3 Ways YouTube is Making You a Bad Writer.

FORWARD: This essay is not preaching, it’s reflecting. This analysis comes from experience as I have fallen into every trap I’m about to describe.

On Writing Well.

Be concise, this is the first rule of good writing. It is only within in this axiom that one can experiment for the ultimate purpose of writing is communication. Talk to any columnist or journalist and they will relay to you the difficulty of constraint. Proper writers are expected to go through multiple phases of refinement until their work has been boiled down to its essentials. However, the video essayist is not confined to this box. They are free to expand upon their expansions and wax poetic within their tangents. This is not a skill. Anybody can make a point given no guardrails. We’ve all read books that over stay their welcome or philosophical treatises that might as well be 500 page platitudes. Hence, The incentive has always been; if you want your work to be impactful, keep it simple, but what if this incentive structure is broken?

Many new writers find their voice on YouTube. Your first Substack or Medium post will almost definitely not be read. However, if you orate your essay, apply clean visuals, and learn the YouTube thumbnail/title meta, you could immediately reach thousands with no prior exposure. This is the greatest opportunity new writers have ever had. Creators like Horses, Exurb1a, Contrapoints, and Solar Sands, have transitioned from amateur content creator to mainstream cultural commentators. For example, Contrapoints’ videos have been viewed a total of over 100 million times. Compared to Malcom Gladwell’s 23 million total book sales, It’s not crazy to assume that more people have engaged with Contrapoints’ ideas than the most famous nonfiction writer of the 21st century. Although Gladwell is undeniably more “famous”, he is probably less consumed, and herein lies the folly of YouTube, consumption.

1: Big, Long, Now.

Working on YouTube means your are helpless to its algorithm. An algorithm that, above all else, favors attention on advertisements. Accepting one’s work becomes fodder for advertisers is the deal one makes when uploading. What one may be unaware of though, is the way the algorithm changes the nature of their work. The incentive structure of impactful writing is conciseness. the incentive structure of the YouTube algorithm is Squeeze in as many fucking ads as possible without the viewer clicking off. So How does the content creator answer this call? Make the longest video possible.

If a video was over 10 mins in 2011 it was considered abhorrently long. Now, anything between 25-40 mins is the norm. Do all of these videos warrant a long runtime? No. Do they make more money and get more views? Well, to figure this out, we have to go back to the beginning of modern capitalism… Just kidding. Yes, long videos do better. They do better because the algorithm likes ads and longer videos can fit more ads. The more ads the viewer watches in a single video, the higher the income per view. So how does one make a long video? Well, to understand this, we have to go back to the Bronze Age collapse… is what I would say if I was trying to make a long video.

Long videos warrant unnecessary tangents to fill run time. For example, one could easily explain the 2008 financial crisis in under 10 minutes. In fact, it would be a sign of one’s skill as a writer to do so, but this doesn’t fill runtime. Hence, one must divulge into diatribes about the history of capitalism, the birth of neoliberalism, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, and other things they probably have no business talking about in connection to 2008. You’re Writing as if your listener is asking “why?” every time you explain a basic fact. I’m sure there’s a compelling connection between, say, the Paris Commune and the dot com crash. There’s also a connection between the Jurassic period and the hot dog. Everything is connected, worry about the ones that matter. By answering the call of the algorithm you aren’t sharpening your skills as a communicator, you’re making YouTube more money. The long video incentive not only rewards puffy writing, it satisfies the authors ego.

2: Simulations of Intelligence.

Any self-employed creative knows the trap of conflating hard work with smart work, yet the YouTuber deludes themselves into thinking they are honing a craft. The hours of research, the obscure literature, all giving the illusion of progress. “I spent WEEKS on this and that’s a good thing”. This impulse to put in as many hours as possible is destroying the clarity of your work. This applies to every creative pursuit. Video editors will work on the same five second edit for hours because it’s easier than actual progress. Visual artists will fuck with the same element for days rather than finish the piece. The difference with YouTube is that your are incentivized to obfuscate. The unnecessary research rabbit hole plumps your video up for sloppy consumption. The algorithm capitalizes on your drive to hustle like a brain worm. Not only does it feel good to work hard, it feels good to be smart.

