a half-hearted defense of the youtube short

this is a weird post to make. but i've been getting into youtube shorts lately. and i feel like expressing what i like about them.

first off, some context to my youtube use habits. i am a very sedentary browser. i'm not especially inclined to go check out new long-form youtubers, really, and i'd rather rewatch things i've already seen than go find a new creator and watch their videos. most of the people i follow on youtube are the long-form video essayists, dan olson, jacob geller, f.d. signifier, big joel, etc, people who post once a month at best and realistically, once a year. the youtubers i'm subscribed to who post more than once a week are also the people whose videos i don't watch more often than i do. people like fantano, binging with babish, et cetera.

and make no mistake: youtube shorts are the slop trough. in a lot of ways, it's where i go to not think about what i'm watching that hard, and i imagine this is probably worse if it's your default form of finding videos. but it's not for me, and it breaks that sedentary browsing habit. it slots nicely into habits, and it kind of gets at the way i imagine people (younger/less autistic) than me browse.

i subscribe to almost no youtubers who primarily make shorts - again, it's fantano, babish, people who are career youtubers, and not career essayists, who are a smaller part of my subscription feed. but this also leaves a lot of gaps in the algorithm, which tends to be filled in some pretty interesting ways.

as mentioned. i am a very sedentary browser. and so i get in ruts, where i will reshape my algorithm to just be a bunch of videos i've already seen a million times - hell, there's a video of jenny nicholson basically doing email management on camera, reading off emails she gets from a disney event and saying she does not care about them, that resides in the lexicon of my friends. because she exclaims "moon knight?! what is moon knight?!" in a way that is easy to mimic.

and so being exposed to new guys all the time, it's nice. it's like hanging out on the town as opposed to cooking at home. sure, the public is distasteful and unenjoyable and eventually, i want to go back inside, but it's worth it anyway.

and there are personalities i've come to enjoy - dearmodern, etymology nerd are great, camman18 is fun if i'm minecraft-aligned in the moment, there's guys there. it's basically an entirely different ecosystem. and that's interesting in its own right.

it's not better or worse, really, it's just different.