Unfortunately, it is genius.
Most people I see are hugely addicted on doom scrolling content and shorts are part of it.
If you haven’t hade use of selecting “not interested” on videos. You should now. I barely get brain rot recommended to me but sometimes the alg is very persistent.
First time I found shorts it was crap the second time though I wasted 2 hours on shorts. That stuff is evil.
But that requires me to watch shorts to judge them… I don’t know if that’s worth it, to be honest.
People can’t be arsed to turn their phones sideways
When smartphones were still a new thing, I kept preaching to take videos sideways because all useful playback devices were sideways. Man, how that has changed…
pretty simple. [the video site] sees how popular tiktok is and wants to get a slice of that “short format” pie. It incentivizes content creators to make content that fits the format by promoting it on the algorithm. If there is a shortage of content in that format (and for that type of audience), anything semi-decent will do, eg. highlights from longer videos. As the algorithm needs to fill that quota of videos somehow