your video essay could have been a tiktok

On prosocial short-form content, collective knowledge building potential of short form social media, and why your video essay could have been a tiktok

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My particular flavour of neurodivergence means that I incessantly need to explain things and find out the why. Recently, this took the form of me wondering about

1. the nature of Queer Discourse™ online

2. those style-over-substance "I am better than you because I write lots of words and don't use capital letters" essays that seem to get a lot of attention for saying the same things repeatedly.

These ponderings led me to question the nature of short vs. long-form content, the social perceptions of the different mediums, and how interface design can create and influence these perceptions. So, this essay is about that.

queer discourse

To my few and far-between straight readers: sorry about the detour; I promise it is relevant. To the rest of you: this is not me involving myself in the discourse; do not do discourse in the comments, and please engage with my ideas meaningfully. Online discourse has both positive and negative outcomes (surely this cannot be controversial), and I, as a designer, am interested in how this is created & how it can be improved.

As I’ve spoken about in a few of my recent essays, I have explored the intersection between my queerness and my work as a technologist/designer/who knows what. If you haven’t picked up a copy of “The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet” yet - you should go and do that. In this book, the author discusses how the rise of the first public social media formats - where there was a traditional linear scrolling format, and everyone on the platform generally saw posts - gave rise to a new, complex form of trans community online.

The increase of this kind of format has categorically led to progress in trans rights and to the popularisation and widespread understanding of the very term “transgender.” In short, without The Discourse™, trans rights would not have made the progress they have (albeit limited). The Discourse™ can be thought of as a way of collective knowledge building through passive, digitally mediated interaction. Popular media mostly demonizes this through a deliberate twisting of the wildest and wackiest forms of The Discourse™.

But that’s not the whole story. My experience often differs from this - I find a lot of trans discourse to be mean, unhelpful, and very reductive, driven mainly by the desire to prove that you are "more oppressed" than other trans people. I often find myself wondering about the nature of online versus physical queer spaces - if you went into any gay bar and started saying the things that are said in The Discourse™, you may very well get punched in the face. Any time I try to discuss these same issues with my queer friends in person, no one ever speaks with the same reductive, self-centred tone that The Discourse™ seems to give rise to. Suppose I raise that I find their explanation a little uninformed and offer my perspective: I rarely get a dismissive response. When people need to point out biases someone else has not spotted, it is always done with an understanding that none of us are perfect. We are all interested in learning about one another for the sake of the collective movement. It is never a case of one-upping or cancelling someone (except in extreme cases).

Queer people (without digital mediation), in my experience, are capable of incredible empathy and a deep understanding of the nuances of the queer experience. Why, then, is The Discourse™ almost always the opposite of this? And why, despite its toxic nature, has it still led to significant progress in the conversation around trans people & our need for rights?

I know two things are true:

1. I deeply, deeply, deeply hate The Discourse™

2. On a material level, The Discourse™ leads to progress through communication and collective knowledge-building

The problem is not queer people or queer discourse but the nature of the digitally mediated conversation, particularly short-form content.

But, as a designer and social media researcher, short-form content & the platforms they live on are not entirely bad. There is something valuable about The Discourse™ and the cultural vehicle of short-form platforms, which has led to increased visibility for trans people and furthered the movement significantly. I am interested in dissecting the demonisation of short-form content, its value, what creates our social perceptions of these things - and how it can be improved.

genz airport books

It was only recently that I discovered I do not hate poetry; I hate Tumblr poetry. You know the shit I mean. There are no capital letters, very little sentence structure, and a breathy feeling of talking about some nebulous concept that the writer clearly doesn't understand, but it has a certain ring to it. Rupi Kapur adjacent, the kind that leads to milk and honey dupes being sold in Urban Outfitter stores all across the world. The aesthetic of these kinds of influencers and writers always intrigued me as a teen. I wanted the round glasses, the sunflower flower crowns, and the excessive Instagram filters.

