YouTube shorts was the dumbest fucking idea. They have a niche: long-form (as in >1min) video content. They are dominant in that niche. Then they saw TikTok was popular and dominating the short-form video scene, and their response was… “we should switch to making more short form”. WTF?! And on top of that, they’ve diverted resources away from their main product (longer videos) as the article says. It just seems like such a catastrophic unforced error.