Problem with shorts is until you click on them you don't know what channel they're from. Lots of things that look legit are actually AI junk or someone ripping off someone else's channel.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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One thing I hate with shorts is that (at least on desktop for me) they hide the dates. When I see something I want to know if it's recent or not, so I avoid shorts altogether.
Yeah I'll click one about an update for a game I'm playing and look at the comments only to realize it's a year old and completely irrelevant. At this point I just keep the comments open so I don't waste time watching something old.
I've disabled shorts in feed and search. Much better without that stupid shit.
There are a few Firefox plugins that exclude Shorts from YouTube search results.
Web search engines that provide a video search may have a duration filter. Both Kagi and DuckDuckGo can do this, in a quick check.
You can block them with uBlock, too.
They invented a cooked metric to make shorts look more popular than it really is, and now they have to use the same lie everywhere or else people notice the metrics are faked.
Yup. They want videos to have TikTok scale numbers to compete, but it all feels like fake inflation of numbers.
Google did not just switch emphasis to shorts to compete with tiktok but also for reasons of space. Prior to the switch access to modern camera technology was beginning to allow very large numbers of users to upload ten minutes of 2160p content that was around 5GB a time. This was clearly a storage problem and Google had to shift those people toward choosing to make much smaller uploads.
Honestly I doubt this. Google wants the mountains of data for AI training
I love how they played such a big part in destroying people’s attention spans TO engage in longer form content… only to have to enshittify their own platform to solve the problem that they helped create
I assume now YouTube will think I'm even more into the 2 hour long silent "relaxing wallpaper" videos it chooses to autoplay for me sometimes when I am listening to a video in the background.
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