, Instagram Reels.
no seek bar
I really don't understand who thought that removing the seek bar from a video player was a good idea...
It's actually there on mobile, just hidden.
I only tried it on desktop. There's a tiny progress bar at the bottom, but you can't interact with it.
Even TikTok has a seek bar and has for a long time.
I use it all time. What are you talking about?
It technically has a seekbar, but it's very hard to find and/or might be obscured by their capricious A/B randomized testing
I have a seek bar, is it because I'm using Revanced? I just that ot was there
Pretty sure that's one of the Revanced patches.
I use the regular app and the seekbar was always available for me.
Hmm. Guess I was wrong about that then.
Nope, official app has a seek bar on the bottom (I was using vanced before but had to reset my password which reset the login cookie and I am not trying to delete my downloads of years by trying to sign back in)
P.S. I have too many downloads, so if anyone has a method to extract them, I'll be thankful.
But why do I have to do that when every other video player has a volume slider?
On the contrary, why bother hunting the down the slider for every different player when you could just use the system?
Just curious, since I use the youtube slider like once a month.
I’m not the guy you asked, but I assume they do as I do. My system volume is calibrated for all the various applications I use day to day, including video conferencing. If I have to adjust that, it means everything else is the wrong volume. I’d rather modify YouTube to be the right volume than everything else.
This. My system volume is calibrated to be similar across all applications, games, etc. This means all apps are individually adjusted to reach similar volume level. Why should I have to mess with all of my other volumes just random manager at Youtube decided a volume slider on shorts isn't necessary despite the site still using volume from regular videos where it can be adjusted? This isn't an issue with any other app or platform. Maybe the last Youtube video I watched had overly quiet or loud audio compared to the norm and I either have insanely loud audio or I can't hear a damned thing and I can't fix it quickly like on any other Youtube page.
Not everyone had a set of dedicated volume buttons, or wheel, etc. on their keyboard, so having to go into Windows settings or reach for a knob or button on the speakers themselves to adjust is a lot more than getting a slider like every other website in the world gives you.
You can't move around in them, it's either play or pause and repeat, which sucks (as shorts don't have to be short..)
Oddly enough, this seems to be a desktop limitation. I can scrub backwards and forwards just fine on my phone.
Hopefully desktop PC hardware will become powerful enough to gain the ability to skip around in 30 second videos someday. I think I read that they expect them to be at parity with smartphone hardware in the next decade or two.
They don't even need a seek bar, just support arrow keys
It's also annoying that you can't save them without using the hack where you change the URL.
You can scrub around in them. Look for the red bar on the bottom after the short starts. You can tap and drag on it and a little red circle will appear that will show briefly after you release.
You can move around in them. Atleast on Android, there is a hidden red bar at the bottom which becomes visible if you pause the video.
This is a problem with all of these Tik Tok clones (and even Tik Tok let’s you do it for some videos). It’d so annoying to be watching a 45 second reel but if I miss something, I have to watch the whole thing again
I have the exact opposite problem? I can skip around just fine in shorts, but can't in reels... Is this due to A/B testing or am I dumb?
I simply prefer TikTok for short form videos due to unique community and reasonably entertaining algorithm.
I enjoy YouTube to the point of paying for Premium but I hate that my YouTube subscriptions feed on TV is littered with shorts that I have no way of disabling other than hiding them one by one (which I do to make a point).
Suits at Google will try to shove it into everyone's throats until they get bored and someone adds it to killedbygoogle.com so why would anyone even bother with it.
This is why I use LibreTube. It just filters all the Shorts
I'm deep in Apple ecosystem and unfortunately this is not an option on Apple TV as far as I know.
You should consider leaving.
In case of Apple TV, it's the smoothest TV software experience, leaps and bounds above any ad-ridden smart TV or aging Nvidia Shield. I used Android TV and it's just jank. For a time I had HTPC with Kodi too, it's been relegated to hosting Plex and downloading stuff from Usenet. I enjoyed freedom to install anything but ultimately this didn't outweight better audio codec support on Apple TV.
ad-ridden smart TV
Oh the irony...
Not sure what you're making a stab at.
Apple software is obviously ad free and I have no problem with paying for YouTube Premium due to value it provides. Some good soul on Lemmy also recommended me a way to block sponsored content via isponsorblocktv which is a script that runs on my server and skips sponsored segments by reading YouTube app state and sending fast forward commands like a remote would.
Not sure what you're making a stab at.
The fact that you're calling Android "ad-ridden" (which it's not) in a conversation about how you can't remove ads on Apple devices.
I called smart TVs ad-ridden, might have been bad wording on my part.
It's amazing how much social credit you possibly have. Xi Jinping is proud of you.
Are you alright there mate?
What if we fucked over all of the people that like our website to try and cater to people that don't like it?
Seems to be the current trend in social media this year...
This is to perfectly put.
Mind you those are (at least some of) the guys that killed animation and comedy sketches on youtube because they made it necessary for videos to be 10+ minutes long to be relevant.
Which I get a laugh out of, because in the early days youtube would not let you post any video longer than 10 minutes, unless you were a "special" approved account. Now, only 10+ minute videos matter. A complete about face.
Using revanced. Disabled shorts.
Watching these YT shorts & recommendations decays my brain cells
I blocked shorts with ublock origin.
Ive used blocktube.
It can also prevent auto pause. Hide the movies you can rent, hide specific channels, or videos with specific words in their title, etc
Advertising ruined YouTube years ago.
YouTube ruined YouTube
I swear to god these dumb social media sites are going to hell faster every day.
I used to like YouTube because I could watch all sorts of interesting things ... funny things ... informative things ... things actually liked
Now my main YouTube recommended feed is filled with clickbait thumbnails of idiots making surprised or shocked faces to try to get your attention to get you to look at their dumb video of nonsense that has zero information and is not entertaining at all.
My take's always been Monetization ruined YouTube.
Because if theres money to be made then theres a few million idiots that are happy to exploit the fuck out of the system and do essentially fuck all to earn cash.
But without money, the platform would have sunk.
It's a harsh reality that all brilliant internet things have to face.
And i hate it.
Google ruined YouTube years ago.
I don't mind grabbing my pitchfork and joining the "YouTube is already ruined party", but two thoughts first:
That headline is so deliberately vague. It could literally be one employee who said "eh, I don't think YouTube shorts is a good idea".
The article itself doesn't really give you any information that isn't in the headline. It feels like an attempt to stoke anti-YouTube sentiment without providing any useful information.
...okay, with that out of the way...
Yeah, the current YouTube situation is pretty crap.
Yeah honestly these are some great points, and really it's one of these reasons as to why I just dislike modern journalism today with the headlines as such.
It does cite internal metrics on ad revenues going down for three consecutive quarters due to lower potential to show ads in short videos compared to longer ones. It's anonymous and doesn't give solid figures but that's what this article is about.
You should be able to remove Shorts from your feed. I never watch them and yet they fill my feed up making it jore difficult to find real content. I'm specifically talking about the smart TV app which throws them all in together.
I'm using some custom ublock origin filters that I found somewhere to block shorts across all of youtube:
He's talking about smart tv app. If those "shorts" are being pulled from some other subdomain then perhaps a block rule on that domain set on the router would help. But best just not to use youtube.
I'm pretty sure shorts are just Youtube videos but with a different UI.
You can take the video ID from the URL of a Shorts clip and put it in a normal Youtube URL and the shorts video plays with the normal Youtube player.
Basically.
I don't know what I would do with this. And I mentioned to someone else that I mostly watch YT on a Shield. Is this even relevant to me?
Surprising no one jumped onto you with thw revanced suggestions.
SmartTubeNext is what you want on TV platforms. You can turn shorts off. It blocks ads. And it has sponsorblock so it is configurable to additionally skip sponsor segments, self-promotion, intros, outros.
And as others have pointed out, you can also block them in browser with Ublock Origins and with Revanced which covers the desktop and mobile platforms.
What I want is a YouTube viewer that cuts out ads that I can use on my Mac or my iPhone to use on my TV with a Chromecast.
Chromecast is how I view all my TV content.
You'll have to take that up with Apple. They're the ones dictating that you can't use any of the wonderful apps we have on Android.
As for Chromecast, SmartTube Next is what you want
Shorts is (for me) a worse viewing experience and it's just more useless junk tha clutter up my youtube main page.
That's why I have a Firefox extension that automatically redirects from shorts. Although, if Google's new Web Environment Integrity goes through I guess I could kiss stuff like that goodbye.
