What is it with all social media platforms and their incessant desire for shorts, or TikTok videos?

As you know, I’m not using social media now but I’ve only kept YouTube and even that has Shorts! I hate them!

Many of the YouTube channels I’m following lament that there’s been a change to their algorithms. They complain that they’ve lost subscribers or the view counts reduce drastically after a short period which impacts their revenue.

It annoys me that I cannot choose to stop Shorts on YouTube. I simply don’t want to see them. Of course, I can hide them but on the mobile, it’s a temporary solution. They’ll always keep coming up and all they succeed in doing is wasting your time. I keep thinking that there’s an entire world population wasting their lives on watching TikToks.

However, if you’re not creating TikToks or Shorts, you have lower views. So either way, the platforms have the power. They’ve basically won the game for our attention which is worrying.

I’ve got a YouTube channel myself and I’ve hidden all my old social learning videos and renamed and rebadged it as Life Lessons From Books.

The only reason I have The YouTube channel is that I’d like to find a casual or part time job with something to do with books. Given that I have no qualifications in librarianship, growing a YouTube channel about books is my very slow way of showing an interest in books so that hopefully I can somehow gain an entry into that area. I have no interest in going back to pick up a formal education qualification because I simply want to have a casual job for fun, social interest rather than a new vocation at this time of my life.

However I have a few loose rules i follow on on my channel to prevent me going down the rabbit warren of time and attention suck. These are:

• I don’t refer people to anything from Amazon.
• I also don’t create Shorts.
• I don’t promote books from authors who send me their books (I ask them not to)
• I don’t have a regular schedule
• I control the comments published (trust me, there’s some people are just plain nasty).
• I review mainly second hand, borrowed, won (in a competition) or library books or books referred to me in the comments section.
• I’m not selling any product or service
• I never ask anyone to follow or subscribe to the channel or like videos
• In effect, to me it’s just a platform on the chance that it MAY provide me with an “in” into work in the book fields because I don’t have any qualifications or networks in the field.

However, this TikTok craze is annoying me. It’s a blatant push for people to start creating short videos to vie for attention. Thing is, I don’t care about views nor subscriber numbers. I’d hope that they come to the channel of their own accord. Anything else is simply adding pressure on me to consistently create videos which I simply don’t want – or need to do.