Why on Earth would you want shorter videos? The best thing about YouTube is that it's one of the only places you can find quality medium-to-long-form content.
That's all due to changes by YouTube to reward length and frequency, which of course makes sense for maximizing their ad revenue. But the result is creators are incentivized to pump out 20-minute fluff videos, not well edited/written videos.
People on here complain about SEO sites being filled with meaningless garbage. That's what YouTube is starting to be. The difference is their search bar still works whereas Google's will only give you the garbage. Though I still get "such and such breaks down their career" even though I've never clicked on that.
And despite all the dredge, there is a lot of good content on YouTube, at least in certain niches. Video essays on media and politics, lots of video-game analysis and other fan communities, history content, lots of e-sports to name just a handful that I personally enjoy.
Search is literally one of the things YouTube is poorer at than ever and it blows my mind. I get a handful of results that might be relevant and then it’s just pages and pages of completely unrelated content that has nothing to do remotely with my search.
There's almost no meaningful 3 minute content possible, so a platform like TikTok that only works for short videos is basically condemned to be meaning-less, to be pure entertainment.
In a world full of distractions I for one love the more slow-paced videos than “shorts” churned out by content mills designed to feed the modern day digital ADHD…
Youtube learned the wrong lesson and started to optimize the algorithm for retention and length. It is annoying to click for a review of some product that looks like a lengthy one with probably tests and what not only to see painfully slow unboxing and a wikipedia read of the history of the product and company and then sponsor read and then they turn on the device for a minute and give arbitrary score.
Exact same info could have been communicated in 30seconds, but then they wouldn’t get sponsor money and mid video ad roll