Yeah I usually watch YouTube on my shield and it clutters up every channel with junk I have no desire to watch.
I don't disagree but there are some channels that do great shorts. For example check out squat university shorts.
Guys, I think I found The Algorithm's Lemmy account!!!
God I hate shorts. Luckily you can disable them. But youtube is so riddled with ads in general, it makes watching without adblock impossible. If they'd go back to one 3 second ad at the very beginning, I might even tolerate it. But the current shitshow? Not on my system.
Doesn't help that they have a whooping 113 trackers running simultaneously.
Wait how do you disable shorts this is the first I'm hearing of this
with uBlock Origin, right click on the shorts area > click on ublock's "Block element" > select the Shorts section > Block
Blocking with uBlock really isn't the same as disabling. Disabling implies you're using the app and it's a setting.
You can disable them in Vanced and Revanced. NewPipe either disables them by default or doesn't even support them, which is fine with me.
None of those apps are the original and official app. Which is pretty obviously what this was about. I used to use Vanced and it never worked as easily as everyone seems to imply, and I never could get it to cast. Vanced is no longer available on the PlayStore btw, and the same can be expected for every app that tries to offer YouTube content, modified.
Right, well, it seems like you don't want solutions and would rather just whine about something.
YouTube shorts was the dumbest fucking idea. They have a niche: long-form (as in >1min) video content. They are dominant in that niche. Then they saw TikTok was popular and dominating the short-form video scene, and their response was... "we should switch to making more short form". WTF?! And on top of that, they've diverted resources away from their main product (longer videos) as the article says. It just seems like such a catastrophic unforced error.
YouTube have such a stranglehold on the >1m market, that's why they can afford to stagnate in that area and look into other markets. They don't have to fear a competitor threatening their core market any time soon.
not only is the shorts UI shitty but the shorts themselves are often shitty imo, or at least the "scroll through shorts one at a time" linear format means you see a lot more videos you wouldn't click on intentionally.
"No YouTube I do not want to watch Jordon Fucking Peterson. I will NEVER want that. Fuck all the way off."
I stopped watching shorts because of the unwanted boosts of fascist content.
Silver lining: It gave me the opportunity to "dislike" Jordan Peterson, which was not an opportunity I previously had.
I mean, I guess I always HAD the option, but there's something to be said about having somebody serve it up on a platter like that.
Hey, boosts engagement, he's happy all the same.
I watch shorts but I never swipe up. I pick which ones I want to watch.
I hate that I get such random shit in my feed when I really only look at art videos - like my scrolling should be nothing but people drawing but random shit like slime videos or some ass hat and his kid.
Yeah YouTube really likes to inject videos you wouldn't normally watch into your algorithm. It's pretty annoying. I would never seek out religious videos, and never have on YouTube, yet they keep making their way into my feed. Even voting them down doesn't seem to change the frequency.
For real. I've never searched a prank video in my life but they come up during shorts.
The interface isn't consistent between videos and shorts.
You can rewind and fast forward videos on phones by double tapping the left or right hand side of the video, but doing that on shorts just likes it.
I literally could not understand what half the ones I saw were even supposed to be about last time I went on YouTube. Like they were just random people doing shit with no punchline or point.
might? Shorts are the main reason I found alternatives like Freetube, Newpipe and Invidious; and continue to look for actual alternative platforms.
if there was just a checkbox to turn them off forever I'd probably still be on the mainpage.
Shorts also cannot be cast from a mobile device. If I'm going through my curated channels while casting, the app give an error and requires me to stop casting before I can watch the short. I just skip it and don't bother anymore.
Yeah, most of the youtube I watch is cast to the chromecast of whatever room I'm in. I can't add shorts to the queue, so I just skip them.
I wish I could watch shorts from only my subscribed channels.
This isn't a bad format inherently, it's just being abused. I like seeing short Blender clips, or short guitar tutorial on a riff, or stand up bits that sit well within the time frame.
In the app, you can just open your subscription tab and click on the Shorts section. That way you'll only see Shorts only from your subscribed channels.
I my shorts feed is now only shows content from standup comedians. I discovered several that I really like Troy Bond, that guy is hilarious and just started doing comedy since COVID. If there's no Shorts I might not discover him.
Yeah it's great for comedy, I've found a lot of really funny content I wouldn't have found otherwise.
You can watch the shorts for just one channel. But yeah it's algorithm sludge
I like and hate their shorts page. I like the fast pace consumption of good content but half of it is rage bait, onlyfans bait, low effort content theft, and people acting obnoxious for attention. I wish I had more control over what shows in shorts because the don't recommend button doesn't seem to do anything.
Shorts suggestions are based on what you watch. If you spend less time watching rage/OF bait shorts or just scroll past them, they will show you less of these. 95% of my shorts scrollpage is from creators and topics that I'm interested in.
Soo looks like you just like to watch this type of content if this is what the app is serving you.
I don't like blaming the user, but I can confirm I only get shorts from creators I follow but then I also don't tiktok scroll once I open a short, I will see a short on my home screen open it and then back out and watch the other one in the side scrolling list if it interests me
my feed should be all art videos then but its not. They throw in shit that I never look at.
Instagram reels never does this to me btw. I never really stray from watching speed paints/drawing tutorials/artist reels so that's what I see.
I know how it works and I'm saying it doesn't work good enough. It shows things I like and subscribed to but it also shows me things I don't want to see more often than I expect.
The terrible content moderation policies and adblock bans will ruin it long before shorts.
Shorts are far from being the biggest problem, the ads are much much worse.
YouTube ads are so mild compared to other free content platforms though, even some paid services tbh.
Where have you seen ads worse than YouTube?
In freemium mobile games
Cable TV has crazy long adverts about mesothelioma, the radio has big long ad breaks with police car sirens and nonsence in, have you been on a news site recently? It's hard up find the story there are so many auto playing adverts and banners.
I think even twitch is worse, they randomly throw thirty seconds adverts up over the top of content so one moment you're watching the key moment of a vital battle and the next you're pulling your hair out while watching chat say 'oh wow that was the funniest thing ever!'
What acceptable quality free content provider has less obnoxious ads? You can even skip most the YouTube ones after five seconds.
If we are starting to compare YouTube with TV and Radio ads, it's a sign of how much worse it's getting. A lot of people started got into the habit of watching YouTube because they were sick of TV ads.
The problem here is, just as it happened with TV itself, as the executives want ever growing profits over a saturated market, they add more and more ads. It used to be even Cable TV was sold with the promise of no ads, and so were streaming services. I remember when YouTube had 5 seconds of ads every hour. Now it's pushing for two 7 second ads every 10 minutes, that is, when they don't put longer unskippable ads there too. Wasn't it enough to pay for the service before? Ads keep getting longer all the time, while our lives only get shorter.
Tubi is remarkable good about ads. Long watch times between ads.
Hulu
And what's worse about Hulu is you pay to see those ads.
I don't really understand the point of shorts (aside from trying to compete with TikTok). It's an arbitrary limitation of video runtime and locked to a phone screen resolution. So dumb.
And how many Youtube-based creators have adapted them SO FUCKING POORLY. The worst I've seen is the Modern Rogue, who have chopped their existing library into like ten thousand shorts. It made being a subscriber to their channel fucking useless because you'd get small snippets of content you'd already seen just shuffled up and out of context. It was especially bad before Youtube separated them into their own tab.
Many others just use it as a "dump this tiktok to Youtube as well" place.
I like them for speed painting/drawing
Shorts: just a normal YouTube video but it's too short to be useful, and most useful functionality had been removed.you can't skip ahead or go back if you didn't hear something, you just have to watch it again and again.
Shorts is something a manager came up with. It doesn't make it better, it makes it worse, but it also attracts more views, so profit!
The article indicated that, apparently, Shorts is even more unprofitable than regular YouTube. So they don't even have that going for them
I figured they were just ripping off tiktok seems to be the same kind of shit.
Every time I see the little "new content" blip next to someone I've subscribed to and it ends up being a short, I feel cheated.
yes i started unsubscribing some of the channels who publish daily shorts
Bit fuckin late now isn't it, I can't even open the mobile app without being forced to watch a wish version of tiktok.
Use Newpipe duh
I'm making my way there, I'm using revanced atm.
Or LibreTube
Am I just using the wrong instance or is LibreTube super slow to load videos compared to for example Vanced? I'm otherwise loving it, but the load times got so bad I couldn't take it any more..
