They put seek controls on them quite a while back.

And auto repeat, sadly.

And no captions

Auto-repeat is the thing that most mystifies me about shorts. I understand the idea behind auto-play, although I disable it; but who on earth wants to watch the exact thing they just watched by default?

Given the success of TikTok, the answer is apparently, "billions of people", but I just don't get it.

My theory is that it is a way of forcefully grabbing people’s attention.

Without autoplay there is no engagement once the video is over. With autoplay there is the risk someone leaves the player on the background and ignores it. With looping videos people get annoyed and (if they’re like me) close the tab or skip to the next video just to get something different

> but who on earth wants to watch the exact thing they just watched by default

Wrong question.

The right question is: "Do we blindly copy Instagram?"

Ctrl + Right click, Show controls will bring up the classic controls (play, pause, volume, seek, full screen) on Firefox. I'm sure other browsers have something similar. Haven't found a way to turn this on permanently for all videos though :/

Shorts are normal videos too, so you can view them in the normal player.

I have a redirect rule that redirects https://www.youtube.com/shorts/<video-id> to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=<video-id>