there was an indication that YT shorts was able to be gamed, and it was unstoppable. I tested the theory and it was true for a short while, but it looks like google was able to "stop it". If you uploaded a #shorts tagged video it would be fed to everyone seemingly "at random" and you would get a ton of views and interaction. I uploaded a dumb 8 second video about the local mail truck and it got 800 views, far more than any other video i've uploaded in the last decade.

I don't know that google even actually fixed it, i think the idea that it could be gamed sort of fixed it by deluge of #shorts videos, this diluting the pool so that your video was less likely to appear at random.

This is simplified a bit; but the point is, once upon a 2008ish, youtube decided that monetization should be harder, and this was around the time that fully monetized videos were required to be 10 minutes long. This was a paradigm shift, considering that in the old days there were length limits to individual videos imposed on youtube (and google videos), first being quite short (possibly even 10 minutes) and eventually ran out to 30 minutes, and now where i'm unsure if there's even a 'real' limit on video length. I know there are some 20+ hour videos on youtube.

So in order to appease advertisers, youtube made it so content producers had to fill their time with fluff, which is why there was an adage that still holds true - on a computer, when a youtube video starts, press "3" to skip the irrelevant stuff (hey guys its... hit the like and...).

Tiktok and instagram have brought back the drive-by short videos, youtube attempted to capitalize on the short video craze (originally vine et al started the trend, but further back even ytmnd and .webm did it as well), and now it's a race to the bottom. I fully expect the most popular video by view count and impact to be less than 8 seconds long in 2022.