Comment by homefree
7 months ago
The annoying bit is similar to reels, shorts are good for engagement.
It’s similar to why I don’t buy Oreos. I like Oreos, everyone likes Oreos - they’re engineered to be liked, but they’re bad for you. The best way to not eat them is to not have them in the house.
Short form videos are the heroin of media consumption - meta having to pivot instagram to it is because they’re facing competitive pressure. Same with YouTube. You can’t only have vegetables when your competitors are dealing heroin and your revenue is engagement based.
It seems the revealed preference of addicting consumption for engagement is tv with with a novelty button. TikTok and short form videos are that distilled to its purest form.
These companies can’t turn them off - they’re trapped by market incentives, it’s moloch. A few years back when Facebook had a more dominant market position Zuck said they were intentionally going to focus on human connections and friends despite the revenue cost that would cause because it was the ideal he wanted. In battle against TikTok you can’t hold those kinds of ideals unfortunately.
So you don't buy Oreos, and think the best way to eat them is not to have them in the house. I agree. That's why I don't have TikTok on my phone. So why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled? I'm telling them I don't want it. If I'm the kind of person who doesn't keep Oreos in the house to avoid eating them, why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
It all checks out if you recognize YouTube clearly doesn't consider the app and the website to be your turf. You are in their home, they have oreos all over the place and they will offer it to you over and over again. You'll ask if they have water, they'll bring it with a box of oreos. You'll ask where the bathroom is, and find an Oreo waiting for you by the sink in case you'd like to indulge.
This is the correct model.
If you want your own home you can use something like Urbit.
Generally in the web as it is, we are all serfs on other people’s computers.
2 replies →
>find an Oreo waiting for you by the sink in case you'd like to indulge.
this is a hilarious image. "ooh, don't mind if i do".
"Thanks, but I asked for heroin..."
> why can't I keep YouTube Shorts disabled?
> why would I go to a grocery store that insists on slipping a pack of Oreos into every third bag of carrots?
You can see how these are not analogous. The store _is_ slipping Oreos in your vegetables. So yeah… don’t install TikTok _or_ YouTube. I get that you’d rather YouTube to be YouTube-without-shorts, but it’s not a thing anymore, vegetables-without-Oreos is not an option at this grocery store
I think the thing they got wrong is it’s not a grocery store. It’s a casino - you can have a good time there, but the house isn’t interested in what’s best for you, but what’s best for them.
Even that’s imperfect because Zuck really was interested in the interactions he thought were best despite them not being highest engagement, but you can’t only do that and stay alive in a competitive market.
The Oreo analogy is perfect. I don't buy Oreos because I can't help myself from eating the whole container in a few sittings.
I don't even touch short form video because I'll get sucked in and suddenly hours go by. Short form video on YouTube makes me want to never open YouTube because I know how easily I can get sucked in.
IDK a lot of how-to and the like videos I watch can probably be distilled into 30seconds or less.
Long form content (i.e. Veritasium) are nice for sure, but some of it suffers from fluff too.
There's a difference between useful 30 second tutorials/how-tos and 99.99% of short form content which is brain rot designed to hook into you and keep you mindlessly scrolling - whether it's out of rage or joy. All they care about is eyeballs on screen no matter how it happens.
When I say I don't like short-form video content, I typically mean the tiktok-influenced infinite scrolling algorithm-driven video wall of videos. Where you might click on one thing that looks useful or interesting on your home page and without even thinking about it you start swiping through the videos and suddenly you emerge an hour later form a brain rot video fueled fever dream, with no idea how you just lost an hour of your life to useless shit online.
At least losing an hour to video games or reading online might leave you with a sense of accomplishment or satisfaction. I have never felt anything positive after binging on social media videos.
That’s nothing: YouTube has recently added shorts to YouTube Kids and it can’t be disabled.
They previously had a whitelist feature where parents could curate channels and videos for their kids.
That has been silently broken and all related features are disabled or non-functional.
Whoever is pushing Shorts is the equivalent of a drug dealer waiting outside a junior school to sell heroin to kids.
Sociopaths do this kind of thing.