Technology

You can hide them with extensions, I'm pretty sure the one I use is called Unhooked, Revanced also works.

Didn't realize that. Gross.

I feel like we'll be having the same conversation about YouTube Shorts in 10 years as we are having about YouTube Gaming today.

Which is to say none.

Not really. I've seen plenty of sponsored YT Shorts, properly tagged and everything so YT's definitely got the infrastructure in place to monetize Shorts. But most sponsors aren't going to pay for a Short because... well, it's too short, so those tend to be few and far between.

However, Shorts aren't profitable for their ability to directly monetize your content, they're profitable for their ability to drive a LOT of new viewers to your longer-form content. The Shorts algorithm is very aggressive at referring you to channels you aren't subscribed to, and that has helped a lot of creators get very large followings, very quickly.

Thor/Pirate Software is an excellent example of this; he's always had a pretty decent following, but once he started putting out YT Shorts, his subscriber and view counts began skyrocketing, which has also overflown into new Twitch subscribers, as well. He started with a small but healthy community, and has blown up into a huge, multi-platform community, and has easily doubled his YT earnings since engaging with Shorts.

Shorts are very helpful to creators right now. More creators need to realize that creating YT Shorts is basically creating ads for your own YT channel, on YT, for free. It's probably the closest thing to "IRL money dupe glitch" that there is.

Not that I disagree but how is tiktok doing it?

That being said, that 20-hour postmortem video on Skyrim feels right given how long I'd guess the playtime is on most people's savegames.

I don't know who really got that trend going. I've enjoyed up to hour-ish long videos on more or less anything, but a few years back the first truly excessively long video I remember is Whitelight's 7 hour long overview/miniseries on Death Stranding. And to be fair, I did find that faster and more enjoyable than playing Death Stranding.

(Also I get why folks make them: more ads plus having that much watch time heavily biases the algorithm towards you so it's more money overall. And the kind of person that watches 7 hour long reviews in the background (or while sleeping), aka me, certainly help weigh the scales for super long videos.)

But also, I kind of like when shorts are like a minute long or less so I can watch one when I'm like, on the shitter and not accidentally end up with a video essay. I mean 10 minutes used to be the limit of every youtube video! Will they introduce a new, even shorter format? Bring vines or blips back?

I use GrayJay/Revanced on Android and Enhancer for YouTube on Firefox (or any browser)

I think that is a setting in freetube. Also some browser extensions can do that.

There are also uBlock Origin custom filters/rules that block all shorts, at least for Firefox/Firefox mobile and its forks AFAIK.

Who wears short shorts? 🎶