Unfortunately, I could never get behind the writing. While people were posting their shit poetry (and I was copying their outfits,) my mother was withholding my latest fantasy book from my grasp until I finished at least two Virginia Woolf novels, or a book by Maya Angelou, or any number of others. I would then read the poetry posted by my favourite influencers and feel nothing. It didn't appeal to me. But they were cool and popular so it couldn't be that terrible. I just didn't like poetry, obviously. I never saw my mum read poetry, so I concluded that I had inherited this—merely a preference.

And that's before I get into my Carol Ann Duffy trauma (if you understand this reference, I send my condolences).

In a quest to improve my nonfiction writing, I found myself deep down an internet rabbit hole of successful nonfiction essayists at 6am on a crisp Monday morning. I was propelled into waking at a ridiculous hour before my day job by a deep desire to gain that sweet sweet Substack validation for myself. Something I kept coming across, again and again, was that many of the ways these stories are told take more from poetry than fiction writing, as poetry has a particular way of talking about issues without talking about them. This lets the nonfiction essayists make their point without damaging the presumably fragile egos of their readers. So, like any dutiful GenZ, I posted an Instagram story asking for recommendations. Turns out poetry is great! I love poetry! I just hated Tumblr poetry.

So, what happens when those Tumblr poets finish their degrees and thrust themselves into the world of real adulting? They can no longer hide behind the romanticised individualism of their teen years because they have to deal with the consequences of capitalism now. The seduction of the intellectual life and the desire for accolades and success play into this, as encouraged by a culture that tells us our individual praise is the ultimate thing to strive for. This typically results in two things:

1. They become video essayists, posting suspiciously in-depth analyses of the trends on the short-form app that they swear they don't use excessively.

2. They become successful Substackers, doing more or less the same thing or waxing lyrical about how society is terrible and we should all be nice to each other. Or, they use their Tumblr poetry to make the same claim that well-respected social scientists have been making for decades, get far more attention for the claim, and block you when you ask them to credit aforementioned well-respected social scientists.

So, into this dynamic enters short-form content vs. long-form content. These former Tumblr poets, now congregating on long-form platforms, have developed a uniqueness complex and become protective of this form of media. They believe they are superior to TikTokers, who spread accessible knowledge. Because, as everyone knows, short-form is an inherently bad format.

Now, I am taking airport books as a case study. Self-help and nonfiction books based on scant evidence that would generally have been better as a listicle. They are not cool anymore. Some of them still sell - but GenZ typically don't read them - and we certainly don't write them—especially the intellectual types.

Most people will agree that most airport books should have been articles but were elongated into books for the sake of money, capital, and influence. So, we know that long-form content is not inherently better and can have a lot of fluff. But, the natural human desire for bullshit still prevails—style over substance, far more words than there needs to be. Yet people seem to eat it up.

The precedence for fluffed-out listicles is set by the capitalist appeal this has. If you market it correctly, phrase it to appeal to some emotional issue experienced by your target audience and throw in a bit of self-congratulatory rhetoric. You'll become an overnight success. This applies to airport books, pointless video essays, or grammatically awful Substack essays. In the TikTok age, where all of the Tumblr greats are coming into adulthood, this natural human desire for comforting bullshit takes on a slightly different form.

But it is just as dangerous.

a critical analysis of short form content

“Dialogues on CoreCore” is a work that examines the CoreCore movement as an artistic response to an oversaturated media environment, leaning on its similarity to art movements such as Dada, which disregards institutional expectations for production quality. This opposes the late 2010s trends such as “cottagecore” and has developed in directions that can be described as documentary. This presents an interesting lens through which to take “passive” internet culture seriously as a method of communication instead of merely dismissing it based on passivity is bad. As part of this, there are broader conversations about the historical context of short-form content such as CoreCore, with CoreCore becoming symbolic of negation, sidelining the ego to create a contradiction in the way we typically think of knowledge. Knowledge as embodied, knowledge as collective, knowledge as nonlinear: all of these things come into discussion in analyses of the CoreCore movement.

