Too simple of a narrative. At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices:
So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds. The most popular video creators are doing both; even MrBeast routinely has videos over 30 minutes long.
kulahan · 4h ago
Worth mentioning that literally any video under 60 seconds is forced to be a short, which is that stupid type of YouTube video where they remove a bunch of controls and make the overall experience miserable.
So maybe that’s pushing longer-form content as well. Some people making 30 second videos moves to 90 second ones to avoid the bad format, this crowds the format and pushes others up as well?
Totally talking out of my ass here.
CM30 · 1h ago
Fortunately, a video does need to have a vertical screen resolution to be counted as a short. So landscape/widescreen videos don't seem to be affected there.
But this can definitely trip people up, especially now the maximum length of a YouTube short is 3 minutes instead of 1. If you recorded a 3 minute video on a phone (or other random vertical screen device like a Game Boy/DS/3DS), YouTube will classify it as a short and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
0x00cl · 56m ago
YouTube has been pushing for longer videos for a while now. I believe it has to do with getting more money for ads. I remember YouTube updated their guidelines suggesting creators to create longer videos (10+ minutes for better monetization)
I almost never want 2-hour documentary style videos, yet 1-minute teasers leave me even more dissatisfied.
I want 5-minute to 15-minute videos. They can be either overviews or summaries that cover broad stretches or super focused essays that go deeply in depth on just a singular hyper-focused point.
Long-form typically means opinionated and written for a lay audience. Filled with unnecessary pregnant pauses, fluff, and breathing room. Historians trying to craft a narrative.
Stop wasting your viewer's precious time on b-roll or building a case. Smart audiences will trust you if you're succinct and factual.
So take the heinously verbose documentary format, trim it down to just 10 to 15 minutes, and you're left with a fast-paced, frenetic, fully dehydrated, factual blow-by-blow.
That's the sweet spot. Maximum information density.
hnuser123456 · 2h ago
IIRC youtube enables maximum monetization on videos that are at least 10 minutes long. So you end up with a mixed bag of 10-minute videos where some are content that could've been said in a couple of sentences and been 30 seconds, that were stretched out into 10 minutes of filler, and some where the content should've been 30 minutes or more, squished down to just over 10 minutes to try not to have an intimidating video length.
Yokolos · 3h ago
You say this like their viewers don't want long videos. They do. I am one of them. So if they started doing what you suggest, I'd stop watching them.
There is no sweet spot. Different people have different preferences. Not every Youtuber needs to make 10 minute videos. Not every Youtuber needs to make hour long videos. It depends on their audience.
If you don't like hour long videos, that's fine. You're not the intended audience. Stop trying to make every content creator abide by your preferences and just look for those who already cater to your preferences.
echelon · 3h ago
The problem is few creators do cater to this.
Maybe we'll get AI summarizers for video soon.
Yokolos · 2h ago
I still see plenty of videos that are around 15-20 minutes long.
echelon · 25m ago
Great content tends not to be that length because great creators are incentivized to make longer content.
Perverse incentives.
RankingMember · 4h ago
Some channels do both since people have different tastes/levels of free time. I think it's a good strategy, though I don't know how it plays out on the money side. For example, a YouTube channel about automotive fabrication and tuning ("Gingium" in this case) will release high-detail build videos in series, then when the project is over, add a "Building a [x, e.g. Supercharged Off-road Miata] in 10 Minutes" condensed video with all the key moments.
engeljohnb · 35m ago
10-15 minute videos are usually nothing more than an extended /r/todayilearned post. I'm not interested in learning some new trivia, I like it when the videos are structured and detailed in a way that makes it flow like a narrative. Although some creators (like Quinton Reviews) pad with unnecessary fluff, most of the really popylar ones (Hbomberguy, Lemino, Jenny Nicholson, Lindsay Ellis, Summoning Salt) don't.
You could argue that anything except the thesis statement is a "waste of time," but the videos are for entertainment at the end of the day.It wouldn't entertaining for someone to say "The Oof sound in Roblox was invented by Joey Kuras for a game called Messiah. Tommy Tallarico says he made it but he probably didn't." then the video ends.
What is fun is watching a long deep-dive pulling apart all the ridiculous lies and exaggerations of a fascinating narcissist like Tallarico.
moduspol · 5h ago
I prefer my movie reviews to be longer in duration than the movies themselves.
deepfriedchokes · 13m ago
Are you an English Lit teacher?
mystifyingpoi · 4h ago
Me too, but then it's no longer a review honestly. More like a breakdown or analysis.
bitwize · 2h ago
How many pizza rolls have you sent to that guy's webzone?
giancarlostoro · 5h ago
In my case, YouTube has figured out that I love Pokemon videos where the streamer does really silly things with old Pokemon games (like resetting the emulator 9001 times to find a shiny in order to have a full on Shiny only pokedex, including the starter pokemon. In my case I don't care how long the videos are though.
bo-tao · 4h ago
Lol that sounds interesting, can you share the video?
giancarlostoro · 4h ago
Sure thing! I enjoy random Pokemon videos, watching the story of how the game was birthed by hobbyists is also fascinating.
Joseph Anderson, NeverKnowsBest, SuperBunnyHop and MandaloreGaming are the ones that come to mind. They've uncovered so much about games that I never knew was there! :)
I think some would recommend Matthewmatosis, Hbomberguy and Raycevick as well, I'm just less familiar with their work personally.
trenchpilgrim · 5h ago
Jwlar
Mandaloregaming
Josh Strife Plays
The Sphere Hunter
jmcgough · 5h ago
Highly recommend Dungeon Chill and KBash as well
Hovertruck · 5h ago
Check out Majuular
p1necone · 55m ago
Seconding Majuular - if you like old PC rpgs (and new ones) he does great long form deep dives.
bigyabai · 5h ago
Second Wind is up and running with (2012's favorite) Yahtzee Crowshaw running the ship. An episode of Fully Ramblomatic runs a chipper >10min with barely a second to spare.
The Story of Thief & Looking Glass Studios, also by noclip.
As vintage as they come.
mid-kid · 2h ago
Most of the 20+ minute long videos are bound to be filled to the brim with filler and bullshit. I'm not asking for much, but please stop pretending your video game review is worth an hour of introductions, personal anecdotes, comedy sketches and 3 sponsor ads.
coldpie · 5h ago
A fellow Basement Brothers viewer??
Analemma_ · 5h ago
I understand the motivation but this mindset has failure modes of its own: I'm noticing an increasing number of longform YouTube essay channels adding tons of unnecessary padding to increase the runtime. They don't all do this-- to pick a random example, I think Defunctland videos are exactly as long as they need to be-- but a bunch of the smaller ones do. Ultimately there's no metric shortcut for actual quality.
cogman10 · 4h ago
The other failure is that youtube wants quantity over quality. That incentivizes some bad behaviors. The hbomber video about plagerism is ultimately about that. Taking shortcuts, using 3rd parties (or now AI) to write scripts. It's all really negatively impacted the medium.
AI in particular is like coke to lazy content makers. I've had to drop a few because it became clear that AI took the lead in writing.
prophesi · 5h ago
If your Youtube video is 8 minutes or longer (and your channel is monetized), you're able to place midroll ads every minute or so to maximize ad revenue. Typically Youtube only serves a very small fraction of these midroll ads to each user; usually every 10 - 15 minutes. So 16min+ has been the sweet spot.
It's this ad incentive that has made long-form videos more popular on Youtube.
nicce · 4h ago
Yeah, I have unsubscribed/stopped viewing many specific creators because of this.
They start cycling content and using innovative ways to make videos artificially longer. Some videos of have "what this video is about" and "Summary" sections which can be even half of the video length in total. Sponsored sections are getting longer. There are longer pauses and less editing. The list goes on.
eighthourblink · 5h ago
every 10 - 15 minutes? Thats cute
ryandrake · 4h ago
Yea, I've seen some YouTube videos that display ~30 seconds worth of ads every 3.5 minutes of a hour long video. It's gotten quite ridiculous.
trinix912 · 5h ago
> So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds.
Could it be that the shorter videos that are now 30-60 seconds present the same information as they did when they were ~10min, just without all extra prologue, epilogue, and sponsor inserts? Wasn't one of the reasons they were ~10min in the first place simply to get monetized better?
kulahan · 4h ago
I think we saw 7 minute videos become 10 minutes, not a 20x increase in length for super short-form ones.
Animats · 1h ago
> At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer...
That may be a consequence of the monetization algorithm. It allows more time for ads.
