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One minute, you’re watching a hilarious or even completely bland YouTube short. The next? You realize you’ve just lost an hour of work time or managed to stay up way too lateagain. Losing track of time when watching shorts is not an uncommon experience. But now, YouTube wants to help you set limits to stay on task, hit the hay, or just, ya’ know, not lose precious hours of your life to Shorts. On Wednesday, the video streaming giant rolled out a new timer feature on its mobile app. When users log on, they can go into their settings and click on “shorts feed limit” to set a timer that will remind them to stop scrolling. Once users hit their time limit, the app will send them a notification letting them know they’ve reached their limit. Of course, it’s not hard to dismiss the timer and keep on watching Shorts. Still, the feature may help to nudge users to get back to work. Shorts are a core part of the YouTube experience, YouTube said in its announcement. Setting a scrolling time limit on the Shorts feed allows for this exploration while helping users be more deliberate about their viewing habits and manage their time effectively. When it comes to setting time limits for scrolling, this isn’t YouTube’s first effort. The company has already had both “Take a Break” and “Bedtime” features in its mobile app settings. And while other social media platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, have since added similar features, YouTube was one of the first streaming platforms to help users put their phones down. Earlier this year, YouTube announced it was doubling down on its bedtime reminder feature for teens, which became automatic in 2023. At the time, Jon-Patrick Allen, a professor of social and behavioral sciences at Rutgers School of Public Health, told Fast Company that users will still have to exercise some self-restraint. It will be effective for a small proportion of people, but the onus is still on the user to turn it off.” Allen added, “These are all cosmetic things that may work for some people, but arent really going to shift user behavior. Either way, the move feels like an invaluable one. According to YouTube internal data, per Sprout Social, last year, YouTube Shorts averaged 70 billion views a day. And it’s not just Gen Alpha and Gen Z who are endlessly watching YouTube hijinx: 25-to-34-year-oldsa combination of both Gen Z and millennialsare the platform’s most diligent viewers. No wonder workers are distracted and groggy.
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E-Commerce
Venture capital powers innovation, yet investment decisions still favor the familiar. From the original design of the industry to the women reshaping its future, the patterns that drive investment may be poised for change. Is venture capital ready for a new outfit? On October 25, 1988, the Womens Business Ownership Act (H.R. 5050) was signed into law, granting women the right to own and operate businesses without a male cosigner. This landmark legislation was a breakthrough for womens economic independence. Yet by that time, generations of deal making had already embedded a pattern of men investing in men. Pattern matching is woven into the fabric of venture capital itself, such that investment in women-led startups has been stagnant at only 2% for more than 15 years, dropping even below that percentage in 2025. Venture capital, founded by men, invests in the familiar. Whether you mark the birth of the industry in 1946 on the East Coast with the establishment of the American Research and Development Corporation, or in 1961 on the West Coast with Davis & Rock and the rise of Silicon Valley, there is one truth: Men invested capital in men for decades before women could even own a business. PATTERN MATCHING AND THE SCIENCE OF RETURNS Fast forward to 2013, and pattern matching had become part of the investors craft. In a New York Times profile, a partner at Y Combinator (YC) described reviewing video interviews with founders applying to the accelerator to identify predictors of failure: When you have to talk yourself into something, its a bad sign. Such rapid assessments may well have relied on pattern matching. With YC partners predominantly male, could this instinct have influenced cohort selection? The stakes are high: In the Winter 2024 batch, YC admitted just 260 companies from more than 27,000 applicationsan acceptance rate under 1%. Based on self-reported data, only 21% of those companies had a woman founder, and just 11% of the founders were women. If decision making in venture capital were driven by data rather than psychology, more women-led startups would be funded. Women-led startups generate more revenue per dollar raised than their male counterparts, and companies with a female founder have outperformed all-male founding teams by 63%. Morgan Stanley estimates that investors lose $4.4 trillion each year by underinvesting in women and people of color. Yet year after year, only about 2% of venture capital dollars flow to women-led startups. DISRUPTING AND UNRAVELING THE PATTERN To address the lack of access to capital, organizations are working on multiple fronts: expanding the pipeline of women entering venture capital, accelerating the career growth of emerging fund managers, and providing mentorship to empower female founders. A systemic issue requires multiple points of disruption to effect a systemic shift. Sourcing is a pivotal leverage point, influencing which founders are included in the consideration set of strategically aligned, high-potential deals. Twenty-eight percent of venture capitalists are women, and many of themanalysts, associates, and principals in male-led firmsare responsible for sourcing startups as part of the deal flow process. What if women sourcing deals were able to more efficiently identify women-led startups aligned with the investment thesis of the venture capital firm, expanding the consideration set and unraveling the threads of pattern matching? Efficiency means moving beyond the familiar networksthe same elite schools, the same geographic hubs, the same social circlesthat reinforce pattern matching. MOVE THE NEEDLE Thank you to the women, and especially the National Association of Women Business Owners, who advocated and lobbied for this landmark legislation. And to the women entrepreneurs and the women invested in them who still persevere, knowing that progress may not be fully realized in their lifetimes. Shannyn A. Smith is founder of The Capital Boutique.
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E-Commerce
Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an industrial-scale, unlawful economy to scrape the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain. Reddit’s lawsuit in a New York federal court takes aim at San Francisco-based Perplexity, maker of an AI chatbot and answer engine that competes with Google, ChatGPT, and others in online search. Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a former Russian botnet, and Texas-based startup SerpApi, which lists Perplexity as a customer on its website. It’s the second such lawsuit from Reddit since it sued another major AI company, Anthropic, in June. But the lawsuit filed Wednesday is different in the way that it confronts not just an AI company but the lesser-known services the AI industry relies on to acquire online writings needed to train AI chatbots. Scrapers bypass technological protections to steal data, then sell it to clients hungry for training material. Reddit is a prime target because its one of the largest and most dynamic collections of human conversation ever created, said Ben Lee, Reddits chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday. Perplexity said it has not yet received the lawsuit but will always fight vigorously for users rights to freely and fairly access public knowledge. Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest. SerpApi’s customer success director, Ryan Schafer, said in an email: We strongly disagree with Reddits allegations and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in court. Oxylabs didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. AWMProxy could not immediately be reached for comment. Reddit compares the companies it is suing to would-be bank robbers who can’t get into the bank vault, so they break into the armored truck instead. The lawsuit alleges they are evading Reddits own anti-scraping measures while also circumventing Googles controls and scraping Reddit content directly from Googles search engine results.” Lee said that because they’re unable to scrape Reddit directly, they mask their identities, hide their locations, and disguise their web scrapers to steal Reddit content from Google Search. Perplexity is a willing customer of at least one of these scrapers, choosing to buy stolen data rather than enter into a lawful agreement with Reddit itself. Reddit made a similar argument in its lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging that the company ignored Reddit’s appeals to cease using its content. That case was initially filed in California Superior Court but was later moved to federal court and has a hearing scheduled for January. Along with digitized books and news articles, websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit are deep troves of written materials that can help teach an AI assistant the patterns of human language. Reddit has previously entered licensing agreements with Google, OpenAI, and other companies that are paying to be able to train their AI systems on the public commentary of Reddits more than 100 million daily users. The licensing deals helped the 20-year-old online platform raise money ahead of its Wall Street debut as a publicly traded company last year. Matt O’Brien, AP technology writer
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E-Commerce
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