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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1539 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.

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