Some people say they are addictive, but to me shorts are an absolute nightmare, I despise them, I hate them, I’m allergic to them.
The ultra quick cutting, the often chopped style, the accelerated voice talking at you without pause or mercy even at 1.0, the subtitles in the center that I cannot disable. It’s an attack on my senses, pure overstimulation.
My wife sends me couple of shorts each day and sometimes it’s even interesting content-wise, but I absolutely hate this horrible format, procrastinate watching them and wish back a world where this form of media did not exist. It all started even before shorts in the way people did videos, and somehow it spiraled into this kind of hell scape.
Anyone else feeling like this?
EDIT: thanks everyone, now I feel validated, thought maybe I’m the odd one with so strong negative feelings about them! And sorry about the confusion about pants and stocks (that provoked some funny answers though so no regrets). Yes - as you have all figured out, I’m talking about the annoying short videos almost everyone seems to be addicted to.
I like shorts because they are comfy and easy to wear
i fucking hate short videos. it’s the most vacuous thing invented thus far.
i literally block or dim the thumbnails with ublock origin.
then again i also hate long videos with slow talking and tons of useless and filler segments such as:
- intro montage
- recap
- sponsor product ad
- channel subscription begging
- alternate channel subscription begging
- off topic rambling/ranting
- outro montage
(thank you ❤️Freetube & ❤️Sponsorblock)
can’t stand them cause i hate vertical videos. at first they were restricted to vine, then tiktok… then they broke containment and every video service out there wanted to stuff them in their app whether people asked for them or not.
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I despise them because they’re shallow as fuck, “content” that requires zero brain to enjoy (I do enjoy some of that shit on occasion, but not in the form of short videos, I prefer the lazy approach of putting something on and not having to move a finger for 10+ minutes).
Another thing that makes me hate that kind of video is that it’s a breeding ground for “reacts”, as if the longer form of that wasn’t already a piece of shit. Neither of these problems are exclusive to YT, they’re just following on Tiktok, like Instagram didReaction videos are the worst, in any form. I’m waiting for the day until there’s a reaction video loop referring to nothing than other reacts in circle and nobody knows what the actual underlying video was. The recursive reaction from hell.
The only type of “reaction” content I like is experts validating or refuting non-experts’ videos in their area of expertise. I think they add a lot of value to these platforms by promoting critical thinking and the value of experts.
Then again, I hate shorts, so I rarely see even those. So maybe I’m off base.
Yeah agreed, but that presupposes that the person watching can distinguish someone just babbling and someone who actually is someone qualified to comment on some topic. And I guess the latter kind is a drop in the ocean, because expertise is a limited resource but opinions and bullshit are cheap.
I like them. Sometimes I want to watch videos, but not get super involved in a longer production. Plus, youtube shorts, at least, often have links to the main video they were clipped from, which I’ll throw into my “watch later” playlist.
Not everybody likes shorts, and that’s fine, but I make them work for me.
The only thing I like about them is that there’s no ads.
With an ad blocker there are also no ads on normal YouTube ;) and there is even an extension called sponsor block that can help skipping over in-video ads
I know, I do like supporting creators though.
Do none of you remember vines??
I mean, it was a little after my time but Vine never got abused by rage bait/content churn and fine tuned by the platform specifically to hijack your attention span and feed you ads.
I quite like shorts, but I only watch specific videos. I watch woodworking and Minecraft build videos to see if the technique is something that I’d want to try myself, and then either watch the longer version, or find other ways to try it out.
I’m glad to find other people with similar experiences to mine trying out short form video. I tried TikTok a few years ago when I realized how big it was and that I was missing out on entire cultural touchstones but I just couldn’t. Too much music I don’t like, too much randomly clicking and hoping I like a video, too much visual and audible noise.
Seriously why can’t I just see the title and uploader of a video before I click? What if I don’t want to watch this person or this particular video? Why do I have to decide while watching the video instead of relaxing with a bit of silence between videos?
Honestly the whole UI was just mentally and visually exhausting. I think I made it about 20 minutes of trying to get into TikTok before I finally just said “not for me” and gave up entirely
I especially can’t stand it when either of these two things happen:
- The subtitles show one word at a time (???)
- The subtitles are animated
The one word at a time is because studies have shown it improves reading speed with no loss of comprehension.
No idea, never watched them. Now that I think about it, I’ve been watching less and less youtube this last months to a point I think I wouldn’t miss it much if it went subscription only or I couldn’t block ads.