I wish shorts would die. YouTube and TikTok are entirely different kinds of products.<p>If a creator wants to make a short video, they can just make a short video. If the audience wants short videos, they'll preferentially watch them. That will show up in the creator analytics, and then they'll make shorter videos.<p>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.<p>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.<p>They also recently removed the ability to order a channel's videos from oldest to newest. Now there's just "popular".<p>Give us back the dislike counts.<p>At least on mobile web, say you scroll down a bit and go to a video. Most of the time when you go back the entire page reloads and you get an entirely new set of videos. This is incredibly frustrating in that you both lose your scroll position but also any other videos you might want to see that may never be surfaced to you again.<p>And please oh please stop recommending videos I've already watched. That's what watch history is for.
> In the absence of Stories, YouTube wants creators to instead post content to other surfaces on the platform: Community Posts and Shorts.<p>There's a difference between YouTube Stories and YouTube Shorts!? What's the difference? I legit thought they're the same thing.
Finally! Now kill Shorts. They take up a bunch of space on desktop, yet the player is super annoying to use. As far as I can tell, you can't scrub videos. They do a poor job of hijacking scrolling and clicking. Very unintuitive UI.
All the comments here asking to kill Shorts because "vertical video looks shit on my desktop", like who do you think YouTube is made for? A HN nerd running Linux on a desktop or the average person who has likely never touched a desktop in their life?<p>I remember few years back when it was genuinely cool to make fun of and take moral high ground over people taking vertical videos. How times have changed indeed! Even back then I felt vertical videos were the future (on a mobile device it was the natural filming pose, and the videos looked more immersive and personal). The UI just had to catch up (and we have to credit tik tik for discovering that).
I'm old and so probably spend more time on youtube than all of you young guns with your Insta and TikTok and whatnot... But I've got to admit, to this day I've never heard of Stories. So they won't be missed, at least not by me.
>In the absence of Stories, YouTube wants creators to instead post content to other surfaces on the platform: Community Posts and Shorts. The company recently expanded access to Community Posts, a text-based updates feature, and added the ability to have posts expire after a certain period.<p>YouTube seems really dedicated to Community Posts and pushing creators to use them, except that they don't seem to plan on ever making them viewable in the iPad app where a huge portion of the audience is. Virtually every other feature, including Stories, was added on iPad at about the same time as iPhone, except Community Posts are years behind. Weird.
Based on all the love people are expressing for "Shorts" here, I feel like the feature should be renamed "Pants".<p>This joke only makes sense if you understand UK-type English.
Those hating on shorts need to watch old people use YouTube. They have no idea what TikTok is, but they get suckered into shorts so fast when they open "YouTube".
An interesting thing that no one (I think/hope) has mentioned: Shorts are just glorified videos. Mind you, I have only watched less than a handful of them, more than a couple of months ago but here it goes: The URL is something like youtube.com/shorts/w12jfk. That last part is the random ID YouTube assigns. If you change the link to a video link, youtube.com/watch?v=w12jfk, then you get the normal interface. (The ID is randomly typed)
Maybe a bookmarklet, or something, could make things bearable, but there still giving clicks to Shorts, probably.<p>Edit: But the post is about Stories, huh... A thing I hardly remember it existed. So much for a first comment.
This is exciting! This is the inverse of my rule of thumb:<p>An app is past its peak once a stories feature has been added. After that point, it has become overly bloated and will shift towards no longer be worth using.<p>Over time, I have watched stories be added to multiple apps that make no sense such as Uber Eats. Whenever an app has added a stories feature unnecessarily, I have uninstalled the app because it has lost focus and no longer delivers a quality experience for me. I wonder if this means that YouTube will now increase in quality. We shall have to wait and see!
Yes, let's focus on content for the ADHD crowd. Let's create a situation where videos crop out relevant bits and end mid sentence. Let's incentize channels to post videos that end before the payoff promised in the title and let them end with vapid promises that it will be in a part two that doesn't and will never exist.<p>YouTube and YouTube shorts should be two separate apps/sites sevibg two distinct types of content not one where shorts in crammed into a format it isn't suited for.
I'm truly surprised no one has leapfrogged the short-form war (especially with ads) and started inserting blipverts <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blipvert</a>