Focustube: a Chrome Extension That Hides Youtube Shorts

i can imagine the smug face on some manager at google that gets himself off to engagement metrics at night because his life is so miserable. i wish these people could be named and shamed, but they hide behind a faceless corporation

https://scrollguard.app/

I’m a Premium subscriber as well. In theory, they have nothing to gain from pushing shorts on me or increasing my engagement. It should be all about making the user happy. Yet paying users seem to have to deal with these decisions that are driven by ad-funded users.

I tend to want videos that are about 4 minutes long (what used to be the norm). Now it seems like most of the videos recommended to me are 10-60 minutes long, with the average one being 15-20 minutes. When I’m looking for something shorter it seems like Shorts are the only option. However those are usually either too short, or too long to be in the Shorts format without having control over the video on the TV.

Their perverted incentive structures created this mess. They should just have the one normal format for videos, have auto-play that people can opt-in to if they’re into that, and let people making videos of whatever length is best for the content without forcing videos to either be artificially long or short in an effort to optimize for the monetization algorithm.

I also don't think I could ever spend 2 hours watching shorts and feel like I left with something worth having spent the time on, but I can tell you some movies or long form videos which had enough impact to carry in my memory through today.

It’s all perspective.

They should keep going though. Maybe someday I will be so annoyed that I finally stop using this website

The problem is that since then technology shifted from a tool to help the user achieve a certain task to an ad delivery vehicle where success (and profit) directly correlate to the the amount of user time wasted, and it turns out bad UI/UX wastes more time and is preferable in such a scenario.

No, they're worse. Nothing like doing a search for a serious topic related to a class I'm teaching and having unrelated garbage shorts come up over and over, each taking up six times the space of a real video. I'm sure YT has someone analyzing data saying this is better. That person should be fired because they have no idea how to analyze data.

1. seeing AI slop or a unoriginal 'comedy' sketch,

2. thinking "eww get this off my screen",

3. scrolling down to the next video; jump to step 1

On the rare occasions that the algorithm does show something genuinely interesting or creative, I watch to the end of the video and feel a lot more satisfied about spending time on it. That's not to say that long-form videos can't be distracting and addictive, but I would posit that 'shorts' engagement is actually driven by disgust rather than curiosity. I now avoid YouTube shorts like the plague, because life is too short to experience that volume of disgust in it.

When I try to express:

> I don't want to see ANY shorts

instead, I get:

> show me fewer youtube shorts

when I want to say:

> NO

I'm only allowed to say:

> mAyBe LaTeR

Do the people behind these design decisions not realise they're monsters by gagging their users into only being able to express notions that appease them?

Youtube's increasing hostility to how I want to use it singlehandedly made me reinstall Firefox just so I could use uBlock on it.

Appreciate the UBO share!

drops the hopepage recommendatios completely, and also suggestions from the right sidebar

make youtube pull-only ; no push

And what's worse is the infinite scroll.

I only get what the creator wants to communicate, which is almost always misleading or missing details.

It’s an awful medium for communicating and I feel like I’m being misled every time I see short form content, which is rarely since I avoid it at all costs. At least with a longer video there is more substance to evaluate to tell whether the creator is worth trusting.

When the written word took over with the printing press, the same concern was levied. The amount of attention required to listen and memorize a story/poem is a lot more than just reading it.

The change with smart phones is just one of access/time spent on these things. There are people who are spending ~5 hours/day watching this content. There is a big difference between someone listening to 5 hours of a single poem, to reading 5 hours of a single book, to reading 5 hours of blog posts, to watching 5 hours of a youtube video, to watching 5 hours of random videos, to 5 hours of <10s videos.

For some others, shorts are too much of a temptation. You can find a lot of comments even on HN from people admitting that short-form video content on any platform (YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) can pull them into a time warp where they've wasted more time than they wanted to spend on videos. I suppose there are some people who can manage long-form YouTube use but struggle with shorts, but I suspect a better solution for people with self-control challenges is to disable recommendations completely (which will also make YT shorts disappear)

The difference is the Shorts format tips the scales. Somebody might want one and not the other.

Encourage your kid to be a creator. Not a consumer.

If he's busy building things, he has less time to be consuming things.

Give them a drawing book. Play a sport. Legos. Teach them how to make their own game on Roblox etc.

It's not about blocking your kid from things. It's about enabling them to expand skill sets.

Personally I live for the every day, I'm not worrying too much about what I will regret for a few hours on my last day(s) if I even make it there.