Sewell Setzer was a happy child - before he fell in love with a chatbot and took his own life at 14. His mother has now filed a lawsuit against the most powerful company in the world.
Ok, these channels also have the normal length videos covering topics of interest. The shorts seem to be rather a byproduct. How do you personally use them? Do you search for a specific activity or is that part of doom-scrolling shorts?
I don’t really try to consume shorts but YouTube presents them regardless of if you’re looking for them or not. I don’t even search out woodworking or gardening, I usually look for specific “how to disassemble things” videos or guides for video games but the algorithm always seems to get there sooner or later. Sometimes something will catch my eye and I’ll watch it which is how I discovered these guys. I don’t really doomscroll on shorts and if I start it’s usually only 2-3 videos before I hit something stupid that snaps me out of it but I’ve literally never watched https://www.youtube.com/@WorkshopCompanion full videos or seen one of them on my dashboard but their shorts are insanely dense with information. They’re my ideal YouTube “how to” video. If all content creators where like that we’d be living in the futuristic part of that one meme. My point was not all short form content is bad.
In practice I don’t know if I’ve ever had a relevant short come up when I was trying to find how to do a specific thing. Usually if I need help with something it’s more complicated than a short would allow for. I have seen “How to” shorts for all kinds of stuff come across my feed though that were pretty good. So if one came up when I was looking for how to do something I would watch it. That quick, concise format is exactly what I want usually when I’m trying to figure out how to do something. It skips all the “Hi I’m xxxx, welcome to my channel, blah blah blah” shit that the longer videos have. My main point was that not all this content is worthless brainrot stuff. Regardless of if it’s useful to you or me in particular someone else may find it valuable.
I agree that videos that take 15 minutes to explain something that could have been explained in 5 suck. A video explaining how to tie a bowline should be longer than a minute. However shorts with useful content are quite rare, maybe not even 1% of shorts content. Still there is useful information, thanks for pointing that out - I even found this useful knot
The biggest problem with shorts IMO is the presentation. You get force fed brain rot junk. Even when you klick on the links to specific videos like you and I provided you are taken to a stream of videos where the next videos are usually of the brain rot type.
Seeing how children are affected by this format/phenomenon and how the extremist right has used it for political gain I think it dangerous to leave it unregulated. I thinks it is possible to prevent the junk watching part without content-based restriction.
Ok, these channels also have the normal length videos covering topics of interest. The shorts seem to be rather a byproduct. How do you personally use them? Do you search for a specific activity or is that part of doom-scrolling shorts?
I don’t really try to consume shorts but YouTube presents them regardless of if you’re looking for them or not. I don’t even search out woodworking or gardening, I usually look for specific “how to disassemble things” videos or guides for video games but the algorithm always seems to get there sooner or later. Sometimes something will catch my eye and I’ll watch it which is how I discovered these guys. I don’t really doomscroll on shorts and if I start it’s usually only 2-3 videos before I hit something stupid that snaps me out of it but I’ve literally never watched https://www.youtube.com/@WorkshopCompanion full videos or seen one of them on my dashboard but their shorts are insanely dense with information. They’re my ideal YouTube “how to” video. If all content creators where like that we’d be living in the futuristic part of that one meme. My point was not all short form content is bad.
Sorry, I’m trying to understand your use case and it is still unclear to me. Did you ever seek out a short video to use as a how to?
In practice I don’t know if I’ve ever had a relevant short come up when I was trying to find how to do a specific thing. Usually if I need help with something it’s more complicated than a short would allow for. I have seen “How to” shorts for all kinds of stuff come across my feed though that were pretty good. So if one came up when I was looking for how to do something I would watch it. That quick, concise format is exactly what I want usually when I’m trying to figure out how to do something. It skips all the “Hi I’m xxxx, welcome to my channel, blah blah blah” shit that the longer videos have. My main point was that not all this content is worthless brainrot stuff. Regardless of if it’s useful to you or me in particular someone else may find it valuable.
I agree that videos that take 15 minutes to explain something that could have been explained in 5 suck. A video explaining how to tie a bowline should be longer than a minute. However shorts with useful content are quite rare, maybe not even 1% of shorts content. Still there is useful information, thanks for pointing that out - I even found this useful knot
The biggest problem with shorts IMO is the presentation. You get force fed brain rot junk. Even when you klick on the links to specific videos like you and I provided you are taken to a stream of videos where the next videos are usually of the brain rot type.
Seeing how children are affected by this format/phenomenon and how the extremist right has used it for political gain I think it dangerous to leave it unregulated. I thinks it is possible to prevent the junk watching part without content-based restriction.