In a 2025 deposition of John Harding, the Vice President of Engineering for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, lawyers representing more than 10,000 plaintiffs confronted Harding about the apparent admission.
"Goal is not viewership, it’s viewer addiction,” an unnamed YouTube employee noted in the email to others. The note appeared to be part of a collection of thoughts from something called “iOS Creator App review.”
Big Cigarette, Big Pharma and Big Alcohol have entered the chat…
Counter: the Ads are why I don’t watch it much. I can only block them on some devices, limiting how I interact with the medium.
Management: um, uh, err, hmmmm
Ugh that website is blinding me! Why isn’t dark mode working on my Firefox extension?!
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I wouldn’t say I’m addicted but Youtube is my go-to site for most things. I can watch anything from the “Crime Story” series from the 1980’s to someone showing me how to mix mortar for basement stone work.
Something about your comment being skimmed quickly made me think “crime…murder…basement…”
That’s the mindset most folks are in right now, but I see what you mean. 😊
Unfortunately works on me. I don’t know how to quit 😅 at least I only watch long form, and with an adblocker, so they’re probably losing money on me. But I just cannot stop, and it’s a bit of a problem…
Do they generate more money when we watch YouTube shorts?
My instinct would be to say, yeah, almost certainly. Not necessarily from any ads in the shorts themselves, but I’m guessing you can extract a lot more from a user who constantly engages in frenzied bursts of dopamine chasing, than one who consumes slower, longer, less frequent content. Even if the longer content technically has more ads.
Maybe the ads would help you getting rid of the addiction.
I don’t generally get addicted to things online and have always avoided yt shorts. Last couple months it somehow managed to sneak into my regular routine. Historically when I did find a rare watchable one I’d convert the link to not be the somehow even worse than the normal viewer.
How the fuck did they suck me in? I don’t know how it started, I don’t even like watching the fucking things. Now I’m considering blanket blocking yt because of it. Insidious bastards
If you want to remove them, you could use something like the unhook.app extension. I only know about it because Pewdiepie linked to it in a recent video, so your milage may vary, but I do know it supports removing shorts entirely.
Have you considered a platform like freetube that allows you to fully block shorts?
I’ve been using it for ages now (desktop application, I use it on Linux, works great), but other platforms for watching YouTube without ads are also likely to have “distraction-free” mode where all that obnoxious shit gets blocked or turned off, like when I view a creator I’m subscribed to the -only- thing that comes up are full-length videos. No community page, no shorts, no playlists and follows, nothing but videos which is what I’m there for.
You also get the perk of blocking ads and sponsored segments, self promotion, etc. so very nice to use.
It does break now and then when YouTube updates, but they typically get it working again pretty quickly.
It seems to primarily be a problem when viewing stuff on my phone tbh, since my laptop is already basically in lockdown. I’m admittedly an old person when it comes to phones; millenial but I didn’t decide to get one until like 2020. Any particular suggestions for something similar that could work well on android?
I hear good things about NewPipe
I used to use that but I’ve switched to Grayjay which lets you also connect a bunch of other platforms.
I don’t use any of those other things (hell I barely use the ones I did connect) so I have no idea how they work, but this might be useful to someone.
PipePipe works well on Android.
Using the ReVanced manager and microG you can patch a YouTube apk really easily to add things like ad block as well as the ability to block YouTube shorts popping up in your feed. It’s amazing. Highly recommend. It’s the only way I can enjoy YouTube on my phone any more.
Unfortunately no, I’m not on android at the moment (much to my chagrin)
However, lots of people around here are super passionate about sharing exactly that information with people, and there’s a solid chance you’ll get an answer to that here if you give it some time. If not, or if you’d like to know now, you can always make a post about it somewhere like asklemmy and you’ll probably get lots of suggestions :)
Sorry I can’t help further with that one!
They still try sneaking up on me byloading the shorts section on the app. I’ll usually see it and close the app and come back later. But sometimes I’m stuck like a deer in headlights
