Nah, being unable to pause just means they get way more minutes of viewing when people put down their phone to do something. It just sits there and plays, earning that sweet sweet ad money.
This might not always stop playback, for example with YT Premium, I think it also applies to shorts, maybe only when in PiP mode? I can't recall, but I'm pretty sure, I've encountered it, somewhat inconsistently
YouTube Shorts don’t have background play/PiP, at least not through the regular Shorts player. It is possible to get a Short pulled up through the main video player because each Short actually has a page you can access by just replacing /short/ with /v/ in the URL, and that will have background play and PiP if you have these enabled.
Tapping some URLs will inconsistently get you to the page too without having to do any URL replacement. I don’t think there’s any intended logic there, just some bugs in the way URLs get handled hopping from social media app to browser to social media app since most of them try to keep you silo’d in.
I'd always assumed these anti-features were intentional. For example, making it hard to pause reels causes them to roll over to the advert reel which is inserted between every two reels.
Pause and rewind have been features since the phonograph. Vinyl and tapes could do it. Youtube did it (yet somehow they botched it for YT Shorts). Tiktok did it. Now Instagram feels like they invented something...
On the web YouTube, one can change the /shorts/ in the URL to /v/ to get the standard and not the "This is a TikTok-clone" interface.
On Android one can install NewPipe and have a better experience (then again, yesterday NewPipe failed to load any video for me, I guess YouTube updated their obfuscation code).
You can pinch-zoom on mobile, but only while you're holding it down. I suspect again this is intentional and the two go together - they don't want you zooming in on limited resolution images, that'll look even worse.
This is a relatively recent feature. And yes, it is almost certainly because the images are awful quality before zooming in, so they want to limit how obvious this is.
Curiously some Reels videos don't have this white bar. Nor do "Story" (i.e. the "we stole this from Snapchat" ephemeral content) videos.
Also it's possible to add videos as a "post" (the OG data model), and they're not reels, and these don't seem to have scrolling capability.
Gotta love the "Let's just throw a bunch of crap onto this thing" architectural design. I remember when Reels (the part that is full of reposted TikTok videos and girls in skimpy clothes advertising their OnlyFans) was called IGTV...
But still... A feature announcement for a fucking pause button is deranged.