YouTube is facing growing backlash over its short-form content, with users now urging the platform to spin off Shorts into a separate app. Critics say the TikTok-style feature has overwhelmed the main site and made it harder to find full-length videos.
Launched in 2021, YouTube Shorts was Google’s answer to the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels. The feature now dominates the homepage, search results, and recommendations. That’s exactly the problem, according to frustrated users.
While Shorts are here to stay, with the clips receiving 200 billion views each day, many users believe that YouTube made a big mistake by making the clips part of the standard YouTube platform instead of its own separate entity.
Users demand Shorts be separate from YouTube
On July 5, X user Lakshya Lark posted a viral tweet calling out the platform. “YouTube should’ve made Shorts its own app. It’s ruined the YouTube experience, every search is flooded with Shorts now.”
Lark further noted that a permanent filter to “escape” Shorts would be ideal instead of needing to change the settings each time.
The post was later shared to r/YouTube, where it exploded with over 100,000 upvotes and thousands of comments echoing the sentiment.
“If you try to search for something even remotely obscure, your results’ll be flooded with random Shorts that have nothing to do with your search,” one user replied.
“It even shows videos that have nothing to do with your search. It’s because ‘YOU MIGHT LIKE IT,’ as they put it,” another added.
Many users said Shorts disrupted what made YouTube different in the first place. Long-form content and deep-dive videos are being buried beneath algorithmically pushed Shorts.
“YouTube is the one place where I don’t want to watch Shorts,” one user wrote. “I actually want to watch full-length videos.”
The frustration has already pushed some users to cancel their Premium subscriptions.
“This is one of the 3 main reasons I canceled my subscription and found other sources,” one commenter said.
YouTube has yet to respond to the growing calls for a separate Shorts app. But the backlash highlights a bigger issue about what users actually want from the platform.
The site also opted to start showing ads on Shorts for users who subscribe to YouTube Premium Lite, a cheaper version of the traditional Premium service.
Google has also come under fire for adding some of its controversial features to YouTube, such as AI overviews, something that Google Search has been heavily criticized for.
Content shared from www.dexerto.com.