Show HN: YouTube Shorts Redirector (opens in new tab)

Ludicrous that they made such an openly user-hostile interface. Won't show you runtime, won't show you the clip author, just maximally entice the user to click so they get sucked into the infinite dopamine machine. Absolutely unconscionable.

Tip: you can click on any comment's date (e.g. 9 months ago) to automatically redirect to a standard Youtube video.

Plus adjust the volume! Really speaks to the modern state Google's in that they took out their own functionality to more closely clone TikTok, I assume. Paul Graham's got an old quote about what it indicated about Microsoft when they decided to clone Google's business, and it comes to mind every time I see those terrible and vertical thumbnails.

Even better, turn off your watch history and in a few months Shorts refuses to work :)

Thanks, I manually hide them every thirty days because I didn't know that ublock origin can do that, and I didn't want to install an extra add-on just for that (because I hoped that YouTube would some day realise how bad shorts are, and give up on them; wishful thinking, I know).

That's a good option, since it will make the whole experience much more intentional. Carefully selecting what you want to watch and committing to it without having the option to immediatelly skim through it before it's completely downloaded, or to frantically jump from video to video, without ads, nor stumbling upon comments, nor "suggested" videos, is certainly a good thing. You could always use any Invidious instance listed on https://invidio.us, though, if you have good impulse control and prefer streaming to downloading and watching offline.

You might enjoy my app (iOS only) to load and save the video and show you the transcript so you can only focus on that video https://www.appblit.com/scribe

Redirector is great, but unfortunately is no longer maintained because the author passed away[0].

[0] https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector/issues/329

I think these short form videos will hurt us in the long run. Thank you for sharing this.

Thankfully when the channels whose RSS I am subscribed to posts a YouTube short, they are kind enough to add hashtags all over the place. It's practically muscle memory now to mark any entry with a hashtag as red without checking

I use wrapper RSS that adds 3 autogenerated thumbnails from which you see that it is short (because of the black boxes) and you can skip it. You can maybe analyze pixels of those thumbnails.