The format of too many Youtube videos now is
- Useless intro
- Long recap of historical info to allow space for ads
- Actual new content
- Filler
- Conclusion
Those are the ones that aren't just some neckbeard with earphones and a big microphone.
monadoid · 5h ago
I think HN is getting old - nobody has mentioned second screen viewing! imo, youtube videos are getting longer because everyone is just turning stuff on in the background while they're on their phones.
ziml77 · 30m ago
That's what I do. But heck, that's what I've always done. In the 90 and 00s I would have the TV on while I was messing around on the PC, playing my Game Boy, or heck even while doing homework.
esseph · 5h ago
My wife and oldest kid who have ADHD are like that. My youngest, myself, and the middle aged kid never have anything on other than what we are actively paying attention to.
Jordan-117 · 1h ago
I've noticed that the YouTube app on smart TVs typically recommends 10-30 minute videos -- probably a combination of people leaving things on in the background or seeking "mealtime videos" they can watch while they eat.
password54321 · 4h ago
You haven't actually contradicted anything in the article. People can have low attention spans and watch a 30 minute MrBeast video of people shouting. People can have YouTube running on their TV while still being on their phone.
Your narrative isn't any less "simple" or any better backed up.
jagaerglad · 58m ago
Perfect, longer time to scroll tiktok while the TV is on in the background
linhns · 5h ago
Sadly, some of the best contents aer 5-10 minutes, I pick up some investing tips from those, although some longer ones can be 2x-ed or seeked to only view a chunk.
jonbiggums22 · 5h ago
I wish they'd give you more than 2x speed in the web player. Lots of videos seem to talk extra slowly to drag things out to the point 2x speed sounds like normal conversational speed.
linhns · 4h ago
It’s hard to talk that slow and still be able to keep the viewers attentive to the content. I often put on 1.5 or 1.75x as most since I’m not a natural English speaker, though that may be different for born speakers.
Mistletoe · 4h ago
Can you share some of these YouTube investing tips?
linhns · 4h ago
I pick some random suggested videos then do the opposite.
RankingMember · 3h ago
Buy Low Sell High! Please like and subscribe and tomorrow I'll tell you about index funds!
nicce · 4h ago
More you share, less value they provide!
bogtog · 5h ago
> At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices
I assume this is a replacement for TV/streaming. Cases were you previously would've wanted a 10-minute YouTube video are becoming cases where you watch 30-60 second ones. Cases where you previously wanted a 20+ minute Netlfix show are becoming ones where you turn to long YouTube videos
Tenoke · 5h ago
Exactly this tho with more than just 2 categories. You find more than ever optimized for the 60s category, that's true, and you do get longform silos - but those include one silo of channels that clock around 10m, as well as another in the hour+ podcasts case.
The main new takeaway is that the shortform category is bigger and more important than previously imagined but hardly the sole winner.
awjlogan · 5h ago
It seems that the very long videos are a reaction against the very short clips. Usually the topics and density of information are not enough to consistently fill that amount of time, whereas it would be perfect in 10-30 mins. 60 secs: too short to convey much, 60 mins too long to convey too little.
testdelacc1 · 4h ago
I’m addicted to RealLifeLore on YouTube. Each video is 30-40 minutes long. There’s really a quality you can get only with length.
Funes- · 5h ago
>At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices
I wager most people are putting those on while having a meal and using their phones or tablets at the same time. Moreover, 99% of the most watched content on YouTube is utter garbage that would make the average reality show on TV twenty years ago look like The Godfather in comparison. Gossippy, clickbait videos made to induce an immediate dopamine dump and be used as background noise aren't "in-depth" anything. I don't think people are sitting in front of a TV watching an hour-long, non-sponsored, ad-free interview with Margerite Duras and doing nothing else concurrently, for instance.
On top of all that, this trend of making longer videos comes mostly from an attempt to increase ad revenue. Let's not be fooled here.
gchamonlive · 4h ago
Yeah that's kinda like pushing the narrative of "the end of history" just for social networks which I think is very flawed. We can't underestimate the influence the medium has on thought, but I think we aren't in a dystopian monopoly of social interactions just yet.
crazygringo · 5h ago
Came here to say exactly this. People also listen to individual podcast episodes that clock in at 2 or 3 hours, and are hugely popular.
Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes.
TikTok has not "won" at all. There's a place for content of all different lengths. The death of the attention span has been greatly exaggerated.
koolba · 5h ago
> The death of the attention span has been greatly exaggerated.
Spend 15 minutes with the median 7-30 year old and you’ll think differently. Yes it’s not everybody. But it’s clearly most of them.
forgotoldacc · 5h ago
With movies, I feel like that's a bit of return to form. I know lots of older greats were around 2-3 hours in length, and I feel like things moved to 90 minutes basically overnight around the 2000s. Though I feel like a lot of long recent movies are more padded, while older 2+ hour movies felt like they had to cut content to make it a reasonable length.
jollyllama · 5h ago
I suppose if I have to share the earth/air/roads with the brainrot plebs, they might as well subsidize my ad-free consumption of long-form podcasts hosted on YouTube.
rglullis · 5h ago
These are definitely not the same. How many people are actually paying full attention to a 3 hour podcast?
The majority will be listening to it while on their commute, or at the gym, or doing chores around the house. My wife (a civil engineer) has a podcast going in the background even while working. I asked her how she actually manages to pay attention to it and she says that it's mostly for the background noise.
> Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes.
Because these movies are not made for the cinema anymore, but for streaming platforms, where people can consume in the same way they consume their podcasts.
crazygringo · 5h ago
When I do chores or shower or commute, I'm paying attention. It's not background noise. The people are saying interesting things about interesting subjects. If I wanted background noise I'd put on music.
Just because one person uses a podcast as background noise, doesn't mean everybody else is.
loloquwowndueo · 4h ago
> If I wanted background noise I'd put on music.
My dude you’re using music wrong. Noise generators do exist - you can even pick a color for your noise!
mystifyingpoi · 4h ago
> where people can consume in the same way they consume their podcasts
It even has a name - "second-monitoring".
ndriscoll · 5h ago
This post popped up a blocking window before I was even 3 sentences in, so maybe unsurprising that I clicked away in less than 60 seconds. If the author wants people to read whatever it is they have to say, maybe they should not put distractions in front of their writing?
j1elo · 5h ago
Wow it is that bad! It's a white full screen on-your-face message that no one asked for, and it literally appears as soon as you start reading the content!
If that wasn't ironic enough to the title of the article, upon hitting the "X" and then "Back" on my phone (because it generated enough rejection on me that I didn't want to keep reading), the popup appeared again (-: so double annoyance for the price of one.
skulk · 5h ago
The worst part is that it pushes an item onto the history stack both when it opens and closes. So I need to press back 3 times to go back. It's a small thing to complain about but it's still atrocious.
elpocko · 5h ago
OP is only here to promote their own content, never comments, never posts anything other than their own blog.
bee_rider · 5h ago
It is sort of impressive, they seem to have keyed to what sort of posts make it here quite quickly (two failures, then two successes at getting engagement).
pwg · 5h ago
Ublock Origin in default block all Javascript mode results in being able to read the entire article with no distracting popup's at any time during the read.
giancarlostoro · 5h ago
I intentionally do not use adblockers, but when your ads either dominate the page, or prevent me from navigating, I close the tab.
markus_zhang · 4h ago
Also the margins are too large. I really disdain the "modern" UI designs and I'm not afraid to disdain the people who design them.
Better to be just a txt file. If OP wants $$, just put up a Pantheon page.
natalie3p · 3h ago
Thanks for the feedback :)
atlintots · 5h ago
For me, the worst part is that it is so hard to go back to previous forms of media. I often delete these short form content apps in an effort to quit them, but it is now so difficult to get engaged with "slower" forms of media. The thing with Tiktok isn't the length of the media, it's just how fast-paced and "catchy" it is. I could watch an hour long fast paced video just fine, but watching a slow paced show, or reading a book is so much more difficult.
It truly is like a drug.
mtalantikite · 5h ago
> I could watch an hour long fast paced video just fine, but watching a slow paced show, or reading a book is so much more difficult.
Attention and concentration are skills that can be trained, so not all is lost. I was feeling like I was losing my focus about a decade ago and decided that every morning I'd wake up and read a novel for 30 minutes or so. Within a few weeks you'll notice the difference.
famahar · 5h ago
Yeah, it's amazing how nice this feels. You can tell your brain is healing. You're lighter, happier, more relaxed. The first few days are rough though. Hard to focus. Need for stimulation. It really is a drug. Horrible reality so many people are trapped in.
pier25 · 4h ago
I was going to suggest exactly this. Start with easier to read novels. Maybe YA stuff.
rrgok · 5h ago
I don't understand. The problem is not that we don't have attention or concentration. Otherwise how can he watch hour long fast paced video. This a different form of attention. I would like to call it the intensity of attention.
