Have you ever found yourself opening up the YouTube app, coming across a recommendation for a YouTube Short, clicking on it and consequently losing hours of your time watching Short after Short after Short? Without this ever having been your intention? You feel paralyzed, just completely stuck scrolling. Perhaps you even realize while watching what you are doing is wasting precious time, yet you cannot stop. You might even realize that what you're watching isn't even that interesting to you, yet... you can. not. stop.

Studies show that short-form content is highly addictive in nature and can have a severe impact on people's attention span. This being the case, since the introduction of YouTube Shorts, YouTube is no longer safe for people with addictive personalities or predispositions or people with disorders related to attention (such as ADD/ADHD). In an attempt to copy the success of platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, YouTube has also copied the attention span destroying and highly addictive nature of these platforms in an attempt to increase viewer retention through habit-forming and keep people using their app or website for longer, thus creating more revenue from ads. This has been highly succesful for YouTube, demonstrated by the absolutely colossal amount of views these Shorts have generated in a relatively short amount of time.

For people that easily fall prey to these tactics (such as myself) this development can however be life altering: they may feel unable to tear themselves away and focus on more important matters, thus neglecting other (important) tasks and/or negatively impacting their motivation to take the actions needed to improve their life. Addiction can be described as behaviour that you keep repeating despite it having a negative impact on your life, and I believe consuming short-form content definitively fall into this category.

It's important to know that short-form content activates the same dopaminergic pathways as other highly addictive substances such as nicotine or alcohol. In that sense it is a very "real" addiction, no less so than addiction to certain drugs for example. Though the degree of debilitating effects of consuming media versus doing drugs can is debatable, that is not relevant to this discussion. The fact that short-form content can be debilitating and can harm certain people should be enough to warrant immediate action. 

If this unchecked proliferation of short-form content is allowed to continue people that suffer from the above mentioned disorders or predispositions will continue to be harmed. Furthermore, it is highly possible that children growing up watching these videos will be adversely affected. We don't yet fully know or understand the effects of consuming large quantities of short-form content on the developing brains of children, but it doesn't take a genius to understand that most likely the effect is not a positive one. As a father myself, I worry about what this kind of technology is doing to kids, especially to those that are already vulnerable in one way or another.

Thus the request to YouTube and Google Inc. is simple: give people the option to turn this off and opt-out. Make it possible for users to go into YouTube settings and "disable" or "hide" YouTube Shorts, so that they no longer receive short-form content in their recommendations or feed. This will allow both people that are actively trying to steer clear of addictive forms of content and parents who do not want to expose their kids to this kind of content to regain some control over what the app/website does and doesn't present to its users.

We are not asking for YouTube to discontinue or even delete the Shorts section of YouTube, as that would be unreasonable, but simply to add functionality that allows certain users to protect themselves or their families.

We sincerely hope YouTube takes this into consideration and is willing and able to offer more protection to its more vulnerable users, before more harm comes to them.