TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts: Who Will Win the Short-Video Race?

wsj.com

1 point·monsieurpng··4 comments

It’s like Alien vs Predator. ‘Whoever wins… we lose.’

In the movie the Aliens and Predators die. Pretty sure life will follow art in this case. These companies deserve nothing else.

There is no way to filter out these “shorts”. I unsubscribed from half of channels because they produce shorts every day or even more often, spamming “•‎” feature next to a channel name.

I don’t understand this. If I don’t want something I will not watch it, neither on youtube nor on tiktok. Race as much as you want, but why pushing format to a user? This is so stupid. We have a huge deal of content in exchange for our data, but we cannot sort, filter, tune feeds, create subprofiles/moods, nothing. Few guys decide what’s good for everyone, and everyone is the same all the time in their eyes. Make a separate section at least.

It isn’t the first time YouTube has pushed a specific length of video, but this is more brazen than how they have operated in the past. Several years ago they changed the incentives so a video had to be at least 8-10 minutes in order to ‘play nice’ with the algorithm… which was good, in my opinion. Prior to this shift, 2-3 minute (or even shorter) soundbite videos were incredibly common. Now TikTok has YT careening back toward this old, uninformative order, pushing an even shorter format than the equivalent of a cable news blurb.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com