Reading a book, require attention but of lower intensity. While watching an hour long fast paced video, require a high intensity attention.
mtalantikite · 4h ago
Well, one is active and the other is passive.
In the case of watching an hour of video, you're just there consuming what's going on. Reading a novel requires you to world build internally. I'd say that sort of attention is a much higher intensity version. Or at least it takes a lot more active involvement.
If you've ever sat for meditation you'll know that low-input stimulation can be much harder to keep your attention on, but being lost in daydreaming and 'monkey-mind' chatter is pretty effortless. Once you train in it it becomes no big deal, though. Same is true for reading novels.
They put reading a book and watching slow paced television in the same category, which to me seems like a category error entirely. I see nothing wrong with avoiding slow-paced video… life is short, time is precious. If slow video is not your thing, that’s fine. However, books are a different matter entirely. Not all books are worth reading, but being unable to read any book is definitely a sign that your attention span is suffering. Some books are low-intensity, but some are quite high-intensity, and everything in between. But regardless of where they are on that spectrum, all books require an attention span greater than the one required to watch TikTok videos.
My attention span went (back) up after I forced myself to read some books start to finish. It’s something you can lose, but fortunately it’s also something you can regain.
rrgok · 4h ago
I don't know. I have a hard time reading most books because they are indeed slow-paced. And by "books" I mean novels and fantasy books. But I can read an HN/Reddit discussion of several pages without a problem. Heck, sometimes I spend hours reading a specific subreddit.
I like to think that books (novels and fantasy) are low-resolution prose, so the crux of the matter is distributed — mostly useless info — across several pages. While forums — like HN or Reddit — are high-resolution prose. I don't know if I make sense.
mtalantikite · 1h ago
> I like to think that books (novels and fantasy) are low-resolution prose, so the crux of the matter is distributed — mostly useless info — across several pages.
Well, novels are just more subtle. A good novel will get you deep into the emotional landscape of it's subject, or give you a vivid portrait of a scene that is happening, or transport you to a historical or future time. You get to embody a particular character or world, which builds your own personal knowledge and empathy. We're not just reading a collection of facts or statements. We can get lost in the beauty of a landscape we've never visited before in a novel, which is the crux of the matter, even if it doesn't seem like it.
Those sorts of novels tend to be challenging to read, but most things worth doing challenge us. If you've never read something like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Gabo's 100 Years of Solitude, or many of the other great artistic achievements in literature, you really should challenge yourself to do so. They make us better.
ryandrake · 3h ago
I suppose one could summarize something like The Lord Of The Rings into a 20-30 minute fast pace YouTube video, or even a 2 minute TikTok, but are these really suitable substitutes?
cvoss · 5h ago
Try going a whole day (like a Saturday) without consuming any digital media. It can be a challenging experience, but totally worth it, even if just once, to feel what it's like to not be tied to such things. I found it very relaxing and freeing.
No YT, FB, IG, TT, or TV for sure. For an extra challenge, try no music (except what you can make yourself) or news (including HN). You'll find yourself grabbing your phone only to immediately put it down again.
No need to force yourself to read or go for a walk or whatever. Do whatever you feel like all day, just not the digital things.
jondwillis · 31m ago
I would run out of stuff to do within an hour or two. Which is the point. I’d have to get into new stuff that isn’t phone or laptop.
aucisson_masque · 39m ago
What if you are reading an interesting book ? I think it would be a great way to train your attention to the level it used to be.
And if you can’t even do that, I suggest you start reading a book right before sleeping until you pass out. Every night. You will fall asleep extremely fast at beginning but I managed to get back to reading while having extreme difficulty concentrating from a completely different illness than TikTok. It only took 2 years.
jerf · 5h ago
Try the video speed adjustments. Most sites offer 2x now. Up to 4x is getting around, and that's generally going to be past what most people can understand for speech, even with practice. I do a lot of YouTube long-form content but I do a lot of it at 2x or even 2.5x. There's also a lot of such things that are effectively podcasts with irrelevant video backgrounds, or only rarely relevant video, so you can do something else entirely while listening.
jondwillis · 29m ago
There are browser settings (or browser extensions) that restore “vanilla” media controls, which enables a lot of stuff that gets broken or disabled in vain otherwise. Playback rate is one of these.
ryandrake · 3h ago
My kid and all of her friends watch video content at 2-4x now all the time, because they just can't seem to get through anything talking at a normal pace. I want to worry about that, but I don't know why it's worrying.
jerf · 2h ago
After some pondering, I've come to consider it a generally positive thing. If I compare watching a 1x video to my reading the transcript, I am reading very much faster than the person can normally speak. Cranking the speed up makes it so the video much more approximates a reading speed. You still don't get as much random access and I can generally still read at a speed where I wouldn't be able to comprehend the speech if it was keeping up, but I think being able to handle increased information density is generally a good thing. It also tends to filter out videos that are just noise and flash and such, because any video tuned for simple tickling our lizard hindbrains at 1x is much less appealing at 2x (because if it was more appealing at 2x, that simply would have been the original speed it was served at).
It is also a side effect of the fact that frankly a lot of stuff on YouTube doesn't actually need to be on YouTube and is, as I mentioned in my first post, really just a podcast with a video track because it has to have a video track to be on YouTube, but that is perfectly ignorable. Even channels as high quality as Practical Engineering are (guestimating) something like 80% stock footage and 20% something he actually created that is useful and germane to the topic.
I often have a hard time dealing with videos at 1x as well but it's not like it has impacted my social relationships or anything. I don't perceive normal people as speaking slowly now or anything like that. Somehow my brain has this segregated, and I phrase it that way because it's not like I can consciously take credit for it, I didn't do anything, it's just happening naturally.
boringg · 5h ago
You let your dopamine loop get hacked
jollyllama · 5h ago
This. It's going to take some serious effort to un-wirehead yourself. Look to religious traditions for methods. Meditation, fasting, prayer.
grishka · 2h ago
Probably a good thing then that I've never had TikTok and avoid even opening reels in Instagram, shorts on YouTube and clips in VK, unless someone sent me one.
famahar · 5h ago
Watch the film Sátántangó in one sitting with no distraction. If you can do that, you are healed. I imagine a chronic tiktok user would find the film a form of torture.
ryandrake · 3h ago
Almost any film from the mid-70s and earlier, go online and read recent reviews, and they're all full of complaints about the pacing. "Too boring!" "Too slow!" "Fell asleep while watching!"
I mean, first of all, who falls asleep during a movie? Even stuff I've seen 30 times already, is still engaging and holds my attention from start to finish. Yet, then again, we've had to cancel "friends movie night" in our house because people would come over, sit down to watch the movie, and after 10 minutes they're all scrolling their phones and bored with the movie. Unless it's got frantic action every second, you're going to lose people. Something is really wrong with our attention spans.
dleeftink · 5h ago
The first step to recovery is...
You'll get there. Go from shorter form content to things that'll grab your attention, piece by piece.
lm28469 · 3h ago
That's how they get kids too now, look at patpatrol and the other slop they ship, you don't get more than 1 second without a cut. These kids are fucked forever, setup for failure from birth
googlryas · 5h ago
I think you need to make the judgement if a long video is long because it's worth it and needs to be that long, or because it's padded for some reason. When I come across a padded video that I still want to consume for some reason, I usually just paste the url into gemini and ask for a tl;dr and get a few paragraphs to read summarizing the video.
kelseyfrog · 4h ago
Reading Debord's Society of the Spectacle in the age of TikTok is surreal.
In some ways, it reads like prophecy. He mapped the inevitability of image-mediated life before we had the feeds to prove him right. In other ways, it feels trivial. Today's hyperreality makes the theory so obvious it barely registers as theory at all, more like a weather report. We don’t have to imagine the spectacle when we're already drowning in it.
My gripe with "How is new media transforming us?" journalism is that it never gets past the pre-theoretical stage. It inventories symptoms: shorter attention spans, algorithmic optimization, but won't name the cause. It's like reporting the moon's position every night and refusing to mention gravity.
The point that matters is Debord's: social relations mediated by images have replaced embodied relations. Platforms sell us connection, but what they deliver is commodification. Yes, some internet friendships spill into real life. But most are fragile, living inside economic structures designed to monetize attention. Everyone already knows the real relation isn't friend-to-friend but user-to-advertiser, and money always wins.
That's the basecamp for any way out: recognizing that hyperreal social life can't substitute lived social life. The spectacle doesn't mediate friendship, it mediates consumption. And if Debord feels obvious now, that's only because his warning has become the background condition of everyday life. Facebook can't really connect you to friends; it can only connect you to advertisers.
