Leave it to big tech to introduce the same exact product with less features while they gaslight you into believing it’s a shiny new product that you should be excited about.
Big tech is about big money, it has less and less to do with tech
The new feature is how much they shove them down your throat.
When I see “New and improved!!” all I get is “We have found a way to make more money, and we sure as fuck ain’t passing the earnings to you”, or potentially “We faced a lawsuit so have since begun to follow the smallest possible set of FDA guidelines the law allows for, making OUR product safer for YOU!”
Sure our product is made by Filipino children, and sure it pollutes pristine wetlands, and yes, it does unfairly contribute to an insanely skewed distribution of wealth, but think of the INNOVATION!
YouTube is the worst with this, because they’ve even gone so far as to convert older videos under 1 minute to shorts. They weren’t uploaded as shorts, but now congratulations you can’t scrub through the video or share a timestamped link anymore.
Pro tip: if you replace “shorts/” with a “watch?v=” in the URL of a YouTube shorts video, you can watch it like a normal video.
Another pro tip: if you replace the entire URL to “https://www.who.int/health-topics/mental-health”, you can learn about mental health, which is an essential piece of knowledge in the case you watch YouTube shorts.
