Shorts Begone (BSidesLV Proving Ground Talk)
I used to waste a lot of time getting one-shot by short-form content, especially on YouTube Shorts. For personal use, I ended up creating a Userscript for the browser to remove Shorts on my Mac, and later a tweak for the YouTube app on iOS.
I hadn’t considered turning this into a talk until a friend at BoulderSec suggested it might be interesting to share.
I should have posted this the same week as BSides and DefCon, but alas! I forgot. It wasn’t until he-who-shall-not-be-named-because-I-don’t-want-to shared Facebook’s latest addition to society, an AI-generated short-form content feed, that I remembered I had never written it up.
Maybe one of these days I’ll put down my thoughts on the cancerous nature of short-form content and how absurd it is that some of the smartest engineers on the planet spend their time optimizing retention rates for this slop.
Video Recording
I gave this talk on Tuesday, August 5th, 2025.
Link to YouTube (Starts around 4:12:18)