Dilettante_ · 4h ago
Thank you for the reminder, dear imaginary person on my screen.
mrtksn · 5h ago
Yea, because it's a superior format.
I love YouTube but my problem with the content of YouTube is that almost all videos are introducing you to everything every time.
For example, there's this science video about this interesting property of fire right? They start with what's fire, when it was invented, what led to be studied this way and then they deliver the money shot. It is O.K. to be introduced to a topic once but it is brain wrecking to be 101ed every time. They are doing it to increase the watch time and the ad revenue and its horrible.
Forcing the videos to be short makes them deliver the gist quickly, TikTok videos that are trying to the introduction 101 thing are just as horrible, when a video is over 1min I'm very skeptical and feel the urge to move on.
Of course in-depth videos need to be long but those are not that many actually. From the pop-sci genre Veritasuim does it well but that kind of production takes long time and they publish videos every now and then. With the race to pump videos as quickly as possible, the short format is the better since you can get the content quickly and if you want to know more about it you can actually read about it. Which is how you actually learn anything BTW.
janalsncm · 4h ago
This is called “fluff” which I feel is too nice a term for how annoying it is.
Start with a clickbait question, then give a complete history ripped off of Wikipedia, then by the end they don’t even fully answer the question. Very frustrating.
skizm · 5h ago
Wadsworth Constant. Skip to 30% of any video that seems like they're dragging out the intro.
ziml77 · 25m ago
Or install SponsorBlock. One of the things people can submit other than sponsor segments is the most interesting point in the video. Basically, whatever is teased in the thumbnail or what directly answers the question posed in the video title.
kjkjadksj · 23m ago
Youtube now shows you the peaks where most people skip towards
zoba · 5h ago
So strange to think about how Vine could’ve won this and an American company could’ve been the leader here.
xnx · 5h ago
A reminder of how much of success is luck/timing.
moduspol · 5h ago
And remember Quibi [1]? Short-form video in vertical format specifically for mobile devices? They didn't have every aspect nailed, but they were definitely trailblazers on that front.
Quibi launched in April 2020. TikTok by this point would have 2 billion downloads [1]. It's difficult to assess they were trailblazers here. I might even say a component of their failure is free mobile video was widely accessible by this point.
Was that at all like TikTok? I thought it was professional creators, not community-sourced.
m0llusk · 2h ago
Didn't have every aspect nailed? Definitely trailblazers? Quibi is a prime example of an absolute business wipeout. They got a bunch of investor money together, showed no interest in what viewers actually want, and then went down in flames immediately upon public release of the product. The whole thing was a disaster that didn't accomplish anything beyond putting a bunch of capital in the pockets of C grade C suite players.
giancarlostoro · 5h ago
They really dropped the ball.
crazysim · 5h ago
It got Kodak'd.
casey2 · 5h ago
Or YouTube. Short form animation was the largest draw of views in the early days before they chose to kill it and become a "serious platform"
jonbiggums22 · 5h ago
I thought the kept incentivizing longer content so they could cram more ads into the videos. Hard to get some one to watch a 20 second ad for a 2 minute video, but if you can convince everyone to pad that thing up to 10 minutes you could stuff at least 2 ads in there.
AfterHIA · 1h ago
Techno-feudalism. Yanis Varoufakis talks about this all the time. Television anticipated a culture which could be programmed to go along with the narrative surrounding the Cold War despite rampant non-alignment in the world (Yugoslav Republic, India, Indonesia.) It is not unlikely that global meta-cartel is giving the blind eye to SV to the end of radicalizing and brainwashing people into, "what comes next."
Russia has recently violated Polish airspace. NATO wants to put troops in Ukraine. Charlie Kirk got shot out our local university today. Something or someone really, really wants you to be comfortable with violence. All it would take to reset the global chessboard would be smuggling a conventional (or nuclear) weapon into a large city in the United States or Europe and provoking an Article 5 response from NAT0. Thanos snaps his fingers and the global population is cut in half over a few days. The rest that remain spend the next few decades trying to figure out, "who was really responsible."
The good news is that in the minds of some this is how the human race, "solved climate change."
firefoxd · 5h ago
I've banned shorts from my house [0]. The more you watch it, the more your attention span gets scrambled. If a joke doesn't land in 15 seconds, you skip it. If the video that just started doesn't reach its climax now, you skip it.
There's actually a format for movies now, where a short scene is shared with the contrast cranked to 11, and background music. And it pays off in under a minute. Shorts is short for climax, and everything over a minute is boring.
Does no one remember vine? They showed there was a niche for a certain type of content. I think it all generally boils down to a sort of comparison of cell phone vs desktop vs maybe even laptop. It's not that when one came out the other was used less. It's instead that each was used now for different purposes, so usage in total basically 2-3x'd.
FjordWarden · 5h ago
> The irony, of course, is that if you've read this far, it may mean you’ve already mastered a rare skill: sustained attention in a world of distraction.
No, sorry I read the first and last sentence. This is why I like the short format more then the long forms, it often boils down to the same clever narrative trickery without waisting 3 hours of your life.
righthand · 5h ago
So you didn’t read that far then. You intentionally skipped it because you assumed to know the value. However by skipping the article you didn’t gain any value and hence why you’re in the comments section trying to “gotcha” the author of the article. You missed the point entirely and not as clever as you think.
It did not take me 3 hours to read that article.
seydor · 5h ago
I m more annoyed that everything is in portrait.
But yeah, there's a dehumanization going on. Speeding up videos to deliver the maximum words per second to the viewer is inhuman. It started as an appeal to ADHD children, but i that meme is overdone, people actually do have attention and still interested in humans, not just what they say.
reddit_clone · 3h ago
I am getting annoyed at this accelerated speech shorts and move on to something else. Especially watching recipes.
Somehow the breathless speech pattern they all adopt is really irritating to me. Thats saying something coming from an ADHD person.
freehorse · 1h ago
Twitter did this already for the text form. In depth analysis articles and blogposts got replaced with whatever could fit in 40 characters and what mattered more than anything was the impression. It changed how politics is done, so I would say it had an even bigger impact to society.
It is all depressing. As if the spectacle has devoured the whole reality and there is now nothing but it.
ryankrage77 · 4h ago
I got addicted to YT shorts for a little while, but I've mostly stopped doomscrolling now as, counter-intuitively, it wasn't addictive enough to keep me engaged. Sure, the first few dozen hours the carefully designed feedback loop keeps you engaged, and then... it wore off, at least for me. The algorithm seemed more interested in pushing what was popular than what I was interested in. I tried gaming it by quickly scrolling past things I didn't care about or had already seen a million times (like those retention farming 3-second loops of reddit/twitter screenshots), and hanging around on stuff I liked, but it didn't seem to budge the needle.
I guess it's a lot like real drugs - you build a tolerance and you need a bigger dose to get the same effect. In this case, no bigger dose is available.
ambicapter · 2h ago
YT being riddled with bugs helped me with this one. My Shorts feed sometimes (often) starts looping after 5-6 videos.
jaredcwhite · 1h ago
I'm not on TikTok and never have been, but I've seen plenty of shortform videos shared elsewhere. Here's the thing about all of them.
They never inform.
The number of video creators I can actually recall and point to who have affected me on any real emotional or intellectual level via shorts I can count on one hand.
"Old-school" longform video (on YouTube and elsewhere) is a medium with real utility and artistic merit. Shorts are mildly entertaining at best and mind-numbing goop at worst. And, as usual, the meme is true: *this could have been a blog post.*
miladyincontrol · 4h ago
Much as many insist they dont and will never use AI, all too many let their entire media feeds, if not their whole personality be defined by `recommendation_watchnext.serve()`
FinnKuhn · 5h ago
Considering that YouTube is still wildly successful and TikTok is now showing me 5+ minute long videos I really don't think this theory holds up.
I would say short-form content found a gap in the market and now exists in addition to long-form content without replacing it.
xenadu02 · 5h ago
I deleted TikTok and my Twitter account. Also stopped watching TV. I'm happier and more productive.
ambicapter · 5h ago
Fitter? Comfortable? Not drinking so much? Regular exercise at the gym? Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries?
I used to love watching the hour long essays but after notebooklm I just get a briefing summary and realize most of these essays are mostly vibes.
markus_zhang · 5h ago
Just don’t install the app. I never did that and I want to make sure my son doesn’t whence he gets his own phone. Well he can do whatever when he is an adult but that’s more than a decade away.
DrewADesign · 5h ago
I’ll bet some number of readers here asked an LLM to summarize this article.
NooneAtAll3 · 2h ago
I want to note that culture has been shaped by recommendation algorithm looong before tiktok...
