Short-Form Content: The Pros and the Cons

Oh my god...I've been on Youtube for three hours I need to get to sleep!

This is a sentence I've found myself repeatedly uttering since the popularisation of Youtube shorts. 'No, I refuse to get tiktok' I would say, 'those videos are cringe and rot your attention span' I'd utter with a prideful prejudice, yet I have found that short-form content has infiltrated my life, and consumed far more hours of my time than I'd prefer.

I'd like to say - YouTube as a whole has been a tremendous benefit to my life, and I'd be half the man I am today if it weren't for the many hours I've spent on the platform. I grew up with Youtube...it first served as a guide to progress a childhood game, where my foolish eight year old brain couldn't wrap it's head around what in hindsight was an easy puzzle. For many years it served this function, I had found a tool to alleviate the frustrations of challenges I couldn't overcome on my own, I had found a tool that objectively increased my performance.

The early days were blissful, but it only grew even better. Influencer was a foreign term in these times, instead, Youtube was simply comprised of 'entertainers', raw and unfiltered, and extremely influential on a young persons brain, I was hooked! Minecraft let's plays, Call of Duty Montages, and hilarious silly skits of Fred and the Annoying Orange were all heavy contributors to my sense of humour, a quality I am proud of as a grown man. Hours of laughter and joy all stemmed from a free video sharing platform.

It was around this time that another niche began to catch my eye, and my obsession and ability to utilize this niche served as a highly formative part of my personality and ability. This niche of course, was educational videos. Vsauce, Veritasium, Numberphile and Khan academy are but a few channels that saw their beginning during this time, and formed core memories of knowledge and logic within my brain. I can find myself still citing Vsauce video facts 12 years later. Constant exposure to these early, high quality educational videos, sparked inside me the desire to learn. In addition, it showed me that this resource I long used for entertainment, can be used as an effective learning tool.

Since then, I have utilized hundreds of YouTube tutorials to learn about dozens of topics, and learn a multitude of skills across a variety of disciplines to a proficiency where I am able to produce an excellent output. However, the shift in focus of these video platforms is an internal cause of alarm, as the popularity of short form content increases, long form content that shaped my personality is at risk.

My gratitude for growing up with the version of Youtube I just described is ever growing the longer I spend time on the current version of the platform. Children, and young adults of today are being done a disservice, they are being fed videos of low quality through a medium that appeals to the base chemical desires of instant gratification and mindlessness. Even I, with years of long-form useful content exposure, can't help falling down the rabbit hole of hours of Youtube shorts, even I am not above the base chemical reactions in the human brain.

Pros of YouTube shorts, TikTok videos, and Instagram reels are certainly present. this form of content allows for complex educational topics to be delivered in bite size pieces that spark intrigue and boost understanding with relatively low effort and commitment. In addition, the exposure to a variety of high quality media through short clips of longer pieces will build an audience to those pieces that is greater than if it were delivered strictly in a traditional manner. 

Cons of these forms of content far outweigh the benefits I'm afraid. The lowering of our dopamine baselines through instant gratification both makes us less happy in the moment, and less happy doing other things. It causes a spiralling effect of dissatisfaction, and worse yet, it's often a complete waste of time. No benefit is gained from the majority of short form content, despite a variety of well crafted educational content. The good is far outshined by the bad.

Despite knowing and believing this, it takes excessive willpower to not click on a short, and to not keep watching all through the evening, until dawn takes me into the next video. I may find that I'll need to say goodbye to my treasured tool, but I will always remember the good times...