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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

The worst thing about Shorts is they’re all in the wrong orientation.

Second worst thing. Worst thing was that up until very recently a portrait 1080p monitor did not render Shorts correctly and cut off the like/dislike/comment buttons. I literally had the correct hardware to watch Shorts on a desktop but nobody bothered to test for it!

Shorts is extremely frustrating and has nothing I would have ever asked for or desired.

Further it decreases the likelihood that I would consider paying for YouTube services.

I was almost ready to try a paid version when Shorts starting showing up with a totally unfamiliar and unwelcome UX. Completely unattractive and therefore NOISE.

That orientation is a big reason why they are great... they are meant to be consumed on a phone.

The only problem is you cant rewind them with the default interface and have to loop it if you missed something.

> The only problem is you cant rewind them with the default interface and have to loop it if you missed something.

As a user every time I encounter that it feels like YouTube is giving me the finger.

They copied this from Other platforms like Instagram :/

Holding you at gun point to finish the video. At least let us rewind if they don’t want you to skip forward.

Just like a monopoly, they long ago stopped tweaking the product to improve your experience, and instead for years now all the product changes have been to improve theirs. As another example, I’ve noticed they’ve started hiding when videos were published too

This is the key point and should be comment #1.

When a company has “won”, it no longer makes product decisions to please users, it makes product decisions to suit itself.

Even on my phone I prefer landscape. The few shorts I’ve seen would have been better if they were landscape. The ones I saw could have been trimmed down to 1:1 or 4:3 and would have been essentially the same.

I’m the opposite, reading is easier in non-landscape and when watching videos on YouTube or Reddit it’s annoying to have to turn your phone sideways and hope you don’t have ‘lock’ on… then if you do you hope it works properly and doesn’t take forever.

Mostly a pain but obviously some video content doesn’t make sense without landscape mode.

Yeah, they are cropping landscape videos 90% of the time. Maddening.

This maddens me too. Or anytime someone has messed with the aspect ratio in general.

Mostly because these are people who willfully wanted to create On Youtube, not tiktok. They probably don't want to make portrait content at all. But if they ignore this new feature google is desperate to make happen, they'll be punished.

I hate that I can't scrub the video.

I find the content in shorts is also usually really annoying.

And only people on HN know this. Millions and millions of other people don't care. They enjoy shorts and spent quite some time on it.

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