It is slow. I think it depends on the instance, but sometimes it just flatout doesn't work at all for me.
Just gotta look for instances and hope one of them works well. Generally I've never run into a situation where no instances work.
Ah ok, I'll do that then. Thanks for the helpful advice 🙂
I really wish they would make it it's own thing and separate it from youtube.
I really wish they'd just kill it. We already have one tiktok, which is already one too many
I don't bemoan google wanting to compete, I just want to see it as a separate product from YouTube.
Shorts suck mainly because you can't cast them.
What good is a Chromecast where I watch long form, see short form I want to watch while browsing, can't cast it without disconnecting from the chrome cast.
Right omg the queue + cast feature is the killer app. Let me queue some shorts in between longer videos.
I wouldn't know, I have an extensive set of modification over youtube that, among other thing, completely remove them from existence.
Now if only I could do the same with the bad automatic translations…
It seems every new feature of youtube is something we have to fight against.
Tech has just reached the maturation point.
As with every industry, there's a point where there's enough growth for a win-win for the company and consumers, so consumers benefit with new features; once that dries up the company starts squeezing, so consumers endure new features and use the product despite the changes.
shorts dont have 30 second ads at the beginning of them, unlike the less than 10 second videos i attempt to watch
who tf goes online without blocking ads
BigBananaDealer
I hate them, but this is kinda late...
If we could only decide WHICH channels we want - let the people who want shorts have it, shitty as it is. Just let me turn it off (and games, film and music while we’re at it).
I never used them. I never will use them. They are just in the way and keep me praying for a YT alternative.
There's just something off about watching shorts and tiktok, if I use it for too long it feels like my head is going to explode. There's some great content there for things I'm interested in, like quick tips for software that I use, but if I watch 5 of those in a row I'm not going to remember anything. All in all I think the format, and regular youtube, would work a lot better if they didn't push so hard to get me to just sit there for hours on end.
Advertisers are also starting to realize this, and are paying less and less for TikTok. If people don't remember the comment they're actively looking for in 5 minutes, they definitely aren't going to remember the ad.
What the format is good for is reaching new subscribers, which actually makes YouTube's approach interesting because it can pull people to the longer content.
But then they go and down the "subscribed" page in shorts, completely nuking the idea.
because it can pull people to the longer content.
In the experience of many youtubers, the shorts audience and long format audience is 2 distinctly different groups with almost no overlap.
Shorts may drive subscriptions, but it doesn't significantly translate to more views or watch time on normal videos.
if I use it for too long it feels like my head is going to explode
Wasn't that one of the storylines from Max Hradroom? An extremely short ad format was invented (Blipverts) that literally made people's heads explode.
Perhaps it's a little too late for YouTube to ride this trend. TikTok is even pivoting to long videos, as they know where the money is.
If they forced livestreams in your face like they do shorts maybe people would actually watch their content
They're pushing it way too hard, just like the google+ shit back in the day but even more in your face. Stinks strongly of "we have tiktok at home"
Youtube just stopped being useful. Now it's all republished TV and no personal expression. Totally boring.
God damn, have you tried looking for crap that is not just the front page of YouTube not signed in? There are endless streams of amazing content that is incredibly educational or hilarious or mind blowing if you know where to look. People making new music of all different genres with insane levels of skill, people literally sharing PhD level knowledge for free. There are plenty of valid criticisms of YouTube as a platform, and there is certainly some crap content out there, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are tons of incredibly talented and inspired content creators out there on the platform.
Can't agree with a word said here.
A lot of channels exist for profit rather than being a hobby
But if you can find the small channels then it’s still worth it. It doesn’t help that you spend more time telling it not to recommend things than actually watching what it recommends
Not sure how small/big of an audience he has but https://www.youtube.com/@ryukahr does great Super Mario Maker content. I only ever watch his videos on YouTube, and nothing else.
I'm not a fan of how little control there is over Shorts feeds and how they are set to repeat infinitely, but people are way too overly dramatic about Shorts. It seems like it's culture shock more than anything.
Yeah some people want to be annoyed :D
I just blocked then in Firefox and carried on
I Watch everything else through newpipe so I don't even bother:)
They are right that Shorts are harming YouTube, in the same way that Windows 8 harmed Windows.
YouTube and TikTok are different things. People go to TikTok for a specific thing, people go to YouTube for something else. And YouTube sees a bunch of people on TikTok, and says 'if that's what people want we should be the ones to give it to them'. But in doing so, they are ignoring the people who WANT YouTube and NOT TikTok, by making YouTube more like TikTok.
This is just like Windows 8. Microsoft saw a bunch of people ditching desktop PCs in favor of iPads, so they said 'let's make Windows more like an iPad'. Thus, Windows 8- only one app open at once, touch-focused interface that was frustrating with a mouse. It ignored the people who WANT Windows and NOT iPad, by making Windows more like iPad.
The simple fact is, Shorts are frustrating. The lack of a scrub bar and volume control are a big part of why I DON'T like TikTok, especially on PC. And seeing that same crappy format on the desktop YouTube web interface is a big turn off.
If there was an option to just 'never show me Shorts' I'd click it in a heartbeat.
There are much bigger problems with YouTube than Shorts though. One of the biggest is their content moderation. I get it, there's 50 hours of video uploaded every minute and you can't watch it all so you let automated system handle it. Problem is, people RELY on YouTube to make a living in many cases. And when some asshole can destroy their livelihood by filing a couple hundred obviously false bot reports, that makes creators think twice. Same thing when the policies you DO have seesaw between allowing some really offensive stuff, and persecuting types of content that people in California dislike.
What YT needs to do is rethink the whole way demonetizing works. Rather than being a single flag that instantly makes a video ineligible for monetization, they should have categories of advertisements. So that way if someone wants to post a video that has controversial themes like (for example) firearms or marijuana use, rather than being entirely demonetized, the video can show ads from gun companies or smoking supply companies. Advertisers could specify what sort of controversial content they are willing to be promoted alongside, so everybody could win.
Another huge problem is their awful 'engagement algorithm'. It seems expressly designed to make low quality content bubble to the top, while the really good stuff is harder and harder to find.
I really think shorts should have a separate recommendation algorithm. Cause the type of videos I watch are way different than the shorts I watch but now my feed is changing
Since they added it I've moved over to revanced which allows you to remove it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Senior YouTube staffers are reportedly worried that its TikTok competitor, Shorts, may eat away at its long-form content, which has for almost two decades been its primary bread and butter, according to The Financial Times.
As FT points out, YouTube’s ad revenue, though recently improved, had been on a downward year-over-year slide for three straight quarters.
YouTube is still figuring out how to reap more ad money from Shorts.
Its long-form content lets it show more ads per video, but as short-form content gradually takes over, content creators themselves are uploading fewer long videos, FT writes, citing YouTube staff fretting about internal figures.
Keeping up with that means adding features like AI summaries and NFL highlights, and even making compromises elsewhere in Google’s business to keep other industries happy and supportive of the service.
It also means investing in Shorts’ creators and incentivizing them to make exclusive content for YouTube’s service.
The original article contains 169 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 11%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
We can only hope
They're well on their way. I've gotten an extension to block them on desktop. I bet revanced can do it on mobile, too
Can confirm ReVanced can completely remove Shorts from all parts of the app, same with SmartTube on TV.
Dope, time to update revanced then
I ducking hate how they removed functionality from them. They don't show when they were posted, you can't speed them up or slow them down, they repeat forever which is annoying if your going through the comments, the buttons being on top of the video obscures it, I can't cast them to the TV from my phone (which is weird because it will play them if I select them directly from the TV app), it's just a terrible UX overall. I never swipe up and I'm starting to get annoyed with how cumbersome it is to exit out to watch regular videos once I've watched the short I clicked on. I really don't understand why YouTube wants to sacrifice everything that makes it great to be more like tiktok. If I wanted that format, I would go to tiktok.
I don't think it's going anywhere.
People get lost in shorts really quickly, especially on your phone. It's the algorithm being able to decide who you are and how to get engagement out of you at a much faster rate then regular videos.
Nobody asked for this, nobody wants it on youtube. But it keeps people on the platform longer and it feeds the algorithm fast. So it's not going anywhere
As right as they are, I still can't help but think "To be fair Youtube was ruined when you let Viacom write the playbook for it."
No way!
Not much left to ruin...
