"Enhancer For Youtube" is a firefox extension that disables much of the nonsense in Youtube's UI. I can't use youtube without it anymore. There might be a chrome version? Idk, using chrome with youtube is dumb af tho so probably don't do that.

Using Chromium-based browsers is the only way to play HDR videos, since Mozilla is dragging their feet for years with implementing support for that. I use Firefox for everything except for YouTube because of that.

But if you're in the same boat, at least use something that has an adblocker, like Brave, Vivaldi or Opera.

Just out of curiosity, what channels on YT do you follow that upload HDR content regularly?

Shorts are up to 3 minutes long now. At this point they are just vertical videos. I fully expect the supported length to keep increasing!

Vertical videos with much shitter UI. Inability to skip ahead or turn back may be understandable for <30 second videos, but not more.

Shorts are normal videos too, so you can view them in the normal player.

I have a redirect rule that redirects https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<video-id> to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<video-id>

And auto repeat, sadly.

Auto-repeat is the thing that most mystifies me about shorts. I understand the idea behind auto-play, although I disable it; but who on earth wants to watch the exact thing they just watched by default?

Given the success of TikTok, the answer is apparently, "billions of people", but I just don't get it.

> but who on earth wants to watch the exact thing they just watched by default

Wrong question.

The right question is: "Do we blindly copy Instagram?"

My theory is that it is a way of forcefully grabbing people’s attention.

Without autoplay there is no engagement once the video is over. With autoplay there is the risk someone leaves the player on the background and ignores it. With looping videos people get annoyed and (if they’re like me) close the tab or skip to the next video just to get something different

And no captions

Ctrl + Right click, Show controls will bring up the classic controls (play, pause, volume, seek, full screen) on Firefox. I'm sure other browsers have something similar. Haven't found a way to turn this on permanently for all videos though :/

They put seek controls on them quite a while back.

All vertical videos I've uploaded have automatically turned into shorts and there doesn't seem to be a way to toggle this.

Add black bars manually or make them longer than 3 minutes.

Nah shorts have a different culture and style. I don’t mean anything technical. For me I can’t stand the style and I avoid it completely.

Most of them seem to be sped up so it's impossible to understand any speech unless you're all wired up on stimulants.

New prophecy just dropped

Maybe in the future they will support horizontal shorts as well. /s

What's crazy is that I can't turn them off for my children.

I complain about it to Google. They ignore it. They couldn't possibly give a shit.

I should probably complain to my congressman. Who also won't do shit even if they actually give a shit.

You could just not let your kids go on YouTube.

There's a long history of people not using it. Most people today don't use it.

I successfully kept my kids off of YouTube until their elementary school gave them Chromebooks. Then they were at least only on YouTube during class.

YouTube has a lot of really positive educational content. I have learned so much from it. For instance, I was able to learn photography from it. Yes it’s still social media in a way, but the benefits can really outweigh the drawbacks with proper use.

Shorts as a whole are incredibly addictive and have a much lower benefit to drawback ratio. Parents should be able to make this cost/benefit decision for their kids. I wish I could turn them off for myself. I settled on only using YouTube on my laptop because shorts don’t have the same appeal in that context.

If you disable watch history, youtube tries to "punish" you by disabling nearly the non-subscription recommendations and shorts not from your subscriptions and a number of other things.

Worth a try.

Brave has a setting to disable YouTube shorts. Both on the mobile app, and desktop version.

Settings -> media -> "Block YouTube Shorts".

There are also other settings related to YouTube. Brave is the only thing I'd use for YouTube on mobile.

It really is. I've been using Revanced to patch out the Shorts feature on my phone, works decently well, but I'm technically violating the ToS with that, despite shelling out 15€/month for it. Obnoxious.

Ive installed a browser extension to remove them on the desktop.

There should absolutely be a better answer here.

maybe there will be another tier of youtube premium in a few years that removes shorts, and people can try to guilt you for blocking them using browser extensions like they do for ad blocking.

The most worrying bit is that politicians are super concerned about "algorithmic content" for kids, like TikTok or Instagram Reels or Snapchat.

Youtube Shorts? Crickets.

It's IMPOSSIBLE to disable it with parental controls and it has the exact same slop as the other vertical video services.

Which kinda sucks because I'm fine with my kids watching horizontal youtube videos by certain creators, but I'd rather not they have access to the infinite pool of shorts unfiltered.

I don't even see any shorts, unless I click the shorts tab on the web.

In the Android app it's literally just one line, which I have to scroll down to... like two pages.