91–100 of 213 posts
I found myself nodding in agreement and patting myself on the back about not consuming SFVs, until I realized that I had just read the abstract and closed the page.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They want more of your money. They will monetize you as much as they can. You're just a well-supported, paying product.
They don't make more money from showing you shorts once you've paid to remove the ads. The default reason some feature doesn't exist is simply because no one bothered to make it. Maybe they don't think there's a big demand from their users to disable shorts completely.
My guess is they know exactly what users are doing with the app and website, and know that people use shorts more often than we think.
This is one of their prime products, and they're Google, the biggest surveillance company on the planet. Of course they know how users interact with their service.
We have one clear rule at home for the kids: YouTube long format is ok. But: no shorts, no reels, no TikTok. Any short video platform is strictly forbidden. No exceptions.
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…
Of course this may have little impact since so many people have no self-control and the gains from shorts may outweigh loosing your views, but it's still something. Enjoy the warmth of angry spite and move on.
Vote with your wallet, your clicks, and be the change you wish to see.
I wonder about the cognitive and mental health correlates of living in a world that no longer makes any sense. I remember 10 years ago watching a documentary about the previous ten years explaining how we we had moved into a post meaning world, and how this was being weaponized by various interests. That time seems positively quaint to me now! I was reading a book from the 1960s, and it was talking about how the worl…
As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?
The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into th…
There are no ads on a sub, this doesn’t make any sense as such to the parents comment.
As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?
This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site. The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the…
Why would it be?
Cable TV (which was just YouTube for the 80s and 90s) figured this out early: the attraction isn't the user experience, it's the content. They started off without ads, because, hey, you're paying. Then they introduced ads, because they wanted both your subscription fee and advertising dollars.
Did people cancel their subscriptions because of the ads? Hell no. They ordered the premium package to watch Cinemax, HBO, and pro sports. They paid for Pay-Per-View boxing bouts and rented movies. Then they bought the DVR and digital cable subscription, because HDTV was the new hotness.
Your kid's head will explode if he doesn't get to watch Mr. Beast like his friends at school get to, so you keep putting up with whatever enshittification Google carries out on YouTube. You won't stop, I won't stop, no one will, and they know that.
As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?
As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?
Google is a monopolist. They have no real competitive pressure, so they're incentivized to extract as much value from you as possible rather than waste time trying to retain you as a user (cuz where are you gonna go lol). Forcing short form video on you could be seen as either an attempt to get you addicted to the format, or just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion. No matter what…
Your theory of
> just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.
is the most likely culprit
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If you're anti-shorts, you could also choose to send a message to the creators by not watching their shorts. If they previously made long form but have switched to shorts, they're concerned with views, so you deny them the views. Of course this may have little impact since so many people have no self-control and the gains from shorts may outweigh loosing your views, but it's still something. Enjoy the warmth of angry…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it’s correct to say there are no implications. The only discernable difference between a short and long videos effects is that one of the videos is capped at 3 minutes. There could be plenty of implication and correlation to high intake watching videos of any length.
There is a HUGE difference in that the combined short length with the fact that the video starts playing before you even have a chance to make a decision on whether to watch it or not leads you to a "heh! I'm here already, might as well just watch the thing".
There are people that autoplay long videos, in fact people stream random Simpson’s (or other favorite tv show, podcast, music, books on tape, etc) episodes in the background while they work. Classic TV has autoplay with no opportunity to decide. Autoplay is not an exclusive short form video feature. I can make a short video on my computer and it will not autoplay other content.