I enjoy YouTube Shorts a great deal. It could definitely be easier to curate your feed than it is, but I have a great deal of intractable pain at all times, and I like the fluffy format. It's easy to digest and understand and move on to the next one when my attention span is completely destroyed by the constant intense pain. Sometimes it's the only thing that gets me through the day.
As a fellow chronic pain sufferer, I sympathize. But the answer is not to make YouTube more like TikTok, it's for people like you to go to TikTok, which is already set up for viewing like that. The world is not built to cater to people like you and me. We're a minority and we need special care and we can't expect everyone else to accommodate that.
Tiktok doesn't have shorts from all my favorite channels though. Shorts is obviously supposed be YouTube's "answer" to Tiktok, but it's a different vibe, IMHO. I've tried to get into Tiktok and it just doesn't do it for me.
IMHO, I think they just need to add a toggle for shorts so that people can opt out (or in, whichever).
A toggle sounds fair.
Some creators have made mostly dusts and stopped making normal videos. I don’t watch sorts as they are too addicting.
YouTubers already become a steaming pile of shit, the shorts being pushed in your face constantly is just a symptom. Their algo, content and ads are just horrific. I used to surf YouTube a ton, now I only go when I'm looking for specific instructional type videos, maybe a review. Watch that and leave.
I think they are a great addition for the short 1 minute ideas some youtubers have that may as well be posted on their 2nd channel.
Imo it could be improved with a landscape option and longer than 1min vids.
Then in 10 years when some disrupting service releases “ephemeral” video clips that last <1 ms and get deleted; and YT implements it. The YT veteran staff of the future will think that is ruining YT shorts
Shorts are fine. Only minor complaint is that they lack descriptions and play like shit on desktop. Some of us like to browse YouTube on a computer on occasion...
There are only about 100 shorts in total on youtube, it seems. I would get 1-100 and even though I’ve disliked all of them, or clicked “don’t show me this channel again”, It will start back at #1 after I reach 100. It’s really, really bad, and most of the shorts videos are advice on how to start a powerwashing business.
what? that's not my experience with shorts at all. There are plenty of different shorts, and I have no repetition (aisde from the regular copycats). Maybe the algorithm is like "dont like what I'm giving you? well fuck you too" lol
Lots of people downvoting you apparently love censorship. Probably only when it censors things they don’t like, of course.
Facts
Sounds like old guys complaining about the new move their employer is making.
Sounds like the old guys at work questioning why the 70 year old CEO started dressing like a teenager, hanging out with young women, vaping, and driving a Subaru WRX to work.
This content is better suited to TikTok and YouTube meddling with stuff like this, especially with regards to their algorithm, has killed tons of valuable types of content in the past.
Why the fuck do people still put content on that shit platform? Stop complaint about it and just leave. This Stockholm relationship shit has been going on for years now. Just quit using it.
And go where?? Most of the platforms either
-Can't handle it
-Have no monetization plan for content creators
-Doesn't support streaming for streamers
-Just hasn't been hit yet by lawyers
Like the only platform even close to it is Twitch, which has it's own issues and doesn't want to host videos to the extent youtube does.
This isn't like Reddit or Twitter. The competitors aren't remotely close and in some cases don't even support the types of content Youtube does.
And go nowhere. If you have no other recourse but to post videoed on YouTube, re-evaluate your life. It’s no one’s only option. Either leave, or admit your Stockholm-like relationship, and learn to love your oppressor. Because its fucking annoying to hear people constantly complaining about their relationship while remaining in it.
So you don't care where it ends up, you're just whining about whiners.
Got it.
ROFL… sure. If you say so. I just think it’s hilarious to watch everyone bitch about a platform, and then keep using it.
Honestly, it’s the terrible content moderation policies that are going to kill YouTube, not a certain type of video.
Bingo. I don't find shorts all that appealing (especially since I can't cast them to a TV! Wtf, seems like core function there) but I agree, the REAL problem with YouTube is how much creators have to top toe around demonization.
"Demonetization" is just what YouTube's promises to advertisers look like when they affect video creators.
Money on YouTube flows from advertisers. The revenue from charging advertisers to show ads is split between YouTube/Google and the video creator. If your video is not shown with ads, then there is no revenue to split.
YouTube gives advertisers a very small control over what videos their ads are shown on. They have a few different classifications of videos, and advertisers can choose which ones they want to be seen with. Advertisers are paying for the service of YouTube putting their ads on videos — but only the videos that YouTube thinks the advertiser does want to be seen with.
If your video is fully "demonetized", that means YouTube has decided that no advertisers want to be seen with it; or that they are not willing to take revenue from showing ads on that video. But they're still hosting it, making it available to viewers.
Video creators' revenue is a share of the ad income from YouTube showing the video (and accompanying ads). A "demonetized" video is one that doesn't show any ads — so there is no revenue to split. It's not that YouTube is taking all the revenue and leaving none to the video creator. They're not making any, because they don't think the advertisers would be okay with being charged to be seen alongside that video.
However, the creator of a "demonetized" video is still receiving value from YouTube. It is not free to host that video — especially if it is popular. Network bandwidth, data storage, and transcoding of video for viewers' browsers are not free; YouTube covers the cost of these. YouTube is willing to host a lot of videos that they make zero money from, at their expense, rather than censoring those videos by taking them down.
That's just not true...they're hosting it because they data-farm the living shit out of both the creator and anyone that gets tangentially close to their site. More content = more people visit = more data on these people = more money...They make a lot of money on this data, even if no ads are shown on a video, and are by no means doing it out of the goodness of their heart.
Yeah, but they aren't making nearly the amount of money on the video as they would with the ads, and no where near enough to compensate the creators beyond free hosting.
You can still publish demonetized content, just don't expect to make money from it on YouTube.
They use that data to sell ads at you across the entire internet. Google is making plenty of cash off those “demonitized” videos.
I didn't say it's charity. I said the video creator (who wants people to see their video) is receiving a service from the video host for no charge, which otherwise the creator would have to pay for. Hosting your own video on your own storage and network bill is not free. If you don't believe me, go try doing it yourself.
If the creator didn't think they were receiving any benefit, they would just take that video down. They sometimes do, but usually they don't.
Publishing a book costs money. Someone has to buy the paper from the paper makers, and the ink from the ink makers. Someone has to line up the print on the page. Those people have to get paid, so they can go buy a sandwich and pay their rent. So, publishers exercise some judgment in not printing books that they don't expect to sell, because they've gotta pay their bills, including parts and labor.
Same goes for video. Hosting a video costs money. Servers cost money. Power costs money. Network connectivity costs money. The people who run those services need to get paid so they can buy a sandwich and pay their rent. If YouTube is hosting your video, even if they're not paying you a share of any ad revenue (because they're not getting any), they're paying bills that otherwise you would have to pay.
I'm not saying you've gotta be grateful or something. I'm saying if you want to understand what's going on in the world, you can't do that without understanding the actual bills that people are actually paying.
To put it simply: The hosting costs of demonetized videos are paid for by the hosting of monetized videos.
Don't believe me? Take your video and store it on a server that you pay for, with network connectivity you pay for. That's a thing you can do. You can even do it with Fediverse technology. However, it will in fact cost you some amount of money.
I know this is true but why do I see so many people on lemmy pushing for self-hosting and even talking about it like its some low rent hobby?
It's not exactly an expensive hobby, but it's also not free.
YouTube hosts a lot of videos.
And — by the fundamental theorem of financial calculus that I just made up — "not free" times "a lot" equals "big bucks".
Finally, someone who gets my idea of math.
they're all paying the bills by hawking raid shadow legends anyways, may as well not rely on youtube monetization anyways and host elsewhere
Case in point, when youtube buried one of Caitlin Doughty's documentaries from Ask a Mortician.
The video in question: The Forgotten Disaster of the SS Eastland. It's 43 minutes long, both well done, and respectfully done. Her team did a good job on it then some youtube automated system buried it for "violating community guidelines".
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=cN5hNzVqkOk
https://piped.video/watch?v=UCHt2MOVCbg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I'm not even sure it is bad policies. I am pretty sure that they just don't have moderators.
I doubt anyone reads 99.9% of reports.
So you get bigotry and hate, you get insane and deadly DIYs, you get 12yo girls being creeped while posting random 5s clips from their lives.
Not to mention just the vast amount of extraordinarily low-quality content YouTube serves up. It's amazing how bad a lot of the videos it thinks you will like are. The algorithm makes no sense.
