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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1455 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

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Have you noticed the information density of youtube going way way down in the last year-two? Videos that could be 5 minutes are 35, everyone talks slowly and lazily. Up to the point where youtube offers x3 and I think x4 playback as premium features.

I've heard that videos under ~5 minutes become shorts which don't get monetized, so the incentive is to make longer videos. I guess videos under 10 minutes are also getting downgraded now because they get less engagement / fewer ads?

I have also noticed that most of the recommendations on lightly-used logged-out browsers are now are now shorts of the simp-bait variety or long-form videos of the "show something rage-inducing and offer light, brainrot commentary from the corner of the screen" variety - Asmongold is the epitome of this, and I always regret clicking. To add to this, I suspect most of the history and food video recommendations I get are wholly AI-generated, and most of the topics that would be interesting are obvious clickbait. It's gotten to where I can pretty much only watch people whose channels I intentionally search.

I've heard that videos under ~5 minutes become shorts which don't get monetized

There was some panic over this in the early days of Shorts when YouTube was retroactively, non-consensually converting existing videos into Shorts, but these days, YouTube is pretty clear that only vertical/square videos less than 3 minutes in length become Shorts. So as long as your video is shaped like a normal video, it can be as short as you want without getting the Shorts treatment.

You can technically monetize Shorts now too, but I've heard it's not as lucrative as traditional videos.

I wanna say it was around 2020-ish when YouTube changed their algorithm to put a lot less weight on channels' upload record / consistency and a lot more weight on individual videos' watch-time. (Hard to know for sure because all information about the YouTube algorithm is buried under a mountain of "how do I get rich on YouTube" slop articles.) Previously the dominant strategy was to release a lot of short, punchy videos, ideally on a daily release schedule; Captain Disillusion griped about that in his 2018 parody video. But by 2021, creators like Quinton Reviews were seeing success with five-hour monstrosities that were actually just a bunch of shorter videos combined into one upload for algorithm purposes.

"Short daily video" YouTubers and "long infrequent effortpost" YouTubers have both existed on the platform for a long time (and still exist), but now that long videos are a popular/successful format, I see a lot more low-effort attempts at making them. It doesn't help that YouTube Shorts (and TikTok) provide a better path to success for people interested in making short videos.

I truly do not envy the lives of those whose paycheck and general live trajectory is dictated by an algorithm that is constantly and aggressively being tweaked but uncaring corporate interests to maximize eyeballs on ads, or whatever they call the actual metric they care about.

Arbitrary-seeming changes that often wreck your previous strategy, or even diminish the viability of the very style you prefer to express in.

Your work output dictated by constant compliance with a disinterested (not malicious, but it'd be hard to tell) program that remains, to you, a complete black box which you can only appease by offering up your best efforts and seeing which get rewarded with views and money, then adjusting from there.

It is true that we ALL live under someone else's algorithm (and, if you wish, EVERYONE is living under the meta-algorithm known as "the market"). But it'd be particularly maddening to me when there's a corporate entity that owes me no allegiance, and refuses to disclose the most important standards by which it judges 'success,' meanwhile it doles out the rewards as it sees fit with seemingly no regard for the quality of the creative work.

Assuming that you're right, I would think that ads have something to do with it. Youtubers are (were?) notorious for stretching <10 minute videos to ten minutes, because that allows them to include a midroll ad.

It’s all downstream of the choices YouTube makes. YouTube wants to show you videos lengthy enough for ads, so they create incentives both monetary and exposure based for creators to make them, and then adjust their algorithm in order to show them to you. YouTube controls it all and the content creators are merely their puppets. YouTube has a monopoly over this sort of thing and that is how they get away with it. The monopoly is more or less inherent to how these digital platforms operate, with market forces encouraging centralization of user bases. So really it’s digitized markets to blame for all of this, YouTube’s just the beast it operates through.

Feels like it used to be that a 'video essay' was mostly guaranteed to have some insights and interesting commentary on a topic you cared about.

The videos are just as long but less 'useful' information, lazier editing, and even the entertainment value has gone down.

Plus certain topics are getting recycled pretty often, so I'd just as soon go and rewatch older classics.

I just don't watch 'em anymore.

AI writing's also surely contributing to this. Somebody can toss in like 5 dotpoints and get a 30 minute script, whilst previously if they were writing their own there'd be more a trend towards brevity.

A method I've seen is for someone to copy the transcript of an existing video, feed it into an AI and ask it to make arbitrary changes, feed the outputted script into an AI voice generator, then use AI + third worlders on Fiverr to stitch together visuals to go with it, and voila, a complete video with minimal effort.

There's also a trend of using AI actors or clones. Essentially, since so many videos are just people talking into cameras with minimal movement, an AI generated actor is totally serviceable. It's AI script + AI voice, exposited by an AI person.

Now the question is, is AI mimicking people or were people already mimicking AI?

Ding ding ding.

Its easier to put out volume if you happily compromise on quality, and I have to assume the Youtube Algo doesn't care about quality over minutes watched.

So there's some 'optimal' amount of information/minute that pads out the video without losing the viewer.

