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292 points natalie3p | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.403s | source
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keiferski ◴[] No.45200147[source]
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:

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.

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quxbar ◴[] No.45200190[source]
I won't even look at a youtube video essay about an obscure vintage RPG (my preferred form of guilty pleasure viewing) if it's under 20 minutes long.
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1. Analemma_ ◴[] No.45200459[source]
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.
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2. cogman10 ◴[] No.45201381[source]
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.