The best writing advice I’ve ever received was from my friend J.J. McCullough; “Stop trying to explain everything you’ve ever learned”. Essayists write like their work is a trophy case. Every paragraph showing off all the books they’ve read, all the knowledge they have, reading like a desperate plea for validation. The audience doesn’t care if you sound smart, the audience cares about understanding what you have to say. If they can’t understand you, you’ve done a bad job. If they can’t understand you AND you name dropped Baudrillard, you’re mentally stunted. If you want respect, write clearly. If you want people to think you’re cool, pick a different career. The algorithmic incentive again manipulates the essayist to entertain their egos. Rewarding trophy writing by squeezing an ad in that extra five minutes you took to explain Deleuze. All for an audience that’s barely paying attention.

3: Slop is a Mindset.

The YouTube audience is distracted and dopamine starved. They aren’t pausing and replaying every sentence while hastily taking notes. They are on the train, playing video games, or falling asleep. Your work will go unappreciated by an absent minded audience. This is fine. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care, it means you should write with an expedient audience in mind. If you care about your your ideas being communicable, keep it simple. If you don’t, make bloated slop to fall asleep to, just pick one.

Creators like Quinton Reviews make eight hour retrospectives on 2010s Disney Channel shows for people to watch across multiple days. Although not skillful writing in an orthodox sense, the longest videos take skill and fulfill a masochistic pleasure; How deep can one go? If Quinton were to publish his scripts as a book it would be unbearable, but a 42 hour video on how The Beverly Hillbillies changed television? (yes, he actually made that) Fuck it. It’s not that Quinton is a bad writer, it’s that he’s playing a different game. His work exists to consume passively. However, if Quinton deeply cared about communicating why The Beverly Hillbillies was important, he could do it in under 10 minutes, and probably possesses the skills to do so.

This isn’t to say all long videos are definitionally bad, that would be like saying books are bad because they are too long. Creators like Hbomberguy, or the aforementioned Contrapoints, release yearly videos of extremely dense journalistic research and philosophy. Contrapoints’ newest video is about conspiracies, a broad topic that commands intense research. Hbomberguy’s most recent video is a four hour long epic about plagiarism on YouTube in which he painstakingly dismantles multiple creators. Catching examples of plagiarism that would have taken months of research to catch. These yearly releases command tens of millions of views because both creators have garnered respect as effortless communicators. They are dense but intentional, they never stray far, they rarely have filler. Hbomberguy doesn’t explain the etymology of plagiarism to you for 15 minutes before hand. Contrapoints doesn’t explain the history of the internet before talking about online conspiracy theories. These creators are rare exceptions in a sea of bloated video essays. They understand their roll the same way Quinton does. Understand the game you’re playing and be the best at it.

Identity.

All good writers can make a YouTube video but not all YouTubers can write. Understand that YouTube doesn’t reward skill, it rewards advertisement attention. When making videos you will yearn to over explain, digress, name drop, quote, ect… Looking back at your hour long video on why mid-century modern architecture is neo-colonial explained through a Saidian lense will make you feel smart, but you’re not smart, you’re a YouTuber. It’s okay to be a YouTuber. It takes a lot of skill to be a YouTuber, but you could make videos for a decade and never learn how to write. If you want to be a good writer, identify as a writer, not a YouTuber. The successful YouTuber has a lifespan of 5 years, the successful writer will outlive civilizations.

An Exercise: Find something you wrote a year ago and edit it. Get the word count as low as possible without destroying it. Do this again the next day, and the day after. Do this until not one more word can be removed without dismantling the whole piece. This will sharpen your craft in ways you didn’t know was possible.