Shorts

2026-05-12

---

My daily Internet experience is quite different from the norm. Most of what I see online is text, and if not, it's long-form video content such as a full sporting event or a deep dive into a given topic. When I peruse YouTube for these videos, though, I can't avoid seeing shorts, or at the least, previews for them.

I hate modern short-form videos. Beyond the issue that 30-second videos by nature cannot contain enough information to make me well-informed on their subjects, but current-day video formatting is a bloated nightmare. People talk fast and with way too much energy. The videos are full of sound effects and music. There are tons of transitions that are deliberately designed to confuse the eye. Every spoken word is subtitled, sometimes with distracting fonts, and often using some automated tool that doesn't even select the right words.

Subtitles particularly annoy me, and I wish I could turn them off. I'm not interested in reading English subtitles for an English-language video: my ears can comprehend the language just fine, and the screen should be reserved for direct visual data that is not being expressed in words. If I want subtitles for some reason, I want to actively decide to enable them. But for the vast majority of short content, the subtitles are burned into the video, and I can't block them.

On desktop, YouTube offers the ability to filter search results by video length. One can find videos less than 4 minutes long, 4 to 20 minutes long, or longer than 20 minutes. I almost always use those tools to filter out shorts, and the fact that NewPipe doesn't include such a filter is frustrating.

---

Up One Level

Home

[Last updated: 2026-05-12]