Who is actually reading these video essays?

I just watched another 40-minute "deep dive" that was basically three tweets and some B-roll. The industry's pivot to extreme length as a substitute for substance is getting wild

honestly i watch them at like 2x and skip through most of it so yes — a portion of us are just speed-running for the thesis statement. but there's also the whole "youtube as video essay medium" thing where people genuinely spend 3 hours making a 15-minute piece on something niche, which is kind of its own genre now and has changed how we watch long-form stuff online. i think most serious essayists are aware they're being skimmed but keep going because the process matters to them too.

honestly i think it's the format itself that does something specific to attention because there are some channel creators who have basically mastered this 45-minute pacing where they build a thesis through layers of context and you don't know when you started paying attention until about twelve minutes in and then it just hooks. It's different from short form which is dopamine loop but long form video essays feel like reading — there's deliberation in the editing, there are pauses for synthesis, and there's a narrative arc that mirrors intellectual discovery rather than consumption. But i also think people underestimate how many of us actually sit through these on our phones at 2 AM when we have nothing else going on because the isolation of late night makes you receptive to dense content in a way daylight doesn't allow for, which reminds me of this summer my cousin moved back from his study abroad and he was obsessed with one specific essayist who covers pre-war european cinema and spent like three nights straight watching every video and then refused to watch anything else because the aesthetic had captured him entirely. I found it fascinating how a single content creator can become an entire intellectual filter for someone's worldview, which is both beautiful and kind of terrifying if you think about the power imbalance between those who curate knowledge into digestible 20-minute packages and the people who ingest them as their primary source of understanding. The algorithm makes this worse because it clusters similar voices together so your perspective gets reinforced by five different creators all using the same thesis with slightly different production values, and that's not education — that's confirmation bias dressed up in 4K resolution with a minimalist thumbnail.

honestly i read half of them while doing chores and write down the good parts in notes later so it's like a podcast with subtitles lol