Things that don't solve the problem but IMMENSELY help me mitigate watching 4-hour long videos: Watching them on FreeTube. No I'm not sponsored by them or by anyone, I live and breathe to hate advertising after a lifetime of hating ads on TV. I hate them enough I have aggressive adblock filters and an unfiltered hatred for them, only matched by my hatred for comment sections.
But what FreeTube lets me do when I have long-form content is simple: Convenience.
- Not dealing with native YouTube, so faster load times, so it's that little bit less of time wasted.
- No risk of nagging "you're using an ad blocker" messages.
- No ads and built-in sponsorblock. Cuts the fat on a lot of videos, so they're functionally shorter
- Lastly and most importantly, it saves where you last were when you close or click away from the video. It is so good at that I have a pile of playlists that annoyingly send me to the middle of a song because I decided to skip them last time. But for long-form content? It is a godsend to know I can pause this, CLOSE THIS, not have this clutter my screen and my mind, and then get right back to where I last was whenever I'm ready for it.
OK now that I discussed how to manage 4-hour-long videos let's talk about why I fucking do this in the first place
Can it be argued 4-hour-long videos are disrespectful of your time? Maybe. I'm not gonna dispute that. I also work full-time and I also can't split my attention between a game and a YouTube video. Rare is the day I have 4 hours of uninterrupted free time and nothing I already want or need to spend it on.
I prefer to look at it from another perspective; Is who I'm watching worth it? Is this someone who does it because they have money to make, or because they have an important message to pass?
That makes the whole difference to me. I will find a way to cut a 4-hour documentary into a few different viewings if I have some foreknowledge that the author isn't a complete cunt, and when it comes to differentiating people like Asmongold and people like hbomb, it's as simple as, "You can tell from the thumbnail."
So no, FreeTube isn't solving the problem that people are making 4-hour long documentaries instead of something in a more reasonable timeframe and it never will. All I can offer is ways to cope and manage. The happy medium that once existed on YouTube was enforced by YouTube, when video length limit used to be 15 minutes. Then it went up to 30 minutes. Then at some point between then and now, it went so high as to be meaningless, if there is one at all.
We used to have shorter-form content on YouTube in part by force. The other side of that is that if you commit to a 30-minute easily digestible format for something that is meant for long-form, you WILL get content creators that put out giant playlists starting with Part 1 of XXX, where XXX is a three-digit number.
But I also want to guard against outright rejection; by not watching hbomb's 4-hour diatribe on plagiarism, I wouldn't have learned exactly how much of a blight on humanity James Somerton is and how prevalent and dangerous the practice of plagiarism is.
By not watching his 2-hour Roblox oof video I wouldn't have developed the healthy hatred for Tommy Tallarico - someone I used to respect! for his contributions to video game music!! my whole fucking life!!! - I now have, because he was worthy of the deep dive and the knowledge in that video was important.
Sometimes long-form content is long because the subject is just that fucking thick and complicated to begin with. Editing it into a TV-friendly size format would be a disservice at best and dilute it at worst. This crap is for people who do television, one of the worst, most corporate, least important lifeforms on this fucking planet. YouTube, for all its faults, will let me watch a 2-hour-long video on a subject that television has summarized - and subsequently, shotgunned the meaning of and disrespected it to the point of shitting on it, with a smile :) - in 60 seconds.
Yes, I realize this is an extreme example. Yes, I realize this is the opposite of a "happy medium". But I am equally anxious about the unhappy medium - the 30-minute video that doesn't teach me anything that sticks. That is 30 minutes of my life I will never get back.
Sometimes we have content creators who choose a different approach - they edit their content around the notion that they're just INTRODUCING you to a subject, they're just the entertainer, the presenter, and all of the references, even-deeper-dives, and extra content is available for you to peruse in the description.
That is PhilosophyTube's approach, and from city gentrification to why cops make up the law as they go, these are the only ways to not make an already hour-long video into a five-hour-long subject with varying levels of dryness. So now you have to make time for 1 hour of video... but you also have optional 0-6 hours extra time of reading and research if you want to fully wrap your head around it!
I get it, we can't always make time. But he specifically mentions hbomberguy, someone whose videos have consistently TAUGHT me important shit. PhilosophyTube was my own choice of point of comparison, but the point is. They are both, and always have been, worth it.