It's just annoying, and by no means unique to YT. Companies forcing changes upon users, it's going to be adversarial - especially for people who do use it a lot

It's just annoying, and by no means unique to YT. Companies forcing changes upon users, it's going to be adversarial - especially for people who do use it a lot. People do watch shorts, of course. I can see it can be a good fit on phones, even if it isn't for me. I can also see not wanting to shaft creators who put effort into shorts. Where it falls down is the heavy-handed, passive-aggressive thing of "ok, we'll hide shorts for 30" (in this view only though). My UI criticism is more that for "normal" videos, you'd use home and subscriptions the most, right? So sandwiching stuff between that just feels like they're trying to make you mis-tap on purpose. Maybe Google engineers don't use bumpy public transport? (Or other one-handed scenarios.) Possibly, this is all a projection of the main worry - especially for paying users: If they are willing to degrade the long-form video experience, or at least show little consideration, what does the future of that look like?