But hey, here's 16 different Joe Rogan clips with sigma male music in the background.
The algorithm seems like it is optimized for profit, not for actually being a good platform.
That should mean engagement. It serves up such bad videos that I disengage.
Once in a while I'll realize I just spent 20, 30 minutes looking at a streak of pretty decent stuff. Rare enough to be remarkable. Usually after just 3 or 4 consecutive crap clips I'll close it down and get back to work.
I doubt anything disengages a user faster than low-quality content. I bet it does it even faster than the authoritarian politics and bigotry YouTube seems to inexorable serve you.
If that were true, it wouldn't be the way it is.
Just because it causes your disengagement, doesn't mean it causes disengagement with the vast majority of their userbase.
They're also more concerned with ad views and clicks, so if you're not the kind of person who gives a crap about ads... they don't really care that much about you.
This is predicated on the belief that Google/YouTube is run in a 100% hyper-competent way. I don't buy that.
Google does things the easiest way possible to make tons of money. They make unforced errors all the damn time.
They don't have to be 100% competent, but they are very competent at what they want to do... which is monetize the technologies and services they provide. They're not trying to make something that people can use well and enjoy... they're making things to make a shit-ton of money. The two goals are not generally mutually inclusive.
Yours, on the other hand, is predicated on the belief that they're all super-incompetent and have no capability of doing anything right ever... which is confusing considering they're a multi-billion dollar company and not just some guy in a shack banging rocks together to see how they sound.
Nope. It's only this specific thing that I necessarily think they're doing a bad job of. And I'm right; they are. Their algorithm is a struggling baby compared to TikTok and YouTube at large is not a major profit center (and indeed may not be profitable at all -- but they maintain it because abandoning it would be too costly for them).
TikTok is so good at doing this thing that it is a profitable business for them. YouTube is struggling, and we can clearly see why.
What specific thing? The entirety of YouTube? Just the algorithm? Either way their algorithm may not be designed to do promote videos you want to watch, in reality it’s most likely designed to promote stuff that will draw them the most ad revenue and not promote really good stuff all the time. If your content is always great people will expect that and there will never be a great video, on the contrary if there is a great video among mediocre ones at best people will engage more in those (especially if they are longer and even if they have more ads), and additionally will engage more in your platform. This means that even if they aren’t making as much per video they are still making more in the long-term. And that’s really all they care about, your experience means nothing to them.
This is a thread about YouTube shorts and its bad algorithm, dude.
What’s a YouTube short?
The literal subject of this thread.
You're in here arguing with people without even reading the headline of the article.
The terrible content moderation policies are what keep it alive. No one subscribes to youtube so it's primary customers are the ad agencies. And they want content moderation
This Shorts issue seems to have measurable, constant and immediate effect in ad revenue and therefore platform profitability. Bad content moderation may or may not decrease engagement but in the end Google is a commercial enterprise that's looking at the numbers at hand.
Not just terrible, but incredibly hypocritical.
Might? It already has.
If shorts were simply a separate section of YouTube with all of its functionality, then that's understandable. But as they stand, shorts are just YouTube with both reduced functionality (forced vertical aspect ratio, no seek bar, time limit) AND all of the existing flaws (bad recommendation algorithm, reposted content, etc. )
Unless you are some kind of tech contrarian hipster, I don't think there is one thing that YouTube shorts does better than TikTok, or heck, Instagram Reels.
I really don't understand who thought that removing the seek bar from a video player was a good idea...
It's actually there on mobile, just hidden.
I only tried it on desktop. There's a tiny progress bar at the bottom, but you can't interact with it.
Even TikTok has a seek bar and has for a long time.
I use it all time. What are you talking about?
It technically has a seekbar, but it's very hard to find and/or might be obscured by their capricious A/B randomized testing
I have a seek bar, is it because I'm using Revanced? I just that ot was there
Pretty sure that's one of the Revanced patches.
I use the regular app and the seekbar was always available for me.
Hmm. Guess I was wrong about that then.
Nope, official app has a seek bar on the bottom (I was using vanced before but had to reset my password which reset the login cookie and I am not trying to delete my downloads of years by trying to sign back in)
P.S. I have too many downloads, so if anyone has a method to extract them, I'll be thankful.
I'm mostly fine with shorts, except for two things:
You can't move around in them, it's either play or pause and repeat, which sucks (as shorts don't have to be short..)
On the homepage it doesn't show who the short is from (which channel) without opening them
You also can't adjust the volume in browser. You have to go to a normal video, change it, and then go back.
!assholedesign@lemmy.ml
Install Better YouTube Shorts. You can thank me later.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-youtube-shorts/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/better-youtube-shorts/pehohlhkhbcfdneocgnfbnilppmfncdg
Just use the system audio control?
But why do I have to do that when every other video player has a volume slider?
On the contrary, why bother hunting the down the slider for every different player when you could just use the system?
Just curious, since I use the youtube slider like once a month.
I’m not the guy you asked, but I assume they do as I do. My system volume is calibrated for all the various applications I use day to day, including video conferencing. If I have to adjust that, it means everything else is the wrong volume. I’d rather modify YouTube to be the right volume than everything else.
This. My system volume is calibrated to be similar across all applications, games, etc. This means all apps are individually adjusted to reach similar volume level. Why should I have to mess with all of my other volumes just random manager at Youtube decided a volume slider on shorts isn't necessary despite the site still using volume from regular videos where it can be adjusted? This isn't an issue with any other app or platform. Maybe the last Youtube video I watched had overly quiet or loud audio compared to the norm and I either have insanely loud audio or I can't hear a damned thing and I can't fix it quickly like on any other Youtube page.
Not everyone had a set of dedicated volume buttons, or wheel, etc. on their keyboard, so having to go into Windows settings or reach for a knob or button on the speakers themselves to adjust is a lot more than getting a slider like every other website in the world gives you.
Oddly enough, this seems to be a desktop limitation. I can scrub backwards and forwards just fine on my phone.
Hopefully desktop PC hardware will become powerful enough to gain the ability to skip around in 30 second videos someday. I think I read that they expect them to be at parity with smartphone hardware in the next decade or two.
They don't even need a seek bar, just support arrow keys
It's also annoying that you can't save them without using the hack where you change the URL.
You can scrub around in them. Look for the red bar on the bottom after the short starts. You can tap and drag on it and a little red circle will appear that will show briefly after you release.
You can move around in them. Atleast on Android, there is a hidden red bar at the bottom which becomes visible if you pause the video.
This is a problem with all of these Tik Tok clones (and even Tik Tok let’s you do it for some videos). It’d so annoying to be watching a 45 second reel but if I miss something, I have to watch the whole thing again
I have the exact opposite problem? I can skip around just fine in shorts, but can't in reels... Is this due to A/B testing or am I dumb?
I simply prefer TikTok for short form videos due to unique community and reasonably entertaining algorithm.
I enjoy YouTube to the point of paying for Premium but I hate that my YouTube subscriptions feed on TV is littered with shorts that I have no way of disabling other than hiding them one by one (which I do to make a point).
Suits at Google will try to shove it into everyone's throats until they get bored and someone adds it to killedbygoogle.com so why would anyone even bother with it.
This is why I use LibreTube. It just filters all the Shorts
I'm deep in Apple ecosystem and unfortunately this is not an option on Apple TV as far as I know.
You should consider leaving.
In case of Apple TV, it's the smoothest TV software experience, leaps and bounds above any ad-ridden smart TV or aging Nvidia Shield. I used Android TV and it's just jank. For a time I had HTPC with Kodi too, it's been relegated to hosting Plex and downloading stuff from Usenet. I enjoyed freedom to install anything but ultimately this didn't outweight better audio codec support on Apple TV.
Oh the irony...
Not sure what you're making a stab at.
Apple software is obviously ad free and I have no problem with paying for YouTube Premium due to value it provides. Some good soul on Lemmy also recommended me a way to block sponsored content via isponsorblocktv which is a script that runs on my server and skips sponsored segments by reading YouTube app state and sending fast forward commands like a remote would.
The fact that you're calling Android "ad-ridden" (which it's not) in a conversation about how you can't remove ads on Apple devices.
I called smart TVs ad-ridden, might have been bad wording on my part.
It's amazing how much social credit you possibly have. Xi Jinping is proud of you.
Are you alright there mate?
What if we fucked over all of the people that like our website to try and cater to people that don't like it?