First time I noticed that was "we are number one" meme in autumn 2016
daedrdev · 5h ago
Youtube forces 30 seconds of adds multiple times a video. Tiktok has absolutely become more popular than youtube thanks to its less intrusive ads.
knowaveragejoe · 5h ago
tiktok videos themselves are often just ads.
cwillu · 5h ago
But they're not forced.
sirbutters · 4h ago
Am I the only one who absolutely despises vertical videos? For that reason alone I would not touch TikTok with a 10ft pole.
coldtea · 5h ago
TikTok and those consuming it can rot.
Some of us will continue to be reading War and Peace level works and watch "lengthy" movies.
mdavid626 · 3h ago
IF there will be “lengthy” movies.
coldtea · 1h ago
There a stock of older movies though, bigger than I can watch in a lifetime, and that's just considering the good ones.
mdavid626 · 3h ago
I could easily watch TikTok short for 10 hours or more. No problem at all.
I’d ban shorts immediately. It’s like crack or fentanyl.
We lost control long time ago.
accrual · 5h ago
I'm going to be the odd duck here and suggest TikTok has been helpful for me. I view it as a tool. It can be used in a harmful way (scrolling for hours, reduced attention span) but it can also be helpful if used correctly.
It's kind of like Reddit and other "customize your feed" social media. If you subscribe to the defaults, yeah, it's hot garbage. If you select content creators or topics that support your individual growth then you get a much different outcome.
Of course not to say I couldn't have benefited from the same topics via another type of media. But I enjoy the few minutes I spend on TT per day, seeing what my favorites have posted, etc. I even met a cool dummer named Zooich in Japan who I enjoy following and interacting with each week. And I've made a bit of content myself which I'm proud of.
Lastly, in no way does my positive experience diminish the negative issues surrounding TT. I fully agree it contributes to reduced attention span, spreading misinformation, etc. -- just like most other forms of social media. And there's a very real risk of it becoming state media in the future. I just wanted to provide a different perspective other than "TT is terrible in every way, ban it!".
kshacker · 5h ago
I am traveling to India and unfortunately "our services are not available in your country or region". And a few months back we were all singing "oh wen ji" (really badly paraphrased) on RedNote when TikTok was already down pending reinstatement by Trump.
Point being TikTok js a winner in a slice of the population. I just stopped following the bunch of Indian folks even though they had an Instagram or reel account because I just could not get used to it. Similarly I followed a few people on rednote but promptly abandoned it when TT came back. So maybe TT won. But look at it from the other side. People in India and China don't follow what I follow. And there are billions of those.
TikTok is an awesome platform but not yet a "too big to fail" like YouTube I guess
Edit. But I get the point of 60 second media winning. Nowadays I am just unable to focus on a tv show. Or I am watching a show with some digression (Reddit, tiktok) in my hand. Theaters is the only place I am unable to do so and that's the only place I now enjoy movies I guess.
OhMeadhbh · 4h ago
To be fair, you can just ignore TicToc.
Okay... maybe you can't. Maybe there are people in your life that won't let you forget it exists. Maybe your job is in communications and you have to get on TicToc (or YouTube or InstaGram or whatever.)
170 million people is about half the U.S. population. And I can't say this without sounding like an elitist pr*k, but it's always seemed like about half the population is below average. (And since we're all savvy consumers of statistics here, we all know that attempt at a joke would be better if I said "half the population is below the median.")
So assuming an algorithmic dopamine-stroking video platform is a social evil, maybe people are susceptible to it because there's something missing in their lives? I don't watch a lot of TV and look at the internet mostly through a text based browser. Mostly because I KNOW I have attention problems. I don't need flashy ads bombarding me with distractions. But mostly it's because I do a lot of other things that aren't watching videos that are more fulfilling (like commenting on HN threads.)
I don't know if this is true... but I like to play the game where you think about how the world would have to change for various statements to become true. (It's fun to wallow in the swampy mud-bath of your own imagination.) What if... TicToc (and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and all the other attention sucking apps) are a net benefit to people's lives?
I know it's en vogue to bash new media dealers and clutch our collective pearls. But if traditional media could get these engagement numbers, I can't imagine they wouldn't. Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow have been dead for decades. If, as a culture, we valued the Children's Television Workshop, we would have funded them publicly instead of letting them crawl into (financial) bed with NBC/Universal and Warner Brothers.
So sure... maybe TicToc is evil, but what alternative are we offering the half of society that wants their midbrain stroked?
bstsb · 4h ago
there are some amazing creators on tiktok. yes, the core user loop rewards fast-paced content, but that's led to some amazing educational creators using the short nature of the videos to their advantage. for example, etymologynerd makes really interesting videos on the origins and definition of newly spreading slang online, and goes really in-depth with his content.
also not sure why you kept purposely misspelling TikTok given the app name is the first thing in the headline?
OhMeadhbh · 4h ago
Lol. Yes. I honestly thought it was TicToc, which is funny because the title of the story we're commenting on clearly says "TikTok." Actually an honest mistake. Not an attempt at some snide linguistic side-eye.
That's cool to hear there's some wheat among the chaff. Seems like most technology comes with swings and roundabouts. My suspicion is it's simultaneously wonderful and horrible. That's how I remember the year I was on Twitter. I'm going out of my way to avoid installing the app cause I know my self-control isn't as strong as I often pretend it is. But I'll look for @etymologynerd on other platforms.
alchemical_piss · 4h ago
> I know it's en vogue to bash new media dealers and clutch our collective pearls. But if traditional media could get these engagement numbers, I can't imagine they wouldn't.
At least legacy media wasn’t directly promoting and rewarding antisocial behavior and crimes.
OhMeadhbh · 3h ago
My joke here would be to say "oh yeah! they seemed to encourage participation in voting!" But HN is not a place for humor, or my imitation of humor.
But to your point... yes... gate-keepers can keep out the riffraff. (And I'm not trying to be snarky with that last statement.) Taste-makers can steer the listening public towards some competent art. As a society we tend to swing back and forth between freedom and conformity. We're in a pretty "free" feeling era and the word "conformity" is almost a pejorative. Monoculture is dangerous, but sure, so is letting the moral equivalent of the Manson Family loose on your child's phone. (not implying TikTok is the modern Manson equivalent, just hypothesizing the existence of a really bad player in the digital realm.)
Is there a middle ground? Would we recognize it when we see it?
Do societal leaders and taste makers have a duty or right to discourage the use of media platforms? I always got the impression the reason TikTok was singled out was 'cause it's from China (and Singapore as well somehow.) I would love it if the people who are singling out TikTok for playing fast and loose with our dopamine regulatory system explained how western companies (Facebook, YouTube, Hacker News) aren't.
Feel free to stop reading at this point, if you haven't already. I'm well beyond replying (and mostly agreeing) to (with) your comment. Now I'm just rambling.
I have this memory of a picture of soviet workers sitting in an auditorium listening to classical music. It was around the 40s or 50s so I'm sure it was Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich or Rachmaninoff or Khachaturian. And they had completely blank looks on their faces like "okay. my boss says I have to be here, so I'm here." Me? I can't get enough of these guys and would definitely have a smile on my face if I got to get off work early to listen to them.
But... as taste-makers and culture gate-keepers, would we prefer to force people to consume "high culture" when all they want is TikTok? I mean, I would much rather read Louise Glück than watch Housewives of Some Random Town. (Sorry Glück folks, I'm just not a fan.) But if someone doesn't care for Henry Miller (any one of his books I could read over and over again), I would much rather they not be coerced into reading them. I love W. H. Auden and my spouse loves Bukowski. It's okay to enjoy what you enjoy.
I dunno. I think the article mentioned above seems a little gate-keepery. And I get it that we're worried about how people are being manipulated by media controlled by a foreign political power, but if we're gonna ban TikTok, maybe we should spend at least as much thought about what we're going to replace it with.
buyucu · 3h ago
Facebook and Instagram did this a decade before Tiktok.
nextworddev · 5h ago
At whose expense?
Zak · 5h ago
The article offers several options depending on the question's perspective. The commercial answer would be publishers of longer-form content, but the more sociologically important one would be that it is harming the ability of the average person to engage with long-form information, making the phenomenon costly to the whole world.
tsunamifury · 4h ago
The idea that long form = good is absurd and this type of thinking shows how over-confident this author is in their own intelligence.
Information compression and storage is the baseline of our species evolution.
Zak · 4h ago
Ahh, it seems I made my comment too short.
I don't think that long-form content is always superior to short, but I do think overconsumption of short-form content reduces peoples' ability to handle irreducible complexity.
