I only justed noticed this today, every few minutes a paused YouTube shorts window will restart and try to pull your attention.

If you are distractable, close that shit!

Insidious

i thought most platforms did this -- mine do.

Another reason I have shorts hidden with untrap

Shorts as a format I think are fine. However, you should click on the videos deliberately after reading the titel and watching the thumbnail, like all other videos. Not use the "TikTok" feed.

Agreed... Unfortunately that is how they are delivered so I hide it from homepage and bar... If I want to watch them I go to a specific creator page for their content with auto play disabled

Corrected:

Youtube: terrible for those with ADHD

Protip: If you replace the "shorts" in the URI with "watch", the short gets treated like a normal video and gets the usual UI. There are browser extensions that automatically redirect you so you never have to deal with the weird shorts interface.

Well, for Gecko. I'm not sure if Chromium extensions can do that these days.

I feel like there's an additional intent there. Short bursts of dopamine in quick succession are a pretty addicting drug, and thus making people more distracted and sedated, and if they don't have ADHD, they may get the same focus troubles people with ADHD have.

If you must consume those, I strongly advise to at least redirect to places autoplay or replay isn't triggered. In Youtube's case, there are browser plugins for redirecting, yt-dlp, mobile and PC players, etc.

And expanding a bit, since it's not a problem exclusive to Google...

For TikTok and Odysee, I don't consume their short-format videos so can't comment on those. And for Loops, part of the fediverse, watching externally, e.g. on Mastodon, should give the video in a plain form, without the addicting features.

Installing a ‘shorts blocker’ was so good for my mental health.

Morphite has a way to do this (by replacing the shorts player with the normal player)

just search for "ublock youtube shorts blocker" and thank me later

I acquired a script that simply automatically makes YouTube shorts into regular videos. I still hate the shorts feature but this makes it slightly less bad. Literally all you have to do is take the word shorts out of the videos URL and it turns it into a regular video player. I really hate how they just all loop for no reason

This and always use a web browser and never the app

Why do shorts loop in the first place? What might be any actual use of that feature? Are there people who like rewatching the same 15 seconds shit over and over again?

Omg, on my way to look for this now. Thank you

I use the ImprovedTube browser extension which has a feature to turn all shorts into regular videos, it has saved me so many times from accidentally starting a doomscrolling session.

Doesn't it usually use the previous Short when it does that? I thought it was another one of Youtube's annoying bugs

Do you use YouTube app/web? Or non Google fetch servoce like grayjay? Try that if you have not.