Seems to be the current trend in social media this year...
This is to perfectly put.
Mind you those are (at least some of) the guys that killed animation and comedy sketches on youtube because they made it necessary for videos to be 10+ minutes long to be relevant.
Which I get a laugh out of, because in the early days youtube would not let you post any video longer than 10 minutes, unless you were a "special" approved account. Now, only 10+ minute videos matter. A complete about face.
Using revanced. Disabled shorts. Watching these YT shorts & recommendations decays my brain cells
I blocked shorts with ublock origin.
Ive used blocktube.
It can also prevent auto pause. Hide the movies you can rent, hide specific channels, or videos with specific words in their title, etc
Advertising ruined YouTube years ago.
YouTube ruined YouTube
I swear to god these dumb social media sites are going to hell faster every day.
I used to like YouTube because I could watch all sorts of interesting things ... funny things ... informative things ... things actually liked
Now my main YouTube recommended feed is filled with clickbait thumbnails of idiots making surprised or shocked faces to try to get your attention to get you to look at their dumb video of nonsense that has zero information and is not entertaining at all.
My take's always been Monetization ruined YouTube.
Because if theres money to be made then theres a few million idiots that are happy to exploit the fuck out of the system and do essentially fuck all to earn cash.
But without money, the platform would have sunk.
It's a harsh reality that all brilliant internet things have to face.
And i hate it.
Google ruined YouTube years ago.
I don't mind grabbing my pitchfork and joining the "YouTube is already ruined party", but two thoughts first:
That headline is so deliberately vague. It could literally be one employee who said "eh, I don't think YouTube shorts is a good idea".
The article itself doesn't really give you any information that isn't in the headline. It feels like an attempt to stoke anti-YouTube sentiment without providing any useful information.
...okay, with that out of the way...
Yeah, the current YouTube situation is pretty crap.
Yeah honestly these are some great points, and really it's one of these reasons as to why I just dislike modern journalism today with the headlines as such.
It does cite internal metrics on ad revenues going down for three consecutive quarters due to lower potential to show ads in short videos compared to longer ones. It's anonymous and doesn't give solid figures but that's what this article is about.
You should be able to remove Shorts from your feed. I never watch them and yet they fill my feed up making it jore difficult to find real content. I'm specifically talking about the smart TV app which throws them all in together.
I'm using some custom ublock origin filters that I found somewhere to block shorts across all of youtube:
Also separately, for blocking videos that don't exist yet, which I also dislike:
He's talking about smart tv app. If those "shorts" are being pulled from some other subdomain then perhaps a block rule on that domain set on the router would help. But best just not to use youtube.
I'm pretty sure shorts are just Youtube videos but with a different UI.
You can take the video ID from the URL of a Shorts clip and put it in a normal Youtube URL and the shorts video plays with the normal Youtube player.
Basically.
I don't know what I would do with this. And I mentioned to someone else that I mostly watch YT on a Shield. Is this even relevant to me?
Surprising no one jumped onto you with thw revanced suggestions.
SmartTubeNext is what you want on TV platforms. You can turn shorts off. It blocks ads. And it has sponsorblock so it is configurable to additionally skip sponsor segments, self-promotion, intros, outros.
And as others have pointed out, you can also block them in browser with Ublock Origins and with Revanced which covers the desktop and mobile platforms.
What I want is a YouTube viewer that cuts out ads that I can use on my Mac or my iPhone to use on my TV with a Chromecast.
Chromecast is how I view all my TV content.
You'll have to take that up with Apple. They're the ones dictating that you can't use any of the wonderful apps we have on Android.
As for Chromecast, SmartTube Next is what you want
Check out https://ghcr.io/nichobi/sponsorblockcast - run it on your LAN, and it’ll use SponsorBlock to clean up any YouTube-Chromecast stream you want.
Thanks!
And of course the thing I mentioned has now been superseded by https://github.com/gabe565/CastSponsorSkip
I might have to look into that. I do wonder how it could know when a segment is sponsored.
I don't care that much about the ads since we already have Premium so we don't see the ads anyways.
It's crowdsourced and works quite well, been using it for the last year.
Thanks for the heads up
Premium doesn't skip the ads in the videos
That's what 2X speed is for.
Well this is a passive function.
As a viewer I agree with their assessment.
Shorts is (for me) a worse viewing experience and it's just more useless junk tha clutter up my youtube main page.
That's why I have a Firefox extension that automatically redirects from shorts. Although, if Google's new Web Environment Integrity goes through I guess I could kiss stuff like that goodbye.
Yeah I usually watch YouTube on my shield and it clutters up every channel with junk I have no desire to watch.
I don't disagree but there are some channels that do great shorts. For example check out squat university shorts.
Guys, I think I found The Algorithm's Lemmy account!!!
God I hate shorts. Luckily you can disable them. But youtube is so riddled with ads in general, it makes watching without adblock impossible. If they'd go back to one 3 second ad at the very beginning, I might even tolerate it. But the current shitshow? Not on my system.
Doesn't help that they have a whooping 113 trackers running simultaneously.
Wait how do you disable shorts this is the first I'm hearing of this
with uBlock Origin, right click on the shorts area > click on ublock's "Block element" > select the Shorts section > Block
Blocking with uBlock really isn't the same as disabling. Disabling implies you're using the app and it's a setting.
You can disable them in Vanced and Revanced. NewPipe either disables them by default or doesn't even support them, which is fine with me.
None of those apps are the original and official app. Which is pretty obviously what this was about. I used to use Vanced and it never worked as easily as everyone seems to imply, and I never could get it to cast. Vanced is no longer available on the PlayStore btw, and the same can be expected for every app that tries to offer YouTube content, modified.
Right, well, it seems like you don't want solutions and would rather just whine about something.
Modded apps and extensions. Revanced, Smarttubenext, shortsblock, etc.
I target the Shorts container row element with uBlock, so it's removed permanently from the grid.
Details please!
YouTube shorts was the dumbest fucking idea. They have a niche: long-form (as in >1min) video content. They are dominant in that niche. Then they saw TikTok was popular and dominating the short-form video scene, and their response was... "we should switch to making more short form". WTF?! And on top of that, they've diverted resources away from their main product (longer videos) as the article says. It just seems like such a catastrophic unforced error.
YouTube have such a stranglehold on the >1m market, that's why they can afford to stagnate in that area and look into other markets. They don't have to fear a competitor threatening their core market any time soon.
not only is the shorts UI shitty but the shorts themselves are often shitty imo, or at least the "scroll through shorts one at a time" linear format means you see a lot more videos you wouldn't click on intentionally.
"No YouTube I do not want to watch Jordon Fucking Peterson. I will NEVER want that. Fuck all the way off."
I stopped watching shorts because of the unwanted boosts of fascist content.
Silver lining: It gave me the opportunity to "dislike" Jordan Peterson, which was not an opportunity I previously had.
I mean, I guess I always HAD the option, but there's something to be said about having somebody serve it up on a platter like that.
Hey, boosts engagement, he's happy all the same.
I watch shorts but I never swipe up. I pick which ones I want to watch.
I hate that I get such random shit in my feed when I really only look at art videos - like my scrolling should be nothing but people drawing but random shit like slime videos or some ass hat and his kid.
Yeah YouTube really likes to inject videos you wouldn't normally watch into your algorithm. It's pretty annoying. I would never seek out religious videos, and never have on YouTube, yet they keep making their way into my feed. Even voting them down doesn't seem to change the frequency.
For real. I've never searched a prank video in my life but they come up during shorts.
The interface isn't consistent between videos and shorts.
You can rewind and fast forward videos on phones by double tapping the left or right hand side of the video, but doing that on shorts just likes it.
I literally could not understand what half the ones I saw were even supposed to be about last time I went on YouTube. Like they were just random people doing shit with no punchline or point.
might? Shorts are the main reason I found alternatives like Freetube, Newpipe and Invidious; and continue to look for actual alternative platforms.
if there was just a checkbox to turn them off forever I'd probably still be on the mainpage.
Might ruin YouTube? Brother. It's already ruined.
having no proper competitor is the only thing that's still keeping youtube on the boat.
Shorts also cannot be cast from a mobile device. If I'm going through my curated channels while casting, the app give an error and requires me to stop casting before I can watch the short. I just skip it and don't bother anymore.
Yeah, most of the youtube I watch is cast to the chromecast of whatever room I'm in. I can't add shorts to the queue, so I just skip them.