The experience of CoreCore is subconscious; it is felt and embodied. This allows it to bypass certain thought processes, such as our ego. Many young people online will speak about their tendency to intellectualise their feelings rather than just feeling them. So, when we look to process the current state of the world, we can tend to collectively over-intellectualise our experiences. Online movements that the long-form content worshippers like to demean, like CoreCore, can allow expression of this frustration on a societal level.

“Critical Meme Culture III” is a work that examines a similar phenomenon, describing social media as “a way of sharing an embodied experience of capitalism.” The book explores memes as a process and cultural remedy and discusses why AI “can’t meme.” This aligns with arguments that suggest AI cannot engage in adductive reasoning. The passive interaction inherent in meme culture—as well as in movements like CoreCore—often defies categorisation. It produces a unique kind of nonsense that only a real human can generate, which holds increasing value in the age of AI. All across the internet, posts lament the joys of noticing a typo in your favourite newsletter, as these small mistakes also indicate humanness.

And what better conveys humanness in opposition to AI-generated slop than the joys of almost nonsensical memes? The same goes for many short-form content, with memes as one example. Design discourse is another example of this, with the selection of memes below being part of my collection - I feel they convey my approach to design and perspective on the field without being convoluted, and they express the emotions I feel towards the discipline in a way all of the most well-intentioned booklets cannot.

So not only could your video essay have been a TikTok - but maybe it should have been. Queer discourse, CoreCore, or memes as cultural remedies: they can all can provide this essential part of community building. Short-form content can lead to an embodied, visceral experience that adds to your life meaningfully and helps you build community - it can also cause ridiculously childish name-calling. Long-form content can provide in-depth analysis and nuanced perspective - it can also be a whole lot of horseshit.

The two mediums are both morally neutral and when we look at this in a broader context, we can see how the widespread cultural assumptions on the subject inform how their respective interfaces are designed and how we perceive the cultural value of these designs,

overthinking about scrolling formats

Scrolling formats typically take two forms: linear scrolling and nonlinear scrolling. Linear scrolling is precisely what it sounds like - your typical social media feed, where you scroll down to view more. Nonlinear scrolling, on the other hand, is a little more mind-map-esque. The theory goes that nonlinear scrolling mitigates the negative impacts of the doom scroll and provides an interface that allows for the good bits of social media without the bad bits - like doomscrolling. This is the proposed solution to the short-form content dilemma and is growing in popularity in a lot of design circles. The ideas around this are based on active interaction versus passive interaction.

Linear scrolling is seen as encouraging more passive interaction, whereas nonlinear scrolling is seen as encouraging active interaction. This passive interaction is said to negatively impact mental health outcomes and doesn’t correlate with a “positive digital experience.”

Nonlinear scrolling is another example of a surface-level solution to a much deeper problem, lauded by ethical designers and eventually co-opted by Big Tech. It claims to offer a solution to the negative impacts of passive consumption by demanding active use, which they claim correlates with positive digital experiences. But when using nonlinear scrolling, such as on sootworld.com, you instinctually do not feel socially connected to others.

This makes sense, as research suggests that passive interaction is the cornerstone of building positive social relations.

Passive interaction is key to social bonding processes. We need this subconscious interaction to form social bonds and be part of communities; it’s part of how cultural norms develop. The demonisation of this connection is another iteration of rampant individualism - we only value interaction and communication when it is “productive” and, therefore “, active.” So, when you are looking at a dataset that indicates short-form content produces more of this passive interaction, whereas long-form content produces active interaction, it is pretty easy to conclude that short-form content is, therefore, “bad” for you.

These assumptions are present in research that indicates the so-called harms of short-form content, but they are also present in a lot of “intellectual” content, both on Substack and, interestingly, on Tiktok itself. We have been trained from birth to value productivity, effort, work, and all related emotions. So then, we feel more accomplished when we watch an extended convoluted video essay than when we watch a TikTok explaining the concept. Then, we start thinking about how cool we are to overcome the plague of short-form content that appeals to the masses. Then, we write a Substack essay, with very little grammar, attempting to intellectualise this.

