As someone who pays for YouTube, I don't understand why I can't disable shorts fully. They already have my money. What more do they want?

The subscription revenues is a decent chunk of your lifetime value (LTV) as a customer, but it's not all of it. The goal here is to squeeze as much value from you aside from that as possible, measured mostly by two things, really: the direct ad revenue, measured by dollars that go on the balance sheet, and the indirect "engagement" value measured by the KPIs (think daily, weekly, monthly active users) that go into the quarterlies. The more time you spend on the platform, the more "things" you have got used to interacting with (aka day-to-day, week-to-week "retention"), the more they can potentially "sell" to you -- and it's not just ads / youtube subscription upsells, it can be and often is other "products" on the same platform: their music streaming, their search, their documents and emails, maps, drive, etc. etc. And it just so happens that the short format is _really, really_ engaging for many folks.

The more time you spend in the mall, the fuller are the bags on the way out, be it out of chance, habit, or convenience.

Google is a monopolist. They have no real competitive pressure, so they're incentivized to extract as much value from you as possible rather than waste time trying to retain you as a user (cuz where are you gonna go lol). Forcing short form video on you could be seen as either an attempt to get you addicted to the format, or just a way for some product manager to fluff up their metrics for a promotion.

No matter what you decide to do, they're going to profit off of you. The only remaining question is "how much".

Personally, I don't want to make it easy for them. That's why I like to use alternative YouTube frontends that limit data collection and block ads. I sure as shit don't pay for premium. Whatever effect that has on their business is likely negligible, but it at least makes me feel better about the situation.

You can. Turn off Youtube history, it disables shorts. Not an ideal solution if you actually did want to keep your Youtube history, but this works.

Sadly this requires a browser plugin. Happily, those exist. I also pay for YT and use "enhancer for youtube" which can do a plethora of things, one of which is to disable shorts.

They want more of your money. They will monetize you as much as they can. You're just a well-supported, paying product.

By being a paying subscriber, you've indicated:

* that you grow attached to video content if they can get in front of you

* that you have disposable income

* that you're willing to spend disposable income on video content and probably other things

* that people associated with you, those you network with on their system and those you share content with via links, are more likely to share one or more of these traits with you, compared to people they know nothing about

By paying them, you've inherently invited them to try to squeeze more value from you and betrayed that your own social network probably includes many similarly ripe marks for subscription sales or effective ads.

So pushing the content they think best represents their future income streams, in hopes that you eventually grow attached to it, or at least occassionally share it with your network of ripe marks, is of course going to be their strategy.

In the modern marketplace, subscriptions don't buy you out of ads or capitalist annoyances, they just suggest that you're an even more valuable target for sales and marketing than those who haven't.

There's some thoughtful comments here already, but I wonder the same thing constantly as a fairly addicted user of YouTube who wants to avoid short form video altogether.

I think Premium users tend to be the most affluent desirable group for ad targeting (similar to iOS users on other platforms) and even though YT Premium lets you avoid ads on YouTube, I suspect one's activity feed/"algorithm" on YouTube factors a lot into Google (and others'?) ad targeting. The same eerily effective feedback loop for getting TikTok and YouTube suggestions works better with short-form video, so even if users aren't seeing ads, YouTube still has an incentive to have people use it. So, there's money to be made in dialing in your "algorithm" from using YT Shorts even if you're a premium user.

I'm sure the other stuff about KPIs for increasing usage of shorts to compete with other media sites is accurate too

This is my frustration as well. It seems like Premium should be all about optimizing for the experience the user wants, without the same dark patterns as the ad-supported site.

The worst is search. Shorts are fine as a row in the recommended stuff that I can watch if I want something short or mindless, but when I search I almost always want a normal video. In the iPhone app I can filter for normal videos, but on the AppleTV, the search is 85% shorts to the point of being useless.

Get Unhook extension (for desktop)

Use the Brave browser and look at the inbuilt filtering (search for "Content Filters" in settings), it allows explicit removal of shorts via enabling of "YouTube Anti-Shorts" filter list. Does the job beautifully.

Yeah, I find it odd how hard they push it, like trying to shove it down my throat levels of pushing shorts. I already use their platform heavily, just for regular videos. My guess is they get more data from how you interact with shorts and they find that to be super valuable info over what they get from regular video watching.

They want you to never unsubscribe, which requires your addiction.

Incentive to addict + Ability to addict = outcome

People are less likely to quit buying something when they’re addicted to it.

Google wants you to be addicted to YouTube. It makes you more likely to renew.

And it helps keep you off competing platforms (TikTok, reels, etc).

I would consider paying premium if they allowed me to disable shorts

The best thing you can do is stop paying and wean yourself off YouTube. It’s terrible for your mental health.

I use ublock origin for this. Also the NYT Opinion section because ain’t nobody got time for that nonsense.

Honestly, I use revanced on my android phone which lets me disable all shorts content appearing. and on browser if i stick to the subscriptions tab and maybe the sidebar on videos, there's no shorts.

Also the weird YouTube Playable Games thing that shows up every few weeks.

they want your time

companies don't work like people, there is no limit to their desires. Trying to appeal to the good taste of a trillion dollar company is, as the anecdote goes, like letting a tiger swallow you up to the shoulders and then demand that it spare your head.

[dead]

I wonder what the issue is with shorts? Usually if I look something up on youtube (say a how-to or a product review), I don't want to see a half hour of blithering that could be compressed to a tweet. I generally pick the shortest video I can find about whatever it is. If it's limited to under a minute that's great. I'd really rather have a text post than a video, but those don't seem to exist any more.