I wish I could watch shorts from only my subscribed channels.
This isn't a bad format inherently, it's just being abused. I like seeing short Blender clips, or short guitar tutorial on a riff, or stand up bits that sit well within the time frame.
In the app, you can just open your subscription tab and click on the Shorts section. That way you'll only see Shorts only from your subscribed channels.
I my shorts feed is now only shows content from standup comedians. I discovered several that I really like Troy Bond, that guy is hilarious and just started doing comedy since COVID. If there's no Shorts I might not discover him.
Yeah it's great for comedy, I've found a lot of really funny content I wouldn't have found otherwise.
You can watch the shorts for just one channel. But yeah it's algorithm sludge
I like and hate their shorts page. I like the fast pace consumption of good content but half of it is rage bait, onlyfans bait, low effort content theft, and people acting obnoxious for attention. I wish I had more control over what shows in shorts because the don't recommend button doesn't seem to do anything.
Shorts suggestions are based on what you watch. If you spend less time watching rage/OF bait shorts or just scroll past them, they will show you less of these. 95% of my shorts scrollpage is from creators and topics that I'm interested in.
Soo looks like you just like to watch this type of content if this is what the app is serving you.
I don't like blaming the user, but I can confirm I only get shorts from creators I follow but then I also don't tiktok scroll once I open a short, I will see a short on my home screen open it and then back out and watch the other one in the side scrolling list if it interests me
my feed should be all art videos then but its not. They throw in shit that I never look at.
Instagram reels never does this to me btw. I never really stray from watching speed paints/drawing tutorials/artist reels so that's what I see.
I know how it works and I'm saying it doesn't work good enough. It shows things I like and subscribed to but it also shows me things I don't want to see more often than I expect.
The terrible content moderation policies and adblock bans will ruin it long before shorts.
Shorts are far from being the biggest problem, the ads are much much worse.
YouTube ads are so mild compared to other free content platforms though, even some paid services tbh.
Where have you seen ads worse than YouTube?
In freemium mobile games
Cable TV has crazy long adverts about mesothelioma, the radio has big long ad breaks with police car sirens and nonsence in, have you been on a news site recently? It's hard up find the story there are so many auto playing adverts and banners.
I think even twitch is worse, they randomly throw thirty seconds adverts up over the top of content so one moment you're watching the key moment of a vital battle and the next you're pulling your hair out while watching chat say 'oh wow that was the funniest thing ever!'
What acceptable quality free content provider has less obnoxious ads? You can even skip most the YouTube ones after five seconds.
If we are starting to compare YouTube with TV and Radio ads, it's a sign of how much worse it's getting. A lot of people started got into the habit of watching YouTube because they were sick of TV ads.
The problem here is, just as it happened with TV itself, as the executives want ever growing profits over a saturated market, they add more and more ads. It used to be even Cable TV was sold with the promise of no ads, and so were streaming services. I remember when YouTube had 5 seconds of ads every hour. Now it's pushing for two 7 second ads every 10 minutes, that is, when they don't put longer unskippable ads there too. Wasn't it enough to pay for the service before? Ads keep getting longer all the time, while our lives only get shorter.
Tubi is remarkable good about ads. Long watch times between ads.
Hulu
And what's worse about Hulu is you pay to see those ads.
I don't really understand the point of shorts (aside from trying to compete with TikTok). It's an arbitrary limitation of video runtime and locked to a phone screen resolution. So dumb.
And how many Youtube-based creators have adapted them SO FUCKING POORLY. The worst I've seen is the Modern Rogue, who have chopped their existing library into like ten thousand shorts. It made being a subscriber to their channel fucking useless because you'd get small snippets of content you'd already seen just shuffled up and out of context. It was especially bad before Youtube separated them into their own tab. Many others just use it as a "dump this tiktok to Youtube as well" place.
I like them for speed painting/drawing
Shorts: just a normal YouTube video but it's too short to be useful, and most useful functionality had been removed.you can't skip ahead or go back if you didn't hear something, you just have to watch it again and again.
Shorts is something a manager came up with. It doesn't make it better, it makes it worse, but it also attracts more views, so profit!
The article indicated that, apparently, Shorts is even more unprofitable than regular YouTube. So they don't even have that going for them
I figured they were just ripping off tiktok seems to be the same kind of shit.
Every time I see the little "new content" blip next to someone I've subscribed to and it ends up being a short, I feel cheated.
yes i started unsubscribing some of the channels who publish daily shorts
Bit fuckin late now isn't it, I can't even open the mobile app without being forced to watch a wish version of tiktok.
Use Newpipe duh
I'm making my way there, I'm using revanced atm.
Or LibreTube
Am I just using the wrong instance or is LibreTube super slow to load videos compared to for example Vanced? I'm otherwise loving it, but the load times got so bad I couldn't take it any more..
It is slow. I think it depends on the instance, but sometimes it just flatout doesn't work at all for me.
Just gotta look for instances and hope one of them works well. Generally I've never run into a situation where no instances work.
Ah ok, I'll do that then. Thanks for the helpful advice 🙂
I really wish they would make it it's own thing and separate it from youtube.
I really wish they'd just kill it. We already have one tiktok, which is already one too many
I don't bemoan google wanting to compete, I just want to see it as a separate product from YouTube.
Shorts suck mainly because you can't cast them.
What good is a Chromecast where I watch long form, see short form I want to watch while browsing, can't cast it without disconnecting from the chrome cast.
Right omg the queue + cast feature is the killer app. Let me queue some shorts in between longer videos.
I wouldn't know, I have an extensive set of modification over youtube that, among other thing, completely remove them from existence. Now if only I could do the same with the bad automatic translations…
It seems every new feature of youtube is something we have to fight against.
Tech has just reached the maturation point.
As with every industry, there's a point where there's enough growth for a win-win for the company and consumers, so consumers benefit with new features; once that dries up the company starts squeezing, so consumers endure new features and use the product despite the changes.
shorts dont have 30 second ads at the beginning of them, unlike the less than 10 second videos i attempt to watch
who tf goes online without blocking ads
BigBananaDealer
I hate them, but this is kinda late...
If we could only decide WHICH channels we want - let the people who want shorts have it, shitty as it is. Just let me turn it off (and games, film and music while we’re at it).
I never used them. I never will use them. They are just in the way and keep me praying for a YT alternative.
Get some New Pipes
Looks nice, but I’m on different platform.
It's a different youtube front end I believe
There's just something off about watching shorts and tiktok, if I use it for too long it feels like my head is going to explode. There's some great content there for things I'm interested in, like quick tips for software that I use, but if I watch 5 of those in a row I'm not going to remember anything. All in all I think the format, and regular youtube, would work a lot better if they didn't push so hard to get me to just sit there for hours on end.
Advertisers are also starting to realize this, and are paying less and less for TikTok. If people don't remember the comment they're actively looking for in 5 minutes, they definitely aren't going to remember the ad.
What the format is good for is reaching new subscribers, which actually makes YouTube's approach interesting because it can pull people to the longer content.
But then they go and down the "subscribed" page in shorts, completely nuking the idea.
In the experience of many youtubers, the shorts audience and long format audience is 2 distinctly different groups with almost no overlap.
Shorts may drive subscriptions, but it doesn't significantly translate to more views or watch time on normal videos.
Wasn't that one of the storylines from Max Hradroom? An extremely short ad format was invented (Blipverts) that literally made people's heads explode.
Perhaps it's a little too late for YouTube to ride this trend. TikTok is even pivoting to long videos, as they know where the money is.
If they forced livestreams in your face like they do shorts maybe people would actually watch their content
They're pushing it way too hard, just like the google+ shit back in the day but even more in your face. Stinks strongly of "we have tiktok at home"
Youtube just stopped being useful. Now it's all republished TV and no personal expression. Totally boring.
God damn, have you tried looking for crap that is not just the front page of YouTube not signed in? There are endless streams of amazing content that is incredibly educational or hilarious or mind blowing if you know where to look. People making new music of all different genres with insane levels of skill, people literally sharing PhD level knowledge for free. There are plenty of valid criticisms of YouTube as a platform, and there is certainly some crap content out there, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are tons of incredibly talented and inspired content creators out there on the platform.
Can't agree with a word said here.
A lot of channels exist for profit rather than being a hobby
But if you can find the small channels then it’s still worth it. It doesn’t help that you spend more time telling it not to recommend things than actually watching what it recommends
Not sure how small/big of an audience he has but https://www.youtube.com/@ryukahr does great Super Mario Maker content. I only ever watch his videos on YouTube, and nothing else.
