this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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[–] MrJameGumb 129 points 10 months ago (8 children)

I still don't understand the appeal of YouTube shorts... It feels like the rational behind it is "hey, I can watch 10 meaningless shorts in the same amount of time it would take to watch one video that has an actual point". I guess that's why I've never gotten in to tiktok either lol

[–] lightnegative 67 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Would it make more sense if they were labelled "YouTube Dopamine Hits" ?

[–] MrJameGumb 47 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Is it even a dopamine hit though? I watched a handful of them and they all seemed to just be someone yelling at the camera for 5 seconds, then a 5 second shot of whatever the hell they were yelling about, then 10 to 15 seconds of them asking me to like and subscribe.

[–] ElectroVagrant 33 points 10 months ago (1 children)
[–] TheBat 36 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

this pic goes so incredibly hard

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

No, that actually took effort and creativity to make. Not enough bombardment of emojis and TTS.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

I use shorts for cute animal videos, that's their only legitimate purpose imo

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Would that make a list of shorts a line? Can I snort them?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 10 months ago

There isnt any appeal. It is just them trying to carve into that tiktok market, but the people watching tiktok are already just watching tiktok, so it is basically just there to annoy the rest of us.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

i hate it because I can't move through the timeline

[–] Holyhandgrenade 11 points 10 months ago

Tiktok just doesn't seem worth it to me. Why would I spend days scrolling past cringey dance videos until the algorithm figures me out, when I can just see all the best Tiktoks reposted on Lemmy and Reddit?

[–] ThatWeirdGuy1001 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

It's funny because everyone shits on tiktok for it's short videos yet I regularly watch videos that are 3-5 minutes long if not longer.

Your feed shows you what you interact with. Outside of ads I rarely see content that's not related to my interests and most of the videos I see are much longer than a vine.

Which is especially ironic to me how vines weren't considered attention span killing brain rot that everyone sees tiktok to be.

[–] Holyhandgrenade 9 points 10 months ago

Vines were never culturally ubiquitous enough for old people to know what they were and rant about it.

[–] MrJameGumb 6 points 10 months ago

Unless I'm looking up something very specific I generally don't bother with videos that are less than 15 minutes long anymore. Otherwise I feel like I'm spending more time looking for more videos than actually watching them...

[–] saltesc 7 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Your algorithm still suggests videos that have a point?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Mine is mostly educational content.

[–] flames5123 4 points 10 months ago

I get the appeal, I just hate that I can’t cast them to my TV normally. I can watch shorts on the TV, but I have to disconnect the devices (phones). I can watch it on my phone, but I have to disconnect from the TV, ending the queue. BUT I can watch them on my phone the look into my history and cast them as a normal video. WHY IS THIS PROCESS EVEN THERE IF THERE CAN BE A NORMAL FUCKING VIDEO???

I’m just so tired of the stupid shit.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

The appeal is to the creators, resulting from the differences in unit economics for monetisation structures related to youtube shorts, tiktok, reels, snapchat etc., vs. conventional youtube, facebook or instagram videos.

And also there's appeal to Youtube as a platform, being a place logically suited to this new paradigm of shorter vertical videos where discovery is mostly algorithmically driven but having some issues with the organisational structure of their content that make it uncompetitive with platforms which popularised the format.

It's not appealing to Youtube users because a choice to use Youtube has historically always included a deference to the conventional youtube video format. People that prefer tiktok format would organically become tiktok users not because tiktok is a better platform than Shorts for it, but because youtube already existed and established its own format, so it's not the logical place to go for something that isn't that.