In a society where leisure is constantly demonised through neoliberal ideology, it is pretty easy to moralise anything that is “passive” as bad. Is this moralisation causing a bias in the research that causes an overlook of crucial ways of communicating? If researchers are already going into their research assuming that passive = bad and active = good, then their research is more likely to confirm this. You cannot research what you do not consider - because you don’t know what you don’t know. This bias also exists in a lot of research into social media, as it often focuses on individual mental health outcomes instead of a broader view of the impacts of social media. The litmus test in a lot of the research is “positive digital experiences” (which seems to have a rather vague description, to no surprise). This does not attempt to explore the impacts of technology on the collective, community building & social bonds, where passive interaction can have a powerful (and positive) impact.

The other thing that researchers don't appear to be accounting for is that these "negative" experiences may not have to do with the nature of linear scrolling or short-form content. When it comes to linear scrolling, especially for short-form content, it is easier to capture user data because your reactions are shorter, so there are more of them. This leads to short-form interfaces that make more use of persuasive design—over-designed interfaces with every pixel calculated to draw you in and provide an emotionally satisfying experience. The psychological reactions that create "habit-forming products" are also more effective if they occur quickly.

This exploitation is what is causing the so-called negative mental health outcomes and "negative digital experiences." People don't have negative experiences because of some nebulous idea of passive = bad; they have negative experiences because of data exploitation, excessive consumerism, and the overwhelming feeling that they are being manipulated. They have negative experiences because they have no say in how the platforms that dictate most of their lives are run. Different ways of designing a scrolling interface will only have minimal impacts compared to the context in which those interfaces are deployed.

Current examples of linear scrolling interfaces are associated with this exploitation but are not necessarily intertwined. Instead of recognising these systems that cause these "negative digital outcomes", it is super easy to lean into neoliberal assumptions that you feel "negative" because you're not working hard enough. This is an inherently neoliberal approach despite its lauding in ethical and intellectual design spaces. A more informed (and leftist) perspective would indicate that these passive interactions are key to social organisation and can provide a valuable avenue for movement-building - but are prone to exploitation. Similarly, long-form content can be prone to waffle, posturing, and feeding one's ego.

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The important questions to ask are:

1. How can creators ensure that they choose the best format for their work and that the substance matters most?

2. How can designers create interfaces that allow positive aspects of passive interactions to flourish through less evil interfaces?

reframing and un-evil-ing short-form content

When we individualise, oversimplify, and moralise the differences between short-form and long-form content, it can be difficult to see the true dangers.

Often, we blame this negative aspect of short-form content on individual consumers. In a society where it is nearly impossible to see collective action, we see our individual choices holding more power than they do. Then, the ego comes into play - partly because we tend to moralise things that do not need to be moralised in the digital age. This is a natural result of excessive individualism and an unnecessary veneration of the idea that things you have to work for are more moral than things that are easily accessible.

Going from “short-form content is easier to manipulate under capitalism” to “you are morally less than me because you consume short-form content” is, to put it lightly, a little bit of a reach. Not only that, but it skates over the enormous social benefits of passive interaction that short-form content enables, and, from a design perspective, I frankly find it a little lazy. We should be able to get creative with this. Designers should be able to notice the positive social aspects of passive, short-form content and question how they can extract this from an exploitative system to create an interface that allows for the good bits without the nasty bits.

In pondering this question, I have found a variety of interesting features that can help create an environment where short-form content fosters conversation, limits persuasive tactics and focuses on how we can limit the negative impacts of short-form content and its interfaces. It might look something like this

Infinite scrolling is a bit tricky. People expect it - and user autonomy is essential. But, it can lead us down a rabbit hole. Pagination, or limited scrolling feeds, can limit these negative impacts on a technical level. But they’re just not as appealing in the age of infinite scrolling. So, instead:

1. Embracing a variety of post mediums in one feed not only creates variety but also inspires creativity. It allows people to share ideas in ways that suit them best, fostering a more engaging and stimulating conversation.

