Ask HN: YouTube – what do you think of the “shorts” feature? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: YouTube – what do you think of the “shorts” feature?

If you haven't seen them, these "shorts" are 30-second (portrait) videos, often interspersed throughout a channel. I don't mind these shorts, but they are obviously a response to the popularity of TikTok.

Some observations on YouTube "shorts":

- The "shorts" have no video playback controls (apart from pause).

- "Shorts" take you out of a channel and into what seems (to me) a random stream of "shorts".

- The short, bit-sized format of "shorts" make them popular for mobile consumption.

The idea of short-format video is not new (e.g. Vine).

What are you thoughts on the YouTube "shorts" feature? And what are you thoughts on YouTube "shorts" vs TikTok?

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Channels with usually long-form content are now polluted with those - I hate it.

If I wanted shorts, I'd just go to TikTok and get the original thing there instead of a knockoff version.

But there's a reason I stay on YouTube. A reason that's unfortunately impossible for the "growth and engagement" camp to understand as their salary depends on not understanding it.

The one thing I don't like about shorts is the absence of video playback controls. Otherwise, meh, it's fine, I guess.

As far as overall strategy and vision for YouTube, it seems incompetent. They're just copying other platforms' features thinking it will bring them success (remember Twitter Fleets?).

Whoever is in charge needs to have an actual vision for YouTube and optimize for that instead of chasing trends.

I like the idea, but I don’t find the content interesting or engaging. YouTube gives me decent recommendations for regular content, but all the short videos seem to be TikTokers and immature young adults doing unfunny things to get attention.

It feels like the topics I’m interested in either have little or no short form content, or otherwise, YT’s data colllection, recommendation, and ranking is completely separate from their regular content, and none of my years of browsing and consumption history is used as a signal for my content personalization.

And my regular topics aren’t that niche; astronomy, music, math, tech

Every other short video is some low effort “did you know in Marvels Avengers..” with some junk trivia fact or some teenager or 20 something year old staging some cringy antic or shaking their bottom or chest. Pure trash content.

There's definitely educational content on TikTok. Things like farming, car maintenance, languages, astronomy. Cooking is particularly suited for this. It's easier to understand a 30s video on how to make roux or butcher a chicken.

Like everything else, there's an algorithm and TikTok will assume you're the average 16 year old teenager when you first join. But give it a day or two and it'll figure out your preferences.

I watch a lot of channels where their content is usually 30-60 minutes long, and their shorter ones are 15-ish minutes. But they have also begun to be poisoned with this "shorts" thing, it kinda seems like they "have" to do it bacause of algorithms or something.

I dislike everything about "shorts"; they're way too short (not what I'm looking for), no video controls, and you're dumped into a tik-tok-like neverending feed of shorts?

I’m more interested in understanding what it will take to replace YouTube entirely with a decentralized solution that can’t be censored.

No government or corporation has the right to decide who may speak or what they are allowed to say.

For example, just in the last few days YouTube tried to censor @WIONews, and was forced to relent as millions of Indian citizens protested via #YouTubeUnblockWION: https://www.youtube.com/embed/WQ7vy2JxH0U

Enjoying it much more than I thought I would. I pay for YouTube premium or whatever it’s called, so I don’t experience commercials, and I listen to YouTube hours a day as a podcast medium.

Another odd thing is that while YouTube‘s recommendations normally do not work for me at all, the shorts recommendations are very frequently dead on. Don’t know why that is.

There's some decent content, but not much. If I'm watching videos of a guy shooting an arrow into a helmet, I don't necessarily want an 8 min explanation of the arrow, the bow, and the helmet. But nobody uses that feature for that purpose.

YouTube has a lot of great creators. And so does TikTok. But they seem to attract different types. The people good at making shorts just don't really use YouTube.

Also curious about this, from the perspective of a content creator.

I create very short YouTube videos about kubernetes [1] so adapting it for the shorts format wouldnt be too hard. Does anyone have experience with this?

[1] https://youtube.com/channel/UCeLrAOI3anJAfO3BrYVB62Q

Shorts is YouTube’s version of TikTok or Instagram Reels. Shorts allows you to grab more traffic than normal YouTube videos and helps to grow your channel subscribers.

https://subcap.app/everything-about-youtube-shorts/

Copy cat product, YT is amazing at organizing videos. Stick to that.

Vertical video used to be an embarrasing mistake. Then the Chinese Communist Party created a personal data aggregation service, and to incentivise people to give them their data, they attached a vertical format video sharing feature to the service. From then on vertical video was normalised, and now YouTube wants to compete in the five second attention span arena.

I think they’re idiotic, so I just skip them.

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