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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

FB, IG and now YouTube are becoming indistinguishable from TikTok, thanks to the former all copy-catting and heavily promoting video "shorts".

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The YouTube shorts really piss me off, because, afaik there’s no way to seek (and some of them are a bit long for a “short”), at least from what I’ve seen in the mobile UI. It may be behind a gesture or something though.

That's the copycat behavior. It's forced engagement analytics. You either care (and it's boosted for some people) or you don't (and it's devalued for some people).

All in the pursuit of perpetual doomscrolling.

"Youtube Shorts" is just an alternative frontend, you can replace any url from youtube.com/shorts/XYZ to youtube.com/watch?v=XYZ to watch them with the original UI.

It's a lot more than UI, it is a completely new distribution medium. Creators are also now incentivized to make such type of "shorts" as their distribution/algorithm is completely separate from the normal videos.

Sometimes you can drag along the bottom to seek, but it only seems to work on some shorts. You can sometimes tell if it will work because it’ll show a progress bar at the bottom. I’m not sure what distinguishes those though, since I’ve seen long shorts (hah) with and without them.

Hard to save to a playlist too. Find a useful life tip? Forget about being able to find it later.

I wonder how much noise this adds to their algorithm.

The other day my wife wanted to show me some "short" from a content creator she likes, and had to rapidly scroll through ~30 of other "shorts" in her feed until said creator popped up again and she could click on her profile pic. Whatever way YouTube rated those other 30 vids for my wife is completely wrong, unless they happen to have a classification category called "rapidly scrolling down because of your stupid ass UI that doesn't allow backtracking or searching previously seen content".

At this rate, in a few years, even non-tech-savvy people will get fed up with increasingly nonsensical and confusing UIs of social media products.

And TikTok has a BeReal copy :)

Everyone’s just trying to survive. In one corporate biography type book the author asserted Zuckerberg would institute “lockdown” when he thought they were behind features. I believe the instagram book had a similar claim about Sidstorm (sp?).

I guess when network effects are life you can’t afford to not be the network. Google was smart to nab YouTube. And android. Meta was smart to grab instagram and WhatsApp (and that same logic, after missing out on making a phone, I bet is why they’re rushing to own VR). Innovate, copy, or die, basically.

I feel there's a difference between copy-catting an upstart vs. a competitor that already outclassed you. The latter is kind of admitting defeat :).

But regardless, what's really annoying here is that this new mode of interaction is pushed so hard that it hides away and starves out the "traditional" one. It's like these companies don't understand we're no longer in an era of a single social networking platform. I don't come to YouTube or Facebook to get more TikTok - I'm fine with getting TikTok on TikTok, I come to YouTube for actual longer-form videos, to Facebook for posts and groups, etc. Seeing YT, FB and IG pushing "shorts"/"reels" in my face only makes me visit them less.

> In one corporate biography type book the author asserted Zuckerberg would institute “lockdown” when he thought they were behind features.

Can you explain what this means? I don't know what a lockdown is. Thanks!

From what I understand they would other drop other projects or literally not leave the office until the new feature was built. Again, from a book, you might want to fact check this.

I accidentally started an fb vertical video and thought "Why does tiktok suck today?" until I realized the hole I had fallen into.

Was it a video that was 27 minutes long teasing the big reveal for 26 minutes and 30 seconds and the big reveal was ... nothing?

Watch this simple trick that only requires a chain, a paperclip and an arc welder

I swear five minutes craft copycats on Facebook are spiraling out of hands.

Or my favorite (I've watched probably too many). How to refurbish old rusted gadgets at home* fast.

*industrial machine shop not included.

"wait for it!!!!!"

"LOLemoji watch to the end! LOLemoji"

"Today?"

+Snapchat. Twitter also is experimenting (experimented?) with endless video scrolling.

Twitter needs to figure out how to render video in general, before trying to scrap with the big boys.

I installed TikTok last year when the company I worked for switched all of their ad spend from FB to TikTok. I found it addictive in the sense that it was a time waster, yet fun…

I have now installed TikTok 3 times. Each time for a week I find it fun, then after about another week I uninstall it because I value my time to create my own stuff (writing and open source).

I find YouTube Short to be different. Somewhat fun, but not enough to pull me away from the YT material I watch, like philosophy ‘think’ content, Playing For Change music videos, and minimal political stuff.

Using https://Freedom.to tools to monitor and limit viewing times is almost always a good idea. Latest macOS/iPadOS/iOS also has very good support for limiting app and specific web site use. These are great tools, at least for my digital life.

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