Leave it to big tech to introduce the same exact product with less features while they gaslight you into believing it’s a shiny new product that you should be excited about.

Pro tip: if you replace “shorts/” with a “watch?v=” in the URL of a YouTube shorts video, you can watch it like a normal video.

Another pro tip: if you replace the entire URL to “https://www.who.int/health-topics/mental-health”, you can learn about mental health, which is an essential piece of knowledge in the case you watch YouTube shorts.

YouTube is the worst with this, because they’ve even gone so far as to convert older videos under 1 minute to shorts. They weren’t uploaded as shorts, but now congratulations you can’t scrub through the video or share a timestamped link anymore.

longpress the bottom of the screen, it brings up the seekbar.

Also … there’s a moded APK out there that removes ads, blocks some metadata capture and enables the seek bar on every video (and allows downloads)

At least YouTube shorts has controls now. But videos more than a minute long are nice too.