I don't use YouTube on my iPhone very often, and when I do, I'm almost always terrified by what awful new features they've added that'll inevitably be even more detrimental to the user experience when they end up on the desktop site. YouTube Shorts was and still is a perfect example.

Now, before we get into the meat of this rant burger, (wow, I refuse to believe I'm even capable of writing such an awful sentence.) I want to go over precisely why vertical video is an awful thing that really should be classified as a crime against humanity. First off, it's not natural; your eyes aren't stacked on top of each other, otherwise there'd be even more pedestrian collisions than there already are. Widescreen TVs exist specifically because the wider aspect ratio is closer to our field of vision. Hell, even 4:3 is closer to it than any vertical aspect ratio, and that's considered a Ye Olde Times way of recording by people who have been around longer than many species of aquatic life.

Secondly, it looks awful on any device aside from a cell phone (and even then, every cell phone has a different aspect ratio these days, so that's a pretty dated statement now that we're no longer in the age of cell phone screens coming in any aspect ratio you want, as long as it's 9 by 16. Computer monitors (for the most part) aren't meant to be turned sideways, and even those that do often require changing settings that require multiple steps, or as Apple would probably say, flipping your whole world on its side is just 19 clicks away!

Yes, I'm aware that smart devices are the dominant form of content consumption in 2022, but note the fact that I said smart devices. That means phones, tablets, refrigerators that waste a bunch of energy illuminating a giant useless screen, etc. Tablets often use different aspect ratios (yes, I'm aware that Android tablets exist and often have a 16:9 display, but those were dead on arrival and still aren't any good) so vertical video doesn't look good on those either.

And with smart TVs becoming an even more common place to watch videos than computers, I could say the same thing. Vertical video only looks good alright on phones, and even then, that's only true for the phone that recorded it.

I think the most important reason is that vertical video often crops out a bunch of the stuff you're trying to record. Want to record a parade? Try holding your phone horizontally, that way all the parade vehicles are in frame and it doesn't look like some lone parade float driver got left behind there. Trying to record a group of people in Ukraine standing together to block a line of Russian tanks from travelling down a road? Record it horizontally, otherwise people might just think those tanks are in a traffic jam.

Okay, I feel like I exaggerated quite a bit there, but you probably understand where I'm coming from now. So when YouTube saw TikTok's truly hilarious and highly comedic videos of a person pretending to say a thing that another person said, of course they wanted in. After all, YouTube is the Internet's Waste Management, collecting all the trash out there to dump on their own grounds, and getting rid of things that made the world a better place like community captions, the same way glass recycling has been killed off in so many places during the last decade.

Enter YouTube Shorts, the internet equivalent of a jug of spoiled milk covered in dog shit. I know, what a beautiful thing to imagine. YouTube Shorts came to the mobile app sometime between 2020 and 2022, I truly don't care enough to remember. Just like Instagram Reels, I thought it was a stupid and extremely intrusive feature that got in the way while doing absolutely nothing original. Almost every video from the brief time when I decided to try YT Shorts was nothing more than a re-upload from TikTok, where no sane person would've found it funny either.

I was already worried about what would happen if they tried adding Shorts to the desktop and the possible civil unrest (or even civil war?) that could come out of them doing so. The UI is a massive downgrade from the standard player on mobile, but on a computer it's even worse than trying to write your signature using a mouse. As I probably don't even need to point out, the option for the captions is hidden behind even more pop-up menus than normal, making it an accessibility nightmare. Oh, and don't even get me started on the lack of fast-forwarding or rewinding. Sure, they did bring this one back recently, but for the longest time you also couldn't even look at the video description or the upload date, the latter of which is especially important for how-to videos because now information can be out-of-date without the user even knowing.

But by far the worst things about YouTube Shorts are the fact that it's gotten many of the people who hated ultra-short-form content addicted to ultra-short-form content, and the recommendations. If you're in a public place, you better hope nobody glances at your computer screen when you're browsing YouTube's home page and the first thing on that bar of YouTube Shorts is a video called "teacher calls student N(you know exactly what fucking word I'm censoring here)" and 2 other shorts have thumbnails containing scantily clad women.

While I've tried clicking "not interested" on many of these videos several times so that nobody sees that my YouTube is trying to recommend me Shorts with uncensored racial slurs in the title, it seems like the algorithm is desperate to get my high school to execute me via firing squad, as similar videos appear every single time I go to YouTube. It seems like YT only shows trending Shorts on the home page rather than actually curating them for you or anything of that sort.

After finding out how little control I have over YouTube trying to put the edgiest content on my screen, the solution was clearly finding a browser extension that hides YouTube Shorts from the home page, or better yet, from the entire website.
The only problem? Those don't exist.