You are of course free to swim against the current any boycott things as you see fit. This does not change the fact that YouTube needs to fix its player behavior to better accommodate the majority. Solving that issue will not prevent you from yelling at clouds.

Majority? Vertical videos suck from a videography perspective. Even if we were all using phones most videos are better off widescreen because they capture surrounding context and not just a shitload of the sky and the ground.

Yeah, man, I wish we'd stop putting **ing black bars on things

My favorite is when I'm on my phone, and I run across a vertical video with horizontal black bars padding it out to 16x9 plus user-hostile configuration to make it impossible to resize in any way. I end up having to watch a postage stamp-sized version of the video

Vertical videos work against the way our eyes are placed and were introduced only because they work on vertical screens. Sorta because if you ever watched some interesting videos shot with a cellphone then broadcast from the TV, the ones showing important stuff going on -that is, not food recipes or kittens- you immediately realize there's something missing, and that something is the context in which things are happening: the surrounding area. You may complain about the black bars added on the sides and you're technically right, I however complain about the lack of context because the lower part of the picture shows the ground and the upper part the sky or some buildings well above the action. Our eyes are arranged horizontally because we live in a 3D but mostly horizontal space: if you shoot a vertical video of a car accident you almost certainly get a great picture of the 3rd floor of a nearby building but chances are that you miss completely a vehicle or pedestrian on the left or right that could have triggered the accident. There's a valid reason why screens are more large than high, and forcing people to shoot and watch vertical videos goes against any common sense in the name of selling more and more cellphones, services and advertising.

> Our eyes are arranged horizontally because we live in a 3D but mostly horizontal space

The weakest argument regarding this topic

> if you shoot a vertical video of a car accident you almost certainly get a great picture of the 3rd floor of a nearby building but chances are that you miss completely a vehicle or pedestrian on the left or right that could have triggered the accident

Zoom out, create a composition, pan. Same as with a 1:1 aspect ratio or a 16:9 horizontal aspect ratio.

It doesn’t defeat the purpose of having a bigger screen any more than a window manager does.