Just so happens my preference is on information density is higher than the average youtube viewers. Which is unsurprising.

but we also have powerful defensive tools.

First thing to do with any long video is to copy/paste the transcript into your LLM of choice and get a summary to see if it's worth your time, or just to get the info without the padding

Yep.

Hence why if the video isn't leveraging its advantages as a visual medium to be more engaging/entertaining, I'm backing out almost instantly.

Holy shit they gated higher playback speeds as a premium feature? LMAO

I am pretty sure I have a chrome extension that works on every type of video to arbitrarily control playback speed.

Every time I see someone using the YouTube app instead of a modded client like Vanced (which I use and love), I die a little inside. It's probably better to use the browser at that point, even on mobile.

They gated ‘queue next video’ and ‘play in window’ as premium features too. Netflix gates the latter even if you are a paying customer on the lower tier.

Last year, I did a movie watching challenge: 50 movies that I haven't seen before, from 50 years, 1975 through 2024. From the outset I knew that the selection of older titles on streaming services is abysmal, especially when you're not in the US, so my plan always was to plan the movies first, assume I'll need to pirate most, only watch on streaming if it's available. What I'm trying to say is that my expectations for streaming sites are very, very low, and yet I can't help but be surprised how bad the actual situation is. You really live like this?

There was a brief period in my life when I gave up buccaneering entirely because there was enough proper content on streaming platform to fill my schedule. That period ended quickly - the ecosystem fragmented explosively (and no, I am not going to buy 15 different streaming service subscriptions, thank you very much), most of individual platforms became 95% garbage, with distribution of worthy content in the remaining 5% being arbitrary and shifting all the time, and on top of that every streaming platform has its own app and most of them are crappy in their own unique ways. And of course it's all chock full of ads unless you pay and pay and pay and pay on top of that (and you'll probably still get ads because why not). It is completely intolerable to live like this - especially given the alternative is within the hand's reach, for those who knows how to reach it.

This is one of the areas where the current state of the market is objectively worse than in the pre-internet era. I remember when I was in college (the internet existed but hadn't subsumed everything) it seemed like every town had a video store that opened when the VCR came out in the 1980s, ordered every title that was available, and never threw anything out. The result was that you had independent shops whose archives included pretty much everything that was ever released on video. Sure, it might not be on DVD, and the tape might be in bad shape from having been watched 4 million times, but at least it was available. I remember they had a 5 catalog rentals for $5 deal, and the rentals were for a week, so it was kind of a weekly ritual to rent 5 movies every week whether I planned on watching them or not. They also had a byzantine setup that encouraged browsing because you never knew where you'd find anything, though they had a catalog you could consult. The new releases were obviously segregated, and they had the normal categories (comedy, drama, etc.), but the AFI 100 movies had their own section, as did "Black and White Classics", and there was something called the Video Vault that could have anything. I believe there was even a small LBGT section, definitely odd for a small town store in the mid 2000s.

They closed in 2007, well before streaming. I think it was a combination of OG Netflix and Redbox. I worked at a video store in high school, and 90% of our sales were newer releases, though the one I worked at didn't have much of an archive. It was part of a grocery store, and it became easier for the grocery stores to just put a Redbox machine in the lobby that would cover the dozen or so titles that actually made money. Netflix didn't make sense for new releases at the time, since you had to wait and could be on a list, but for movie buffs who would just put a hundred movies in the queue and watch whatever Netflix sent them, it was perfectly fine and didn't require as much effort. My roommate and I got the Blockbuster equivalent circa 2008 and I remember he spent an afternoon just inputting the entire 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list in, and we'd watch whatever came in. That was probably the peak of movie availability since they really did have close to everything you could think of, unless it was really obscure.

As soon as streaming became the main business it was over, because bandwidth considerations came into play, similar to the space considerations of Redbox, and it was thus impossible to keep an inventory of that size, especially when the licensing agreements were more complicated and probably required them to pay for rights even for stuff that wasn't in high demand.

As soon as streaming became the main business it was over, because bandwidth considerations came into play, similar to the space considerations of Redbox, and it was thus impossible to keep an inventory of that size, especially when the licensing agreements were more complicated and probably required them to pay for rights even for stuff that wasn't in high demand.

It's 100% the licensing agreements that cause this shortage, and not bandwidth.

This is why my only streaming service is the Criterion Channel. The only advantage of streaming over piracy is convenience, so might as well choose your convenience to funnel you towards good movies rather than bad ones.

There's also Kanopy, which has the added advantage of being free to a point.

'You' being non-US or streamers? Is it better in the US?

Yes, although it's been happening for a few years longer than that. The amount of clickbait has also steadily increased where entire 15 minute videos could be replaced by three sentences. And of course the search has now gone completely to shit with even the "before:2027" trick not working anymore.

Yes. The advent of the full time youtuber has led most video creators to compete at being bloated clickbait producing fucks who waste the hell out of my time. It's all so algorithm-meta-gamed and it's all so tiresome.

GothamChess gets a lot of shit for using clickbait titles instead of anything useful or informative, but he ought to get about ten times as much shit for it. Just relentless slash-and-burn farming of the commons.

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