Via The Atlantic:
We live in the age of the short attention span. And yet: Finding a recipe in a blog post requires first scrolling past a novella detailing the chef’s personal experience with the dish. Streaming shows run long, dragging into feature-film territory. Episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast are sometimes longer than Avatar. Even platforms once known for short-form media are stretching the limits: Gone are the days of the 280-character tweet; on X, a user can now pay extra to post up to 25,000 characters (this article, for comparison, is under 6,000). YouTube videos once had a hard cap at 10 minutes long; now they can (and do) reach 12 hours. Even TikTok is going long, reportedly testing a new limit of up to 15 minutes for some creators.
Surely some of this is born of genuine audience interest. Length, after all, is sometimes associated with quality. Reading all 1,000-odd pages of Infinite Jest, or watching all three hours of Oppenheimer, is considered a worthwhile accomplishment in a way that watching a 60-second TikTok dissection of shower grout is not. Sometimes, storytelling merits a prodigious length.
Other times, it does not. Online media are frequently padded not because the subject demands it but because creators are attempting to game algorithms or make more money. On TikTok, people filibuster, delaying their ultimate point, or divide their videos into needless “parts”—strategies to hook viewers and drive up valuable engagement numbers. All of this behavior is a side effect of our algorithmically powered reality. These systems, on the most basic level, are supposed to recommend videos, text, and whatever else people post online (sorting through everything would be impossible without them). Yet in the process, they end up creating incentives for people to generate a lot of junk—and bloated junk, at that. Anything shorter than a minute isn’t even eligible to be monetized on TikTok.
Some of these apps seem to realize what they’ve done. TikTok and YouTube give users the ability to speed things up, watching videos at double speed if they so choose. But the solution only underscores the problem: Everything is too long. Much of this stems from all those ads that run before videos or between paragraphs—for laundry detergent, jewelry, tax software, whatever. Any extra real estate for these ads, be it space on a page or time on a podcast, is a chance for platforms to make more money. Longer articles and videos have more room to seed in advertisements while avoiding the feeling of overwhelm that might come from stuffing them into shorter material.