Funes- · 5h ago
Everyone's.
rietta · 5h ago
I HATE short form videos with an abiding passion. As a user, my preference is long form YouTube videos I can listen to while my hands are busy with the dishes, dog walks, etc. I am ventured more into podcasts because even such videos are painfully annoying with ad interruptions that demand skip click. Under no circumstances do I want to interact with the device every 60-90 seconds. That totally defeats the purpose of listening while being productive in the day.
lloydatkinson · 5h ago
Is the posting account a bot? It’s posted only links and zero comments since it was created.
throw0101d · 5h ago
Are there generational differences? Do (say) Boomers or GenXers use different social media sites/apps than Millennials which are different than Gen Z?
greenhearth · 2h ago
It's basically television^1000. TV was also constantly criticized for reducing critical thinking skills and championing mediocrity. Douglas Adams put it best of course: "the future is the same old stuff with faster cars"
smittywerben · 5h ago
There's olympics for persons with disabilities. TikTok is in one of those but with other similarly sized companies. News at 11: 1080p today looks worse than 5 years ago, ending a a two decade streak of innovation and improvement to the world's telecom system.
mock-possum · 5h ago
I’ll have to take your word for it, I’m not on TikTok.
righthand · 5h ago
It’s ads for the generation that didn’t grow up with no-choice broadcast advertising.
jimt1234 · 5h ago
They said the same thing about us (GenXers) when we were young: MTV was killing our attention spans with short music videos.
YouTube still requires disconnecting connected chromecast devices to view YouTube Shorts?
nottorp · 5h ago
... but everything was mostly crap and not worth your time even before it was 60 seconds long.
If you spend your days watching "content" it's your fault.
Funes- · 5h ago
The "shit" to "good" ratio in literally every field was much less skewed to the "shit" side before smartphones and social media came along. It's always this same fallacy: "hey, that was always a thing!". Sure, drugs have "always" been a thing, but did you have fentanyl producing real-life zombie parades in the streets just ten years ago? If we make these reductionist claims, we can say just about every phenomenon was already a thing a hundred thousand years ago. We have to think about the degree to which something is occurring as well, and how it is taking place, not just try to dismiss it through knee-jerk intended retorts.
nottorp · 5h ago
You missed my second statement, I think.
How about instead of lamenting the existence of social networking and smartphones (by the way, social networking has the same effect on a laptop), we try to educate people to not waste their time on "content"?
alchemical_piss · 5h ago
We’ve been trying to “educate” people on nutrition for a long time, but this country is still fat as hell.
pessimizer · 5h ago
This is terrible to say, but if 170 million people are spending an hour a day watching 60 second videos, aren't they just dumb and easily entertained? Without this, wouldn't they just be consuming other dumb entertainment, or failing to find that dumb entertainment, going outside, and meeting other dumb people in order to do stupid things?
Also, I'm sure I have to subtract a huge number of these people from the dumb list, because they probably just watch a bunch of TikTok to unwind or get summaries of the events of the day, then move on to real content. People spend a lot more than an hour in front of screens, and have for the past 75 years. Plenty of the world was already watching dumb short animal videos, fail videos, success videos, astonishing videos, etc. long before TikTok.
Early youtube absolutely despised and made difficult uploading videos over 10 minutes. The thing was made to share tsunami videos and what were basically animated personal snapshots.
Acting like this is a qualitative change is just easy ragebait, and this story has been written again and again since MTV debuted (which is why it felt the need to refer to it.) That was almost 50 years ago.
edit: Martha Quinn is 66 years old.
dcchambers · 5h ago
> TikTok won. Now everything is 60 seconds.
It's true and it's devastating. I intentionally never signed up for TikTok because of the dangers of hyper-addictive short form content. Ultra-processed, junk food content.
But my Instagram became TikTok - so now I don't use Instagram. My YouTube is becoming TikTok - so now I don't use YouTube. Everything is implementing autoplaying short form content. X/Twitter. Reddit. etc.
TikTok won, and we're all worse off for it.
josefresco · 5h ago
Even the new ESPN app has short form videos called "Verts".
> But my Instagram became TikTok - so now I don't use Instagram. My YouTube is becoming TikTok - so now I don't use YouTube. Everything is implementing autoplaying short form content. X/Twitter. Reddit. etc.
There are notably numerous Chrome/Firefox extensions that will hide Shorts from the YouTube homescreen. Plenty of creators are still focusing on normal-length content
dcchambers · 4h ago
Yes, and I use those on my desktop. Doesn't help with the mobile apps though.
I guess the solution is just no YouTube on the phone.
The one that upsets me the most is Instagrams shift from photos to video. I miss seeing cool photos from my friends.
tsunamifury · 4h ago
Information compression and hyper-stimulation are two different things. Many forms of content online have become meaningless long form slop that could get to the point in less than 10 seconds, but are drawn out to drive view-time advertising metrics.
Fast and compressed is also a sign of intelligence rather than 'stupidity' as so many faux iconoclasts like to say. Our media storage over the last 5,000 years has most been about compression and speed, and to those who dismiss that... I dunno I guess I'll just quote Socrates succinctly "Books are for the stupid."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2025/02/12/launched-...
So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds. The most popular video creators are doing both; even MrBeast routinely has videos over 30 minutes long.
So maybe that’s pushing longer-form content as well. Some people making 30 second videos moves to 90 second ones to avoid the bad format, this crowds the format and pushes others up as well?
Totally talking out of my ass here.
But this can definitely trip people up, especially now the maximum length of a YouTube short is 3 minutes instead of 1. If you recorded a 3 minute video on a phone (or other random vertical screen device like a Game Boy/DS/3DS), YouTube will classify it as a short and there's basically nothing you can do about it.
I couldn't find a source (other than my memory) though, the earliest I could find is a reddit post from 2016 https://www.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/4v6bmy/wh...
I almost never want 2-hour documentary style videos, yet 1-minute teasers leave me even more dissatisfied.
I want 5-minute to 15-minute videos. They can be either overviews or summaries that cover broad stretches or super focused essays that go deeply in depth on just a singular hyper-focused point.
Long-form typically means opinionated and written for a lay audience. Filled with unnecessary pregnant pauses, fluff, and breathing room. Historians trying to craft a narrative.
Stop wasting your viewer's precious time on b-roll or building a case. Smart audiences will trust you if you're succinct and factual.
So take the heinously verbose documentary format, trim it down to just 10 to 15 minutes, and you're left with a fast-paced, frenetic, fully dehydrated, factual blow-by-blow.
That's the sweet spot. Maximum information density.
There is no sweet spot. Different people have different preferences. Not every Youtuber needs to make 10 minute videos. Not every Youtuber needs to make hour long videos. It depends on their audience.
If you don't like hour long videos, that's fine. You're not the intended audience. Stop trying to make every content creator abide by your preferences and just look for those who already cater to your preferences.
Maybe we'll get AI summarizers for video soon.
Perverse incentives.
You could argue that anything except the thesis statement is a "waste of time," but the videos are for entertainment at the end of the day.It wouldn't entertaining for someone to say "The Oof sound in Roblox was invented by Joey Kuras for a game called Messiah. Tommy Tallarico says he made it but he probably didn't." then the video ends.
What is fun is watching a long deep-dive pulling apart all the ridiculous lies and exaggerations of a fascinating narcissist like Tallarico.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcUUbGb77tY
Joseph Anderson, NeverKnowsBest, SuperBunnyHop and MandaloreGaming are the ones that come to mind. They've uncovered so much about games that I never knew was there! :)
I think some would recommend Matthewmatosis, Hbomberguy and Raycevick as well, I'm just less familiar with their work personally.
Mandaloregaming
Josh Strife Plays
The Sphere Hunter
The Making of Vampire Survivors by noclip.
Vintage inspired with the game choice, not straight vintage, but noclip is one of the best doing game documentaries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZmcbShMFNY
The Story of Thief & Looking Glass Studios, also by noclip.
As vintage as they come.
AI in particular is like coke to lazy content makers. I've had to drop a few because it became clear that AI took the lead in writing.
It's this ad incentive that has made long-form videos more popular on Youtube.
They start cycling content and using innovative ways to make videos artificially longer. Some videos of have "what this video is about" and "Summary" sections which can be even half of the video length in total. Sponsored sections are getting longer. There are longer pauses and less editing. The list goes on.
Could it be that the shorter videos that are now 30-60 seconds present the same information as they did when they were ~10min, just without all extra prologue, epilogue, and sponsor inserts? Wasn't one of the reasons they were ~10min in the first place simply to get monetized better?
That may be a consequence of the monetization algorithm. It allows more time for ads.
The format of too many Youtube videos now is
- Useless intro
- Long recap of historical info to allow space for ads
- Actual new content
- Filler
- Conclusion
Those are the ones that aren't just some neckbeard with earphones and a big microphone.
Your narrative isn't any less "simple" or any better backed up.
