> Youtube shorts affected countless Youtubers who made their careers on the platform. They stole the target audience of regular-length videos which lead to a de

> Youtube shorts affected countless Youtubers who made their careers on the platform. They stole the target audience of regular-length videos which lead to a decrease in the watch time for longer videos. Youtube neglected its core audience in favor of increasing user retention based on a current trend. Established Youtubers like Marques Brownlee and Mrwhosetheboss had to create a secondary shorts channel to keep up with their audience. I think this part is the most remarkable of the article. Yes, at this point, we all know about surveillance capitalism, the attention economy, amusing ourselves to death and all that jazz. However, here is a concrete example where a platform operator actively forces its content creators to make their content more addictive. That's not the invisible hand of the market driving youtubers to do a particular thing, it's the quite visible hand of youtube.