#oneaday Day 1134: Eat my Shorts

I was having some idle musings earlier about whether or not I should experiment a bit with YouTube's "Shorts" thing that they won't stop pushing at every opportunity, but the conclusion I came to was that I hate everything about it. I hate the form factor, I hate the format, I hate what they say about the audience, I hate the way in which they're typically used, and I hate that creative types feel the need to pander to attention-deficit zoomers with shit like this.

I feel exactly the same way about TikTok, because it's essentially the same thing. I hate the fact that everyone is ripping off the exact same idea, also. It's the very worst of 21st century cynical "product design" at work, where everything is the same and nothing is actually for the purpose it might initially appear to be for.

Let me at least attempt to back up the reasons why I dislike Shorts (and TikTok, and Instagram Reels, and whatever other shit is doing the exact same thing) though, rather than just ranting about it.

First, the form factor. Vertical video — remember when that was something to be mocked? — sucks for anything other than portrait-perspective "face shouting at camera" videos. And I hate portrait-perspective "face shouting at camera" videos, because in today's social media landscape they appear to have taken the place of actually well thought-out, considered pieces of writing. Why think about what you're saying when you can just yell at a camera in the hope of going viral? But I digress.

I detest the 9:16 form factor because it's impractical for anything I might be interested in doing, which would involve game footage. You either end up cropping a narrow strip down the middle of the game screen, which looks dumb, or squeezing the game screen into a tiny letterboxed space, which also looks dumb. The one idea I'd been toying with was 4:3 retro gaming footage at the top of the available space, with text underneath displaying a few interesting facts or bits of commentary over the course of the 60-second video. But then I remembered people can't (or, rather, won't) read any more.

I hate the format because limiting things to a minute is symptomatic of the aforementioned fact that no-one online has any attention span any more. To be fair, this has been a problem for a long time — I remember old 1up.com forum threads being derailed by people yelling about "walls of text" in the mid-'00s — but it's become particularly noticeable with the rise of these shitty video formats.

I hate what these shitty video formats say about the audience because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy: make "content" (ugh) for self-absorbed zoomers who don't actually care about anything and all you will attract are self-absorbed zoomers who are only swiping through as much "content" as possible because they are incapable of sitting still without a phone in their hand.

I've already mentioned why I hate the way they're typically used, but it can't be understated: I find the average use of this video format genuinely insulting to my intelligence. Out of curiosity, I downloaded TikTok a week or two ago just to see if there was any genuinely interesting gaming stuff on there, and after coming across a guy who was clearly old enough to know better going "Back in the OLDEN DAYS we had to plug our CONSOLES into a TELEVISION with CABLES!!" I uninstalled it and tried to forget about what I had just witnessed.

The growth of this format is the most out-of-touch I've ever felt online, and I know that's a recognised side-effect of growing up and/or old. But as a creative type who favours stuff that demands a modicum of intelligence and attention span to appreciate and enjoy, I feel kind of pissy that everything seems to be continually moving in the CONSUME MORE SHORT-FORM CONTENT MADE BY CONTENT CREATORS, CONTENT CONSUMERS direction rather than allowing specialists the opportunity to… well, specialise.

This was a pointless rant, I know, and I still might try my idea above with YouTube Shorts just to see if it's worth bothering with. But as someone on the autistic spectrum, I find myself feeling obliged to be uncomfortable with change and to complain about it!

I'm done now. I'm off to play the Renovation cart on Evercade.