I agree actually, I said rare not nonexistent.

But note that I, as the user, want to block the ads. If I can easily do so (and I usually can) it’s fine. But the moment I can’t, in that very small way, I am disempowered.

And that’s usually where the junk shows up: in what way is the software not as good as it could be both because it needs to show ads and because it wants it to be hard to disable them (the second is worse).

The thesis is that jank is not quite imperfect software (it will never be perfect!) but rather something which is clearly not at a local minimum, and it’s pretty hard to have a local minimum with ads (even if the global ecosystem requires them for sustainability; something something evolutionarily stable something something always defect).

On a secondary point, when ads are locally optimal, we call it an effective sponsorship. Especially interesting when you don’t know that it’s an ad. How many times have you paid to see something with an agenda? Note that’s not a bad thing; I’d say every decent work of art needs at least some agenda. But it’s interesting because ads generally are not, in this sense, art; though on the flip side I’ve seen sponsorships on YouTube which are genuinely as if not more entertaining than the video itself and are still clearly sponsored and hence not deceptive.

> Video streaming platforms, for example, give me nearly unlimited freedom to watch what I want when I want.

But they'd prefer if it was shorts.

No, they wouldn't. On Youtube, for example, videos were consistently trending longer over time, and you used to see frequent explainers (https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-video-extra-long/) on why this was happening and how Youtube benefits from it. Short-form videos are harder to monetize and reduce retention, but users demand them so strongly that most platforms have built a dedicated experience for them to compete with TikTok.

If that was true, I would be able to turn off shorts from my recommendation feed.

You can. It’s not a hermetic seal, I assume because they live in the same database as normal videos, but if you’re thinking of the separate “shorts” section there’s a triple dot option to turn it off.

I've clicked this triple dots many times. I never saw such an option. I saw "show fewer shorts", and even that seems to be temporary.