Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

attention is all they want

I would suggest you make an exception for YouTube shorts from channels / creators that also put out YouTube long-form content.

You'd think I'd be making a point here about "otherwise you'd be missing a lot of good educational content that happens to be packaged short-form"; but no!

The point I actually want to make is much weirder: unlike the other short-form-video services, YouTube's "shorts" don't seem to have any actual time constraints built into the format. And so many creators — especially the ones that normally make long-form content — actually put out rather long "shorts". Like, multiple minutes long.

Which means that a large percentage of YT "shorts" these days are essentially just... regular YouTube videos. Just, er, vertical.

For a while, I was filtering out YT "shorts"... until I realized that some of my favorite long-form creators I had been following had gone mysteriously missing from my feed. And it turned out I was missing all their new videos, because they decided to format+post them as "shorts." These were the same videos they had been producing for years now. Just as long as before. Just in portrait now.

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Tangent: Why are creators even bothering to make these videos and mark them as "shorts", if they're not actually short-form videos?

Well, creators are incentivized to do this, because YT is really pushing shorts; and so, if you make your video into a "short" — whether or not it's a short-form video — your video will get promoted in many shorts-only UI carousels and recommended areas of the site and apps, that it otherwise wouldn't. (This easy route to promotion is especially tantalizing for newer creators trying to "break through" to a self-sustaining audience.)

And YT itself is incentivized, now that they have all this frontage to push "shorts", to have a constant stream of new "shorts" to push — whether or not those "shorts" are really in the spirit of short-form content.

YT and the creators are effectively aligned in an implicit agreement to violate the spirit of "short-form video" in the name of bringing more attention to what's basically their same old content format.

Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.

I noticed that as well (though I do think there is a time limit), but decided I didn't want to encourage more of it and still avoid any shorts. I usually watch on a TV anyway, so vertical videos are pretty weird...

Honestly, I use revanced on my android phone which lets me disable all shorts content appearing. and on browser if i stick to the subscriptions tab and maybe the sidebar on videos, there's no shorts.