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The worst part is that the Shorts interface on the desktop web is awful. I hate having to watch a Short there because all the buttons and UI are all completely different. I accidentally scroll down to view comments to see the pause button and instead just get to another video.

I'm sure some PM made that so that they can increase "next view" viewership, but all it does is insult me.

Yes, I know Shorts can be viewed with the regular video viewer by changing the URL, but that's a pain to do that on every video. Just give me my regular UI controls back and stop enforcing this silly vertical video format on a desktop.

Again, I understand why vertical videos are being promoted; mobile is indeed king, content is now made for mobile. Fine. But desktop is not mobile so give me my standard 16:9 controls back.

For my money, the worst thing about shorts is how it automatically turns a short video into a "Short" which will crop a video shot in landscape to make it play in Portrait mode.

It actively is messing up video content.

> Yes, I know Shorts can be viewed with the regular video viewer by changing the URL, but that's a pain to do that on every video

There is a Chrome extension to do that automatically [1]. Here’s one for Firefox [2].

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-short...

awesome. thanks for the links!

Generally I like YouTube shorts (at least compared to my tiktok feed which is not tailored to my tastes at all) but I'm really annoyed by the lack of a volume slider in the desktop shorts player.

The worst part is Joe Rogan. Nothing against him, but Shorts carpet bombs me with video clips of him. It's so annoying. I think I've watched one of his videos, the one with Elon hittin' the blunt, and now YouTube thinks I'm a Joe Rogan stan. Ugh!

*Queue sigma grindset music*

I have found that I gain almost nothing from YouTube shorts at best, and at worst they are a blackhole for my time. I added these[1] filters to uBlock and it hides shorts and brings back the vanilla YouTube experience

[1] https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

There are lots shorts blocker extension u can use in the browser.

Two things I hate about youtube these days are:

1. Subscriptions are essentially useless. The UI focuses entirely on recommendations and doesn't show me videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I actually dig into the `library/subscriptions` UI.

2. Shorts. Shorts are everywhere and I don't want to see them, ever.

In summary, the platform is turning into a way to force-feed me content that I am not interested in. If I wanted that, I'd sign up for tiktok.

(EDIT: Fixed formatting)

It's kind of an extreme measure, but there is an extension called "Unhook" that you can use to remove recommendations, and only show your subscriptions. It has a bunch of other tweaks and has made the Youtube UI tolerable for me, personally.

>1. Subscriptions are essentially useless. The UI focuses entirely on recommendations and doesn't show me videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I actually dig into the `library/subscriptions` UI.

I don't think Subscriptions are useless, the Subscription feed only show the published videos from your subscriptions, and in reverse chronological order, with no algorithmic shenanigans.

> Shorts. Shorts are everywhere and I don't want to see them, ever.

Me too, you can remove Shorts (on a browser) using this uBlock Origin filter https://letsblock.it/filters/youtube-shorts

What platform are you watching on? In the mobile app there is a subscription tab on the bottom navigation bar. On the browser and at least on the Roku TV interface there is a Subscriptions tab on the side navigation bar. No need to dig into your library.

I don't understand why "digging" into the subscriptions UI is a big deal. It's one click away from the home page and is where I normally start when visiting youtube.

> What I would prefer seeing YouTube do is improve their search. You may get 15-20 relevant search results before they start mixing in shorts, other videos I've already seen, "suggested videos", etc.

Worse yet, the other content mixed into search results isn't even visually distinct from the rest! If you overlook the header, there's no way to tell why it isn't showing you what you searched for.

Happily, it's possible to fix this with a CSS rule:

    .ytd-search ytd-shelf-renderer {
        background: lightgrey !important;
        padding-left: 20px;
    }

(Or you can "display: none" the whole section if you prefer.)

Does that CSS rule let you browse through all the results for a particular search? For example, if I wanted to watch, say, all 50,000 videos of people reacting to the new Zelda, I could just keep scrolling?

All of the recommended videos on my front page are wrenching, welding, carpentry, fabrication, or related. For some reason, my recommended shorts are all women with heavy makeup, cleavage, and nice legs. Yeah, you're definitely going to be working on a running engine with that long hair dangling into the fan.

There is one thing I really hate about shorts in particular. I watch YouTube mostly via Chromecast and if you attempt to play a short it will show a dialog on your phone saying you have to disconnect from Chromecast first. It is bogus and stupid. So here I am playing videos on Chromecast and this stupid app shows me videos I can't play in this mode. For some reason some searches now return me mostly shorts and it makes me mad.

I imagine they just shipped it and if someone raised the Chromecast issue they said "fuck it". How hard can it be to just send the URL to the Chromecast if you don't want to work on this stupid Shorts UX for Chromecast?

