Open the YouTube app today, and a Short starts playing before you’ve even tapped anything. Your subscriptions and recommendations are pushed a layer deeper.

This is the hostile takeover of your user experience.

For most of its life, YouTube was a place you visited with a purpose. You searched for tutorials, watched creators you followed, or looked up something specific.

Today, it’s shifted into a platform built around passive scrolling. It’s an attention trap designed to rewire your brain, right beside everything you love.

In competing with TikTok, YouTube is trading away the very qualities that built its success.

How Google built the internet’s greatest classroom

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To understand what’s being lost, we have to remember what made YouTube special in the first place. Before it became a feed, YouTube was a classroom.

There are still millions who use it as an open library of tutorials, explainers, and deep dives made by people who know their craft.

It was the internet’s storytelling engine. It was the place you went to learn how to tie a bow tie, repair a leaky faucet, and understand the fall of the Roman Empire.

Its value was built on depth. The long-form format — anything from 10 minutes to 3 hours — allowed for nuance, research, and personality. This depth is where the community formed.

You didn’t snack on a creator’s content. You invested time. You grew with them. This was the start of the creator business model. For many, it worked because it was sustainable.

A creator’s library of long-form videos was a financial asset. A 40-minute documentary on a niche video game or a detailed makeup tutorial doesn’t die after 24 hours.

It builds a back-catalog that can be discovered in search and pays a creator’s rent for years. This is the central, symbiotic loop that Shorts is breaking.

How YouTube is rewiring your brain for impatience

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The YouTube that built the creator economy relied on attention span. The new YouTube is actively at war with it. This is the audience side of the issue.

The Shorts feed isn’t designed for connection. It’s a slot machine built for consumption, and it’s psychologically engineering you for impatience.

The endless scroll interface perfected by TikTok and cloned by YouTube and everyone else now is a textbook dopamine machine.

Now, connect the dots. YouTube’s most valuable and profitable-for-creators product is long-form content.

But the platform is force-feeding its audience a diet of junk food, conditioning us to see a 20-minute video as too much work.

It’s, in essence, poisoning its own well, actively rewiring us to be incapable of consuming what made YouTube popular.

Creators are working harder for less, and YouTube knows it

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YouTube’s move toward Shorts affects both sides of the screen.

Viewers are being trained to expect faster content, while creators are being pushed toward videos that don’t earn or last the way long-form content does.

The long-form AdSense model is a direct partnership. Advertisers pay to be on a creator’s video, and YouTube gives that creator a 55% cut. The Shorts model is a Creator Pool.

All ad revenue is thrown into a giant pot, YouTube pays the music labels first, and then creators get 45% of whatever is left based on their share of views. That 45% figure is misleading, as it’s a slice of a pre-sliced pie.

A Reddit user, as an experiment, launched a new Shorts channel. In 60 days, they generated a staggering 73.3 million views and gained 49,700 subscribers. The total payout for this viral success was $1,186.

This is not sustainable. It’s a content treadmill for pocket change. The money problem is only part of it. The bigger trap is community.

The algorithm dangles exposure and new subscribers in front of creators who make Shorts, but those numbers don’t translate into a real audience.

That’s because Shorts subscribers aren’t the same audience. They’re tied to the feed, not the channel. They scroll, watch, and move on.

They’re not part of a community. The idea that Shorts will lead viewers to longer videos sounds good on paper, but they rarely stick around for long-form videos.

How YouTube became a dumping ground for stolen videos and AI slop

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If the Shorts algorithm pushes legitimate creators onto a low-value treadmill, it has, by the same token, created the perfect environment for content that is even less than low-value.

It has incentivized the rise of the content landfill. The first and most blatant iteration is stolen content as a business model.

The feed is plagued by scammers and content farms that are stealing existing short-form videos from TikTok and reposting them to YouTube Shorts, racking up millions of views and gaining tens of thousands of subscribers.

It’s not limited to influencers either. Scroll long enough, and you’ll find endless clips chopped from movies, TV shows, and podcasts — all sliced into vertical snippets, watermarks cropped out, and titles rewritten for clicks.

This creates an unwinnable, asymmetric war between the original creators. The second, more cynical evolution of this trend is the AI Slop invasion. This is the treadmill taken to its automated conclusion.

AI slop is defined as content with a lack of effort, quality, or deeper meaning. Think of the infinite copies of the same video with an AI voice-over.

These are not creators. They are content farms running automated spam machines hoping to catch the algorithm in the right way. And the audience is drowning in it.

This is the brain rot and doomscrolling we’ve been warned about. Its content offers zero intellectual or emotional value.

YouTube can’t decide what it wants to be

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This brings us to the central conflict. YouTube is now a platform with a split personality, actively in civil war.

The platform is literally running two separate, conflicting algorithms that reward two opposite behaviors. It’s trying to be a library and a slot machine at the same time.

Creators are now expected to play two different games at once, each with its own rules and rewards, to stay relevant on the platform.

The problem is that the slot machine is actively cannibalizing the library. Shorts now dominate the homepage, show up in search, and autoplay by default on mobile.

The real cost of YouTube’s fear and greed

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YouTube’s shift to Shorts comes from fear and greed. After its ad revenue declined due to competition from TikTok, Google responded by aggressively pushing Shorts.

However, recently, CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Shorts now generates more revenue per watch hour than long-form videos.

An hour of long-form content might be two 30-minute videos. You might see four, maybe six, ad breaks in total. An hour of 30-second Shorts, however, is 120 different videos.

The feed-based model allows YouTube to inject an ad between any one of those 120 videos. The potential ad density is astronomically higher.

This is the new model. It enriches the platform by decoupling its revenue from creator pay. It makes Google richer by making the content it pays for cheaper.

Chasing TikTok at the expense of its soul

YouTube built a global empire on depth, community, and the promise of a sustainable creative career.

Its existential fear of being the new Facebook — the old, irrelevant platform that missed the next big thing — has led it to adopt a model that prioritizes views over value.

This has created a deep identity crisis. The storytelling engine is being hollowed out and replaced by a dopamine machine.

The only question is, can they coexist, or will one inevitably consume the other? And when the dust settles, what will we have lost?