I'm not a fan of how little control there is over Shorts feeds and how they are set to repeat infinitely, but people are way too overly dramatic about Shorts. It seems like it's culture shock more than anything.
Yeah some people want to be annoyed :D
I just blocked then in Firefox and carried on I Watch everything else through newpipe so I don't even bother:)
They are right that Shorts are harming YouTube, in the same way that Windows 8 harmed Windows.
YouTube and TikTok are different things. People go to TikTok for a specific thing, people go to YouTube for something else. And YouTube sees a bunch of people on TikTok, and says 'if that's what people want we should be the ones to give it to them'. But in doing so, they are ignoring the people who WANT YouTube and NOT TikTok, by making YouTube more like TikTok.
This is just like Windows 8. Microsoft saw a bunch of people ditching desktop PCs in favor of iPads, so they said 'let's make Windows more like an iPad'. Thus, Windows 8- only one app open at once, touch-focused interface that was frustrating with a mouse. It ignored the people who WANT Windows and NOT iPad, by making Windows more like iPad.
The simple fact is, Shorts are frustrating. The lack of a scrub bar and volume control are a big part of why I DON'T like TikTok, especially on PC. And seeing that same crappy format on the desktop YouTube web interface is a big turn off.
If there was an option to just 'never show me Shorts' I'd click it in a heartbeat.
There are much bigger problems with YouTube than Shorts though. One of the biggest is their content moderation. I get it, there's 50 hours of video uploaded every minute and you can't watch it all so you let automated system handle it. Problem is, people RELY on YouTube to make a living in many cases. And when some asshole can destroy their livelihood by filing a couple hundred obviously false bot reports, that makes creators think twice. Same thing when the policies you DO have seesaw between allowing some really offensive stuff, and persecuting types of content that people in California dislike.
What YT needs to do is rethink the whole way demonetizing works. Rather than being a single flag that instantly makes a video ineligible for monetization, they should have categories of advertisements. So that way if someone wants to post a video that has controversial themes like (for example) firearms or marijuana use, rather than being entirely demonetized, the video can show ads from gun companies or smoking supply companies. Advertisers could specify what sort of controversial content they are willing to be promoted alongside, so everybody could win.
Another huge problem is their awful 'engagement algorithm'. It seems expressly designed to make low quality content bubble to the top, while the really good stuff is harder and harder to find.
I really think shorts should have a separate recommendation algorithm. Cause the type of videos I watch are way different than the shorts I watch but now my feed is changing
Since they added it I've moved over to revanced which allows you to remove it.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Senior YouTube staffers are reportedly worried that its TikTok competitor, Shorts, may eat away at its long-form content, which has for almost two decades been its primary bread and butter, according to The Financial Times.
As FT points out, YouTube’s ad revenue, though recently improved, had been on a downward year-over-year slide for three straight quarters.
YouTube is still figuring out how to reap more ad money from Shorts.
Its long-form content lets it show more ads per video, but as short-form content gradually takes over, content creators themselves are uploading fewer long videos, FT writes, citing YouTube staff fretting about internal figures.
Keeping up with that means adding features like AI summaries and NFL highlights, and even making compromises elsewhere in Google’s business to keep other industries happy and supportive of the service.
It also means investing in Shorts’ creators and incentivizing them to make exclusive content for YouTube’s service.
The original article contains 169 words, the summary contains 151 words. Saved 11%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
We can only hope
They're well on their way. I've gotten an extension to block them on desktop. I bet revanced can do it on mobile, too
Can confirm ReVanced can completely remove Shorts from all parts of the app, same with SmartTube on TV.
Dope, time to update revanced then
I ducking hate how they removed functionality from them. They don't show when they were posted, you can't speed them up or slow them down, they repeat forever which is annoying if your going through the comments, the buttons being on top of the video obscures it, I can't cast them to the TV from my phone (which is weird because it will play them if I select them directly from the TV app), it's just a terrible UX overall. I never swipe up and I'm starting to get annoyed with how cumbersome it is to exit out to watch regular videos once I've watched the short I clicked on. I really don't understand why YouTube wants to sacrifice everything that makes it great to be more like tiktok. If I wanted that format, I would go to tiktok.
I don't think it's going anywhere. People get lost in shorts really quickly, especially on your phone. It's the algorithm being able to decide who you are and how to get engagement out of you at a much faster rate then regular videos.
Nobody asked for this, nobody wants it on youtube. But it keeps people on the platform longer and it feeds the algorithm fast. So it's not going anywhere
As right as they are, I still can't help but think "To be fair Youtube was ruined when you let Viacom write the playbook for it."
No way!
Not much left to ruin...
I enjoy YouTube Shorts a great deal. It could definitely be easier to curate your feed than it is, but I have a great deal of intractable pain at all times, and I like the fluffy format. It's easy to digest and understand and move on to the next one when my attention span is completely destroyed by the constant intense pain. Sometimes it's the only thing that gets me through the day.
As a fellow chronic pain sufferer, I sympathize. But the answer is not to make YouTube more like TikTok, it's for people like you to go to TikTok, which is already set up for viewing like that. The world is not built to cater to people like you and me. We're a minority and we need special care and we can't expect everyone else to accommodate that.
Tiktok doesn't have shorts from all my favorite channels though. Shorts is obviously supposed be YouTube's "answer" to Tiktok, but it's a different vibe, IMHO. I've tried to get into Tiktok and it just doesn't do it for me.
IMHO, I think they just need to add a toggle for shorts so that people can opt out (or in, whichever).
A toggle sounds fair.
Some creators have made mostly dusts and stopped making normal videos. I don’t watch sorts as they are too addicting.
YouTubers already become a steaming pile of shit, the shorts being pushed in your face constantly is just a symptom. Their algo, content and ads are just horrific. I used to surf YouTube a ton, now I only go when I'm looking for specific instructional type videos, maybe a review. Watch that and leave.
I think they are a great addition for the short 1 minute ideas some youtubers have that may as well be posted on their 2nd channel.
Imo it could be improved with a landscape option and longer than 1min vids.
Then in 10 years when some disrupting service releases “ephemeral” video clips that last <1 ms and get deleted; and YT implements it. The YT veteran staff of the future will think that is ruining YT shorts
Shorts are fine. Only minor complaint is that they lack descriptions and play like shit on desktop. Some of us like to browse YouTube on a computer on occasion...
There are only about 100 shorts in total on youtube, it seems. I would get 1-100 and even though I’ve disliked all of them, or clicked “don’t show me this channel again”, It will start back at #1 after I reach 100. It’s really, really bad, and most of the shorts videos are advice on how to start a powerwashing business.
what? that's not my experience with shorts at all. There are plenty of different shorts, and I have no repetition (aisde from the regular copycats). Maybe the algorithm is like "dont like what I'm giving you? well fuck you too" lol
YouTube ruined itself with censorship.
Lots of people downvoting you apparently love censorship. Probably only when it censors things they don’t like, of course.
Facts
Sounds like old guys complaining about the new move their employer is making.
Sounds like the old guys at work questioning why the 70 year old CEO started dressing like a teenager, hanging out with young women, vaping, and driving a Subaru WRX to work.
This content is better suited to TikTok and YouTube meddling with stuff like this, especially with regards to their algorithm, has killed tons of valuable types of content in the past.
Why the fuck do people still put content on that shit platform? Stop complaint about it and just leave. This Stockholm relationship shit has been going on for years now. Just quit using it.
And go where?? Most of the platforms either
-Can't handle it
-Have no monetization plan for content creators
-Doesn't support streaming for streamers
-Just hasn't been hit yet by lawyers
Like the only platform even close to it is Twitch, which has it's own issues and doesn't want to host videos to the extent youtube does.
This isn't like Reddit or Twitter. The competitors aren't remotely close and in some cases don't even support the types of content Youtube does.
And go nowhere. If you have no other recourse but to post videoed on YouTube, re-evaluate your life. It’s no one’s only option. Either leave, or admit your Stockholm-like relationship, and learn to love your oppressor. Because its fucking annoying to hear people constantly complaining about their relationship while remaining in it.
So you don't care where it ends up, you're just whining about whiners.
Got it.
ROFL… sure. If you say so. I just think it’s hilarious to watch everyone bitch about a platform, and then keep using it.