massive backlog of content, only place creators can easily make money from uploading vids I’m pretty sure, so the big creators will never switch, and a lot of smaller creators have at least a fantasy of making it big if their vids go viral, if not a goal. Honestly a government would have to step in a break up YT at this point, it’s got a monopoly on vids and I don’t think any platform will ever be able to break it tbh.
Boomer take
With the attention span of Zoomers and younger generations, TikToks will be everything that anybody needs as nobody can watch videos longer than 3 minutes anyways
Absolute horseshit, the kids watch long form content at 2x speed. They still want it, they just want it ‘faster’. This will also continue to change when they get old and everything slows down for them.
People keep saying this but it really doesn’t hold up. Moistcritikal videos get viewed like crazy and the guy posts 2-3 videos of himself rambling at a camera every day, each 10-20 minutes long, no jumpcuts or loud noises either. The daily Hasanabi videos are all easily 30 minutes long. Hell, MrBeast videos are all well over 10 minutes long as well. Wendigoon has seen a meteoric rise over the past year and his videos are all hour long stories about creeypasta stuff etc. Iceberg videos have been a huge trend and those are all really long as well.
The theory that people’s attention spans keep getting shorter and people can’t watch longer videos anymore doesn’t match up with the trends on Youtube. Videos are not getting shorter, not at all.
The theory that people’s attention spans keep getting shorter and people can’t watch longer videos anymore doesn’t match up with the trends on Youtube.
well… there’s a few things about that. Within youtube itself there are different incentives than there might be on other platforms, and changes in rules, recommendation algorithms, and advertising methods have all contributed to shaping what kind of content does well as much or more than people’s attention spans or preferences. There was a time when short videos were king, but changes to monetization and such shifted away from that.
But if you look industry wide there has been an explosion in the short form stuff. it’s not prima facie evidence of declining attention spans but it is a real trend that has probably brought the average down.
IMO it’s just two different ways to retain attention: a long drawn out explanation or story with the promise of some payoff where it all comes together or builds to a big moment (often lacking), versus rapid fire content coming at you so fast it doesn’t even really matter if its that good as long as its stimulation.
the “declining attention span” thing feels real in other ways though. Most people I know couldn’t sit down and read a book for any length of time if they tried.
People have been saying this about the attention spans of the youths at LEAST since Television dropped, and probably since books dropped
back in my day, we watched 5 hour video essays about Goof Troop
Youtube has that fake tiktok “shorts” feature, but I’m pretty sure it’s just people reposting content from tiktok and other short-form video sites.
Back in my day, we didn’t have 5 hour video essays, we only had 10 minute videos. And even that was considered too long back then.
There are two types of videos. 3 minute ticktoks and 2 hour video essays about “Hegelian philosophy hidden in the Adventures of the Gummi Bears”
There are also 10-hour “analysis” videos of video games that are inexplicably just narrating a playthrough with almost no actual analysis present.
Social media changes incredibly quickly. Think of how recently TikTok came onto the scene, and how it changed every other site. Reddit made the worst video player ever to try to copy TikTok.
That is the only example in the last 10 years and they only ‘succeeded’ because bytedance was willing to burn tens of billions of dollars.