I assume this is a replacement for TV/streaming. Cases were you previously would've wanted a 10-minute YouTube video are becoming cases where you watch 30-60 second ones. Cases where you previously wanted a 20+ minute Netlfix show are becoming ones where you turn to long YouTube videos
The main new takeaway is that the shortform category is bigger and more important than previously imagined but hardly the sole winner.
I wager most people are putting those on while having a meal and using their phones or tablets at the same time. Moreover, 99% of the most watched content on YouTube is utter garbage that would make the average reality show on TV twenty years ago look like The Godfather in comparison. Gossippy, clickbait videos made to induce an immediate dopamine dump and be used as background noise aren't "in-depth" anything. I don't think people are sitting in front of a TV watching an hour-long, non-sponsored, ad-free interview with Margerite Duras and doing nothing else concurrently, for instance.
On top of all that, this trend of making longer videos comes mostly from an attempt to increase ad revenue. Let's not be fooled here.
Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes.
TikTok has not "won" at all. There's a place for content of all different lengths. The death of the attention span has been greatly exaggerated.
Spend 15 minutes with the median 7-30 year old and you’ll think differently. Yes it’s not everybody. But it’s clearly most of them.
The majority will be listening to it while on their commute, or at the gym, or doing chores around the house. My wife (a civil engineer) has a podcast going in the background even while working. I asked her how she actually manages to pay attention to it and she says that it's mostly for the background noise.
> Movies are getting longer at the cinema too -- what used to be 85 minutes is now 150 minutes.
Because these movies are not made for the cinema anymore, but for streaming platforms, where people can consume in the same way they consume their podcasts.
Just because one person uses a podcast as background noise, doesn't mean everybody else is.
My dude you’re using music wrong. Noise generators do exist - you can even pick a color for your noise!
It even has a name - "second-monitoring".
If that wasn't ironic enough to the title of the article, upon hitting the "X" and then "Back" on my phone (because it generated enough rejection on me that I didn't want to keep reading), the popup appeared again (-: so double annoyance for the price of one.
Better to be just a txt file. If OP wants $$, just put up a Pantheon page.
It truly is like a drug.
Attention and concentration are skills that can be trained, so not all is lost. I was feeling like I was losing my focus about a decade ago and decided that every morning I'd wake up and read a novel for 30 minutes or so. Within a few weeks you'll notice the difference.
Reading a book, require attention but of lower intensity. While watching an hour long fast paced video, require a high intensity attention.
In the case of watching an hour of video, you're just there consuming what's going on. Reading a novel requires you to world build internally. I'd say that sort of attention is a much higher intensity version. Or at least it takes a lot more active involvement.
If you've ever sat for meditation you'll know that low-input stimulation can be much harder to keep your attention on, but being lost in daydreaming and 'monkey-mind' chatter is pretty effortless. Once you train in it it becomes no big deal, though. Same is true for reading novels.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23988110/
My attention span went (back) up after I forced myself to read some books start to finish. It’s something you can lose, but fortunately it’s also something you can regain.
I like to think that books (novels and fantasy) are low-resolution prose, so the crux of the matter is distributed — mostly useless info — across several pages. While forums — like HN or Reddit — are high-resolution prose. I don't know if I make sense.
Well, novels are just more subtle. A good novel will get you deep into the emotional landscape of it's subject, or give you a vivid portrait of a scene that is happening, or transport you to a historical or future time. You get to embody a particular character or world, which builds your own personal knowledge and empathy. We're not just reading a collection of facts or statements. We can get lost in the beauty of a landscape we've never visited before in a novel, which is the crux of the matter, even if it doesn't seem like it.
Those sorts of novels tend to be challenging to read, but most things worth doing challenge us. If you've never read something like Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or Gabo's 100 Years of Solitude, or many of the other great artistic achievements in literature, you really should challenge yourself to do so. They make us better.
No YT, FB, IG, TT, or TV for sure. For an extra challenge, try no music (except what you can make yourself) or news (including HN). You'll find yourself grabbing your phone only to immediately put it down again.
No need to force yourself to read or go for a walk or whatever. Do whatever you feel like all day, just not the digital things.
And if you can’t even do that, I suggest you start reading a book right before sleeping until you pass out. Every night. You will fall asleep extremely fast at beginning but I managed to get back to reading while having extreme difficulty concentrating from a completely different illness than TikTok. It only took 2 years.
It is also a side effect of the fact that frankly a lot of stuff on YouTube doesn't actually need to be on YouTube and is, as I mentioned in my first post, really just a podcast with a video track because it has to have a video track to be on YouTube, but that is perfectly ignorable. Even channels as high quality as Practical Engineering are (guestimating) something like 80% stock footage and 20% something he actually created that is useful and germane to the topic.
I often have a hard time dealing with videos at 1x as well but it's not like it has impacted my social relationships or anything. I don't perceive normal people as speaking slowly now or anything like that. Somehow my brain has this segregated, and I phrase it that way because it's not like I can consciously take credit for it, I didn't do anything, it's just happening naturally.
I mean, first of all, who falls asleep during a movie? Even stuff I've seen 30 times already, is still engaging and holds my attention from start to finish. Yet, then again, we've had to cancel "friends movie night" in our house because people would come over, sit down to watch the movie, and after 10 minutes they're all scrolling their phones and bored with the movie. Unless it's got frantic action every second, you're going to lose people. Something is really wrong with our attention spans.
You'll get there. Go from shorter form content to things that'll grab your attention, piece by piece.
In some ways, it reads like prophecy. He mapped the inevitability of image-mediated life before we had the feeds to prove him right. In other ways, it feels trivial. Today's hyperreality makes the theory so obvious it barely registers as theory at all, more like a weather report. We don’t have to imagine the spectacle when we're already drowning in it.
My gripe with "How is new media transforming us?" journalism is that it never gets past the pre-theoretical stage. It inventories symptoms: shorter attention spans, algorithmic optimization, but won't name the cause. It's like reporting the moon's position every night and refusing to mention gravity.
The point that matters is Debord's: social relations mediated by images have replaced embodied relations. Platforms sell us connection, but what they deliver is commodification. Yes, some internet friendships spill into real life. But most are fragile, living inside economic structures designed to monetize attention. Everyone already knows the real relation isn't friend-to-friend but user-to-advertiser, and money always wins.
That's the basecamp for any way out: recognizing that hyperreal social life can't substitute lived social life. The spectacle doesn't mediate friendship, it mediates consumption. And if Debord feels obvious now, that's only because his warning has become the background condition of everyday life. Facebook can't really connect you to friends; it can only connect you to advertisers.
I love YouTube but my problem with the content of YouTube is that almost all videos are introducing you to everything every time.
For example, there's this science video about this interesting property of fire right? They start with what's fire, when it was invented, what led to be studied this way and then they deliver the money shot. It is O.K. to be introduced to a topic once but it is brain wrecking to be 101ed every time. They are doing it to increase the watch time and the ad revenue and its horrible.
Forcing the videos to be short makes them deliver the gist quickly, TikTok videos that are trying to the introduction 101 thing are just as horrible, when a video is over 1min I'm very skeptical and feel the urge to move on.
Of course in-depth videos need to be long but those are not that many actually. From the pop-sci genre Veritasuim does it well but that kind of production takes long time and they publish videos every now and then. With the race to pump videos as quickly as possible, the short format is the better since you can get the content quickly and if you want to know more about it you can actually read about it. Which is how you actually learn anything BTW.
Start with a clickbait question, then give a complete history ripped off of Wikipedia, then by the end they don’t even fully answer the question. Very frustrating.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quibi
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241788/tiktok-app-downl...
Russia has recently violated Polish airspace. NATO wants to put troops in Ukraine. Charlie Kirk got shot out our local university today. Something or someone really, really wants you to be comfortable with violence. All it would take to reset the global chessboard would be smuggling a conventional (or nuclear) weapon into a large city in the United States or Europe and provoking an Article 5 response from NAT0. Thanos snaps his fingers and the global population is cut in half over a few days. The rest that remain spend the next few decades trying to figure out, "who was really responsible."
The good news is that in the minds of some this is how the human race, "solved climate change."
There's actually a format for movies now, where a short scene is shared with the contrast cranked to 11, and background music. And it pays off in under a minute. Shorts is short for climax, and everything over a minute is boring.
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/shorts-climax
No, sorry I read the first and last sentence. This is why I like the short format more then the long forms, it often boils down to the same clever narrative trickery without waisting 3 hours of your life.
It did not take me 3 hours to read that article.
But yeah, there's a dehumanization going on. Speeding up videos to deliver the maximum words per second to the viewer is inhuman. It started as an appeal to ADHD children, but i that meme is overdone, people actually do have attention and still interested in humans, not just what they say.
