Why are so many YouTube videos portrait rather than landscape now?
Why are so many YouTube videos portrait rather than landscape now?
The sheer number of videos taken "the wrong way round" (for my computer's monitor) is mind-boggling. I get that some people watch videos on their phones, but is it really that many?
I wouldn't even mind vertical videos that much, but the real fucking cancer are vertical videos with baked-in black borders for 16:9 ratio, so you can't view them comfortably on anything and the resolution is like 1/4 of the original.
Bonus if those borders are also filled with ads or other annoying bullshit.
YouTube started monetizing Shorts and reduced the payouts to regular long form YouTube videos which is anything wide screen and over 60 seconds. It's pretty much forcing content creators to start doing Shorts if they want to try and not lose as much revenue
TIL, that's just screwed. Sometimes short form content can be interesting, but 99% of the time I want a video I can watch along to. It's terrible and I don't understand the intense appeal these have. Didn't Vine start it all?
I think there has been a major culture shift. YouTube used to prioritize the subscriber feed where you curated your own content. Now it is the home feed where it is fed by algorithm. Shorts seems to be an extension of this where it is pretty much non stop algorithmic feed. If you were used to the old way the new way seems strange, but if not I guess the new way is more intuitive? I couldn't say
I don't know that there's actual appeal outside of the fact that the format seems to be optimized to give our lizard brains the quick hit. There isn't anything inherently wrong with divided attention - we don't think it's bad when we're having a conversation while watching fish in a pond, for example - but I think Vine, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube Shorts et al are the result of years of data corporations honing in on capitalizing our attention.
I wish I could at least block Shorts.
For uBlock:
! YT Homepage - Hide the Shorts section youtube.com##[is-shorts] ! YT Menu - Hide the Shorts button www.youtube.com###guide [title="Shorts"], .ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer[title="Shorts"] ! YT Search - Hide Shorts www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-video-renderer) ! YT Search and Channels - Hide the Shorts sections www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer ! YT Channels - Hide the Shorts tab www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="channels"] [role="tab"]:nth-of-type(3):has-text(Shorts) ! YT Subscriptions - Hide Shorts - Grid View www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-grid-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-grid-video-renderer) ! YT Subscriptions - Hide Shorts - List View www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-item-section-renderer) ! YT Sidebar - Hide Shorts www.youtube.com###related ytd-compact-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-compact-video-renderer)Doesn't seem to work. Do I need to restart? I still see #shorts videos in my sub feed.
I'm using uBlock Origin.
I'll give it a try but in the past those ublock filters did not really work at all for me.
don't we all.
i have a browser extension that does it
Yeah me too. I don't want to see shorts on my subscriptions page
Youtube is using Shorts to try to compete with TikTok in shortform video.
lol, I initially misread it as "shitform"
It is mis-written as shortform
Because corporate enshittification aka "mobile first", "stories" etc.
Mobile first is a good, valid approach for responsive UI. But these amateur webdevs do mobile ONLY neglecting other UI densities and form factors so all corporate websites look like half-assed phone apps. Not to mention the usage of bloated frameworks to save time.
Not keen on vertical content if it's anything more than a few seconds. This portrait-first approach really seems to have taken off with YouTube Shorts, Instagram and TikTok but for long form videos it's a no-go
Although funny enough, after shorts showing up and getting big attention, I noticed more and more youtubers making longer and longer videos, as if they were trying to go to the polar opposite of shorts
I would assume because most videos are taken from mobile now. Camera quality in phones is crazy good now.
I mean, like I suspect for most people, my phone is my camera too, but it's perfectly capable of taking landscape videos.
I think this is going to be a generational divide. Most of my millennial friends will insist on landscape while zoomers tend to default to portrait.
Right. I only take vertical if I'm showing a tree or a plant but for a scene or most other pics it's horizontal.
My Moto G Stylus even does landscape videos with the phone held vertical. Moto gets me.
Yes mobile devices have far surpassed desktop / laptop computers in usage numbers as of years ago. Landscape was probably the preferred video format for a long time because it works for both mobile and desktop but the mobile dominance is so high at this point in life that I’ll bet no one cares.
On my phone I prefer landscape though. I don't watch any videos in portrait so I skip them. It's no effort to flip the phone sideways lol...
I think it's about short-form vs long-form content.
For casual short videos like TikTok or random shorts that scroll by in Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, portrait makes sense because most people have their phone in that orientation.
For long-form video, landscape is still the norm.
Today's younger generation mostly watch content on their phones, Instagram, tik tok, YouTube etc. They're holding their phone portrait to view this content so that's how they produce content. And that's a popular demographic to target so yeah, it's catching on for better or worse
The overwhelming majority of internet users do so on mobile devices (92%+) and the majority of internet traffic is to mobile devices (55-60% depending on who you ask).
It's also to the point where it's not uncommon for people to not even own a desktop or laptop anymore unless they have a specific need for it. Instead phones and tablets are much more common among people who only ever used computers for casual internet browsing.
Is there a way to block all shorts in my youtube feed?
the only way I found is to press the X on top right and then it is hidden (in theory) for 1 month or so, haven't checked if it's for all devices though. I hate with passion that there is no way of permanently disable it (last time I checked)
If someone knows a way I'll be happy to know it :-)
You can either use the "Enhancer For Youtube" addon, or use Ublock Origin filters. I mainly use Enhancer to both hide shorts and also convert shorts to regular videos.
they try hard to beat tiktok, that's why, and every new feature gets a huge reach, which makes people use it more and more. it kinda sucks ngl
people make videos for tiktok which is for phones and oriented as such. people then repost them to youtube. similarly, youtube shorts are made to copy the tiktok style. So yes, there's a lot of people who watch shortform videos on their phone.
I hope AI can soon fix this, that we can record everything in wide format, and that AI cuts it down to various screen sizes. I dislike VVS, but I can also imagine watching landscape content in portrait is also annoying.
It's not convenient to rotate a screen on a computer to watch a video but a phone? It uses fewer calories than eating celery to rotate a phone.
@Ataraxia i can imagine that scrolling trough a feed, you don’t want to be turning your phone every 10seconds.
They are trying to make it realistic and unedited with the use of mobile phones and Youtube shorts. They are trying to compete with TikTok when their market is clearly somewhere else.