Short form video (and it’s sibling, the infinite headline scrollers) are the final evolution of engagement architecture. There’s nothing inherently nefarious about an algorithm presenting content, but these platforms fracture the content into a bottomless feed of tiny dopamine doses, requiring some smart behavior to present all of that.

I’d argue that a short form video platform couldn’t exist without a finely tuned algorithm. With long form videos the barrier to creation limits the pool of available content. A smaller and deeper pool is more manageable for manual curation. A wider and shallower pool is exponentially harder:

• Just navigating each video (even a <1s interaction) adds a large overhead to consuming the content. This could be 16% of your time watching 6s vines.
• You basically have to watch most of the clip to judge it’s quality. Even a 3s glance could put a hard floor of watching 5-10% of all content.
• The amount of video topics in short form dilutes high quality creators. Is it likely that a creator who covers 3 topics in interesting, in-depth 30 minute videos could match that engaging runtime with 90+ diverse topics?

Take out a content distilling/targeting algorithm and your platform is unusable.

Cool cool, so why does voting vs not voting matter? What actionable alternatives would you suggest and why do those preclude checking a box on a piece of paper?

I’d argue that even an illusory vote has value as a public barometer. If 80% of a voter base is consistently voting against the incumbent party it tells you way more about their discontent than 80% not showing up.

[re-commenting with no instance shaming]

Every Marxist-Leninist user