YouTube Stories, Google’s clone of Snapchat, is dying on June 26
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I absolutely cannot stand YouTube Shorts, and I do not know of many people that actually enjoy them either.
I think the TikTok swipe format works pretty well for content discovery on mobile, so I’m glad YouTube copied it.
And unlike TikTok, the long form videos are still there, so I can click on a username and watch more from a creator I like.
One criticism I have of them, though, is on the web they’re mixed in like regular videos on your subscriptions page. On mobile they’re sort of grouped together in a separate UI element, which makes it much easier to scroll through your subscriptions. Maybe this is one of the reasons people hate shorts so much?
With that being said the algorithm needs SOO much work.
I have to select "don't show videos from this channel" every single single time i use it.
The quality seems very very inconsistent and it seems to have a weird bias towards undesirable topics that seem to have large popularity.
By contrast my normal video recommendations are excellent and I am rarely bothered by them.
I'm deeply worried that traditional YT creators will feel obligated to produce these one minute spastic shorts just to remain competitive.
It sucks being spammed with things you'll never watch, and for me at least YouTube now three such boxes take up space: shorts, "mixes", and music videos.
They used to have an option to remove these items. Now the option is gone.