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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   939 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 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.

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.

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?

'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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