Somehow the breathless speech pattern they all adopt is really irritating to me. Thats saying something coming from an ADHD person.
It is all depressing. As if the spectacle has devoured the whole reality and there is now nothing but it.
I guess it's a lot like real drugs - you build a tolerance and you need a bigger dose to get the same effect. In this case, no bigger dose is available.
They never inform.
The number of video creators I can actually recall and point to who have affected me on any real emotional or intellectual level via shorts I can count on one hand.
"Old-school" longform video (on YouTube and elsewhere) is a medium with real utility and artistic merit. Shorts are mildly entertaining at best and mind-numbing goop at worst. And, as usual, the meme is true: *this could have been a blog post.*
I would say short-form content found a gap in the market and now exists in addition to long-form content without replacing it.
https://genius.com/Radiohead-fitter-happier-lyrics
Ok Computer came out twenty-eight years ago (!)
First time I noticed that was "we are number one" meme in autumn 2016
Some of us will continue to be reading War and Peace level works and watch "lengthy" movies.
I’d ban shorts immediately. It’s like crack or fentanyl.
We lost control long time ago.
It's kind of like Reddit and other "customize your feed" social media. If you subscribe to the defaults, yeah, it's hot garbage. If you select content creators or topics that support your individual growth then you get a much different outcome.
Of course not to say I couldn't have benefited from the same topics via another type of media. But I enjoy the few minutes I spend on TT per day, seeing what my favorites have posted, etc. I even met a cool dummer named Zooich in Japan who I enjoy following and interacting with each week. And I've made a bit of content myself which I'm proud of.
Lastly, in no way does my positive experience diminish the negative issues surrounding TT. I fully agree it contributes to reduced attention span, spreading misinformation, etc. -- just like most other forms of social media. And there's a very real risk of it becoming state media in the future. I just wanted to provide a different perspective other than "TT is terrible in every way, ban it!".
Point being TikTok js a winner in a slice of the population. I just stopped following the bunch of Indian folks even though they had an Instagram or reel account because I just could not get used to it. Similarly I followed a few people on rednote but promptly abandoned it when TT came back. So maybe TT won. But look at it from the other side. People in India and China don't follow what I follow. And there are billions of those.
TikTok is an awesome platform but not yet a "too big to fail" like YouTube I guess
Edit. But I get the point of 60 second media winning. Nowadays I am just unable to focus on a tv show. Or I am watching a show with some digression (Reddit, tiktok) in my hand. Theaters is the only place I am unable to do so and that's the only place I now enjoy movies I guess.
Okay... maybe you can't. Maybe there are people in your life that won't let you forget it exists. Maybe your job is in communications and you have to get on TicToc (or YouTube or InstaGram or whatever.)
170 million people is about half the U.S. population. And I can't say this without sounding like an elitist pr*k, but it's always seemed like about half the population is below average. (And since we're all savvy consumers of statistics here, we all know that attempt at a joke would be better if I said "half the population is below the median.")
So assuming an algorithmic dopamine-stroking video platform is a social evil, maybe people are susceptible to it because there's something missing in their lives? I don't watch a lot of TV and look at the internet mostly through a text based browser. Mostly because I KNOW I have attention problems. I don't need flashy ads bombarding me with distractions. But mostly it's because I do a lot of other things that aren't watching videos that are more fulfilling (like commenting on HN threads.)
I don't know if this is true... but I like to play the game where you think about how the world would have to change for various statements to become true. (It's fun to wallow in the swampy mud-bath of your own imagination.) What if... TicToc (and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and all the other attention sucking apps) are a net benefit to people's lives?
I know it's en vogue to bash new media dealers and clutch our collective pearls. But if traditional media could get these engagement numbers, I can't imagine they wouldn't. Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow have been dead for decades. If, as a culture, we valued the Children's Television Workshop, we would have funded them publicly instead of letting them crawl into (financial) bed with NBC/Universal and Warner Brothers.
So sure... maybe TicToc is evil, but what alternative are we offering the half of society that wants their midbrain stroked?
also not sure why you kept purposely misspelling TikTok given the app name is the first thing in the headline?
That's cool to hear there's some wheat among the chaff. Seems like most technology comes with swings and roundabouts. My suspicion is it's simultaneously wonderful and horrible. That's how I remember the year I was on Twitter. I'm going out of my way to avoid installing the app cause I know my self-control isn't as strong as I often pretend it is. But I'll look for @etymologynerd on other platforms.
At least legacy media wasn’t directly promoting and rewarding antisocial behavior and crimes.
But to your point... yes... gate-keepers can keep out the riffraff. (And I'm not trying to be snarky with that last statement.) Taste-makers can steer the listening public towards some competent art. As a society we tend to swing back and forth between freedom and conformity. We're in a pretty "free" feeling era and the word "conformity" is almost a pejorative. Monoculture is dangerous, but sure, so is letting the moral equivalent of the Manson Family loose on your child's phone. (not implying TikTok is the modern Manson equivalent, just hypothesizing the existence of a really bad player in the digital realm.)
Is there a middle ground? Would we recognize it when we see it?
Do societal leaders and taste makers have a duty or right to discourage the use of media platforms? I always got the impression the reason TikTok was singled out was 'cause it's from China (and Singapore as well somehow.) I would love it if the people who are singling out TikTok for playing fast and loose with our dopamine regulatory system explained how western companies (Facebook, YouTube, Hacker News) aren't.
Feel free to stop reading at this point, if you haven't already. I'm well beyond replying (and mostly agreeing) to (with) your comment. Now I'm just rambling.
I have this memory of a picture of soviet workers sitting in an auditorium listening to classical music. It was around the 40s or 50s so I'm sure it was Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich or Rachmaninoff or Khachaturian. And they had completely blank looks on their faces like "okay. my boss says I have to be here, so I'm here." Me? I can't get enough of these guys and would definitely have a smile on my face if I got to get off work early to listen to them.
But... as taste-makers and culture gate-keepers, would we prefer to force people to consume "high culture" when all they want is TikTok? I mean, I would much rather read Louise Glück than watch Housewives of Some Random Town. (Sorry Glück folks, I'm just not a fan.) But if someone doesn't care for Henry Miller (any one of his books I could read over and over again), I would much rather they not be coerced into reading them. I love W. H. Auden and my spouse loves Bukowski. It's okay to enjoy what you enjoy.
I dunno. I think the article mentioned above seems a little gate-keepery. And I get it that we're worried about how people are being manipulated by media controlled by a foreign political power, but if we're gonna ban TikTok, maybe we should spend at least as much thought about what we're going to replace it with.
Information compression and storage is the baseline of our species evolution.
I don't think that long-form content is always superior to short, but I do think overconsumption of short-form content reduces peoples' ability to handle irreducible complexity.
Vine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)
Short-form content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-form_content
YouTube still requires disconnecting connected chromecast devices to view YouTube Shorts?
If you spend your days watching "content" it's your fault.
How about instead of lamenting the existence of social networking and smartphones (by the way, social networking has the same effect on a laptop), we try to educate people to not waste their time on "content"?
Also, I'm sure I have to subtract a huge number of these people from the dumb list, because they probably just watch a bunch of TikTok to unwind or get summaries of the events of the day, then move on to real content. People spend a lot more than an hour in front of screens, and have for the past 75 years. Plenty of the world was already watching dumb short animal videos, fail videos, success videos, astonishing videos, etc. long before TikTok.
Early youtube absolutely despised and made difficult uploading videos over 10 minutes. The thing was made to share tsunami videos and what were basically animated personal snapshots.
Acting like this is a qualitative change is just easy ragebait, and this story has been written again and again since MTV debuted (which is why it felt the need to refer to it.) That was almost 50 years ago.
edit: Martha Quinn is 66 years old.
It's true and it's devastating. I intentionally never signed up for TikTok because of the dangers of hyper-addictive short form content. Ultra-processed, junk food content.
But my Instagram became TikTok - so now I don't use Instagram. My YouTube is becoming TikTok - so now I don't use YouTube. Everything is implementing autoplaying short form content. X/Twitter. Reddit. etc.
TikTok won, and we're all worse off for it.
There are notably numerous Chrome/Firefox extensions that will hide Shorts from the YouTube homescreen. Plenty of creators are still focusing on normal-length content
I guess the solution is just no YouTube on the phone.
The one that upsets me the most is Instagrams shift from photos to video. I miss seeing cool photos from my friends.
Fast and compressed is also a sign of intelligence rather than 'stupidity' as so many faux iconoclasts like to say. Our media storage over the last 5,000 years has most been about compression and speed, and to those who dismiss that... I dunno I guess I'll just quote Socrates succinctly "Books are for the stupid."