The Increasingly Long Reel and Endless Scrolling

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Recently I looked at Instagram and I noticed that almost all of the “content” is vertical videos. When I look at Facebook and TikTok I notice the same thing. Yesterday I noticed that Bluesky were promoting that they have ten minute videos. I think all of these people have forgotten that we’re using antisocial media to connect with others, not to watch long videos.

Of course, there is a very good reason for allowing longer and longer videos. Ads. If we watch a video that is several minutes long we are likely to stick around during the ad break to see the end of the video. The longer a video is, the more ads we see, and the more committed we are not to skip them, or force quit the app.

With plenty of iOS games, and Android games, when an ad plays, we can force quit the game and resume playing without seeing the ads. The same is true with videos. With long content if we force quit then we lose that video and need to spend a while trying to find it again.

With Facebook I was watching the ISS videos and noticed that ad text was obscuring the text in the video. Imagine having a platform that makes seeing the full frame of a video challenging.

It puzzles me that FB, TikTok and Bluesky would push for videos, especially long form videos because we go to those platforms to connect and discuss topics, rather than to passively watch long form videos. Especially since we have Vimeo, Dailymotion and YouTube, if we can stand the ads.

It’s not just that they want us to scroll mindlessly for hours, but now they want us to get stuck on long form videos, on platforms, that initially were about real, human conversations. With long form videos the chance of conversation is obliterated.

I saw this by chance, yesterday, but the change is two or three days old by now. Bluesky is trying to compete, or match TikTok but I never came to Bluesky to watch videos. I came to Bluesky looking for a Twitter like community. My disengagement from Bluesky is not due to video length, but rather due to a lack of social conversations and tight knit community. Without a community I am posting into a vacuum with no return on investment.

Bluesky was meant to be an IM style chat and community, but by going for long videos it is undercutting the conversation niche. Online conversation died long ago, which is why FB, TT, TW, X, IG and other sites are floundering. They forgot that they had value when they connected communities.

Ten minute videos only increase the passive nature of antisocial media sites and apps.