Another incredibly annoying part of Stories is that if you do flip through them, each time a new one loads, it counts as a view in your viewing history. This of itself, would not be a bad thing, but here's the problem:

It tries to routinely recommend low quality, low effort, small YouTube channels. I routinely get YouTube channels that have 5-10 subscribers, bot comments, and uploaded videos of uninteresting gameplay clip, and a mic with audio clipping. The more I watch, the more these low effort channels are recommended to me because I've already "watched" so many of them, even if it was only for 1 or 2 seconds.

I make a point of hitting "Do not recommend channel" and not interacting with the channel, because I don't want that to count as a metric of "interaction", but the view itself seems to increase the problem. There are way too many low effort, terrible content channels out there for me to block them all.

So, the more I use Shorts, the worse the quality becomes.

One might think, "Okay, so remove it from your view history." Not a bad idea! But the problem is that these are shorts. Videos have to be under 60 seconds. Most are around 15-30 seconds. In 10 minutes I could probably watch 20 videos, give or take. This means, unless I break out of the loop of watching shorts - remove myself from the interface they want me to be using - I cannot keep any sort of handle over these low effort channels clogging up my viewing habits.

It's incredibly bad and I really despise it.

Most of the channels I actually subscribe to or care about will apologize for having to include a link for a "real" video because of the stupid 60 second limit. Some of them might be able to get by with 90 to 120 seconds, but 60 seconds is just such a tiny amount of time. It actively discourages any sort of meaningful content. It's just quips, nonsense, and poorly cut video clips. It's just bad.

Can't agree more. I hate YouTube shorts, hate YouTube monetization despite the constant praise it gets on HN, hate the search results when looking for videos, hate I can't see dislikes, hate that I constantly am suggested videos I've already watched and content I've already flagged I don't want to see, especially content flagged annoying. Maybe an a/b test, but it was bonkers to have a survey prompt "Why is this not interesting?", I flagged "this is annoying" and sure enough that very popular creator was suggested again later.

YouTube is so bloated and Vanced made it tolerable, so of course they killed it.

I watch a lot of YouTube from my TV using my subscription page. The shorts clutter it up so much that I am about to unsub from accounts that post too many.

My favourite part is that you can't play shorts on a Chromecast. Old vertical videos work just fine, but if they are tagged as a short they refuse to play.

Why???

> Instead this artificial construct some product manager at YouTube came up with is showing up all over the place where it isn't wanted. It takes up valuable real estate and infests search results.

Even if it was a good product I refuse to use it because of how hard they were pushing it.

YouTube search is so bad. I assume it's on purpose considering Google of all people should be able to figure out search. If the video you're looking for isn't in the top five results search is pretty much useless.

I was so happy and surprised at first, but then realized that Stories is a different feature than Shorts.

P.S. if you use Signal, you can turn of Stories from the settings

The Blocktube extension can clobber Shorts if you like. Does a lot of other good stuff to make Youtube usable

"I wish shorts would die."

I'm pretty confident it will.

What I'm going to say is purely from the user experience perspective and will - for the moment - completely ignore that YT Shorts, as well as TikTok, are basically drugs and should be treated like that. Also, I have no inside knowledge of any of the products working and algorithms, it is just my personal experience as a user trying out both products in parallel.

With that out of the way: YT shorts is terrible compared to TikTok for the following reasons:

1. In my experience the TikTok algorithm adapts very fast.

I usually watch tech but occasionally dabble into music. When I watch piano videos for like 20 minutes TikTok treats me like I was a musician. Back to tech, also very quick. YT seems to adapt much slower.

2. The TikTok algorithm doesn't mess around.

My daughter likes to watch dance videos. As she has no TikTok herself we watch together on my account. Again TikTok adapts to that very fast and treats us like a teenager. But even before the algo is tuned in it never showed me anything inappropriate.

My armchair suspicion is that while TikTok finds a local maximum of what I want and reliably sits there until I nudge it out, YT has the idea to probe me from time to time if another local maximum might be better. This might be good in theory but when it tries to figure out if a latest dance craze video watcher would also like to see some naked raunchy twerking ladies it has failed miserably.

3. The TikTok algo is fine-grained.

Apart from tech and music I watch the occasional extreme sports video and I have my own taste there. I like physical skill but not so much strength. I like bicycle tricks but no motocross. Cars are generally not my thing except for Gymkhana. This is no problem for TikTok. It is like the sports I don't like would not exist. YT on the other is all over the place with its suggested videos.

The worst thing on YT is that it occasionally shows me videos where people got hurt badly. One of these videos is enough to kill all the fun for me because I can never be sure not to see gore the next time. TikTok never let me down there.

4. YT moderation is terrible, TikTok's decent

My general impression is that TikTok's limits are wider but fairly well-defined harsh lines. YT 's limits are narrow, fuzzy and inconsequential.

5. YT is basically a TikTok rip-off when it comes to content.

Many of the videos on YT shorts are either copies or recreations from TikTok. I believe for videos that use content from the TikTok library it is infringement, but YT seems to look the other way.

Finally, if all of this sounds like TikTok advertising: It's not. I think both TikTok and YT Shorts are harmful products. The later is just lame too.