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by losvedir 61 days ago
Damn, yeah that's what I was hoping for.

Honestly, the only thing really keeping me from watching shorts is the perplexing UX decision to not show the channel name as part of the preview tile. As basic Internet hygiene it just feels real bad to click on a video without the tiniest bit of idea about its provenance. For that reason I never do and have always just wanted to hide Shorts altogether.

3 comments

I don't watch shorts because of the type of content it encourages - short clickbait content for the attention deficit.

I want long form, well researched, well put together content. These types of content takes a long time to produce, unfortunately, and the youtube algorithm doesn't favour it.

These types of content takes a long time to produce

Unless they're AI slop, of course. Between shorts and AI slop, worthwhile content on YouTube will soon become almost impossible to find...

That's where off-platform, trust worthy sources are important.

Over the years, i've curated a lot of subscriptions on youtube of such long form content (talking about things like Primitive Technology, Smarter Everyday, etc).

It simply sucks that youtube has gutted the UI for subscriptions - the layout is horrible, i can't scan it as they removed the list view, etc. And sometimes subscribed channel's videos don't even show up there - you have to visit the channel page directly to see the new videos.

it's almost as if they want people to rely only on the home page and the recommended videos from their algo.

Honestly I'd sometimes like a checkbox to ignore any results uploaded after, say 2023. Or else to only see 'verified non-AI' content. There is nothing I'd ever search Youtube for where an AI generated video would be an acceptable answer.
I use the control panel for youtube plugin - there is an option that any short plays in the traditional player. It also has lets you customize the thumbnail grid sizes. it is a little over aggressive with its defaults but you can turn them off. it has a lot of options
If TikTok does it that way (I have no idea if it does actually), YouTube obviously has to copy that! If a fishy channel name stops you from clicking on a short, that hurts your engagement, and that's the last thing social media companies want.