2. Autoplay on videos, while convenient, can have largely negative impacts.

3. Introducing summary breaks during scrolling could help users quickly catch up on important information and help pause the doomscroll. This approach can help by interrupting the continuous feed and giving users access to the information they seek.

Fostering conversation in short-form content is key to an interface that would encourage the positive aspects of short-form content and passive communication. Features like TikTok duets and stitches do this well, and so does Tumblr’s reblog feature. Evidence also suggests that various reactions, including carefully selected emojis, are key to fostering conversation online because they detract from the singular focus on likes, views, and related metrics. It encourages a more well-rounded approach in users, encouraging them to think about how the content made them feel, and allows creators to get a sense of more meaningful metrics.

Bookmark features should be easy to use, but, as we all know - this doesn’t always lead to follow-through. Instagram and TikTok make it very difficult to access links - only a couple are allowed in your bio, not in posts or comments. They also suppress posts that say “link in bio” to discourage follow-through and keep you on the platform. This can limit the knowledge-building potential of social media - you might not buy that book, or those tickets, or make that recipe, for example.

Structured content chunks are also key - think of the communities that sprang from the Tumblr tag feature, which remains one of the best-implemented iterations of hashtag features. The hashtags you have joined are at the top of your home feed - and the recommendation algorithm for recommending new tags to check out (usually) works very well. Of course, not all Tumblr communities were created equal (to put it lightly), but structured content chunks are key to finding your people online.

Algorithmic transparency is the easiest (and most obvious) one. I’ve written about this before, in my post the children yearn for the buttons. The essence of this essay explores the popularity of tactile buttons as representative of people’s desire for more autonomy over their digital experiences - such as their social media algorithms. The desire to tinker with your algorithm like a character from Star Trek would tinker with their dashboard is very present and is key to a more positive experience of short-form content. I don’t believe in doing away with algorithms - but I do believe in user autonomy.

This is more of an aside/rant, but what happened to Facebook events? In an age where no one will stop talking about how much of a shame it is that young people spend so much time on their devices, why haven’t we brought this back? It could be invite-only or open to everyone: time, date, place, activity. Sign-up sent to organiser. Make it integrateable. You can make a short video, and there’s a little embed with the event sign-up. You can send it to group chats or put it in a text post. The possibilities are endless. Bring back Facebook events, but make it usable and a tool for connection!

what can creators do?

It's also important to note that part of the responsibility for this reframing lies with the creators. Short-form content has great potential when it is harnessed correctly. Unfortunately, habit-forming products often create habit-forming content patterns; because people become used to habit-forming cycles, content replicating this is more successful. Given that social recognition is important to our development, creators can quickly become attached to this way of creating content, but it is not necessarily the best for societal development. We feel like we are making a difference because of the number of people interacting with our content - but how many of these people are taking on board what you say and implementing it in their lives or contributing to furthering the discussion? Part of this lies with platform design. In the platform age, where money is made through data exploitation - platform owners want people to stay on their platform as long as possible, so they design it so that “follow-through” is psychologically tricky because this follow-through leads people to spend less time on the platform.

My solution to this is as follows:

1. Focus on “save-ability.” This isn’t a perfect solution—I’m sure we all have those videos saved that we have yet to do anything about—but it does increase the likelihood that someone will actually read what I’ve recommended.

2. Make follow through as easy as possible. I keep all the articles I recommend on a Sublime board in my linktree, and I consistently encourage people to check it out.

3. Quality over quantity. If one of my videos gets, say, 5k views but about 15-20 meaningful comments, that will likely have more of an impact than something that gets 10x that, in which the comments are filled with people deliberately misinterpreting my point to try and one-up me (On a related note, I strongly recommend looking into critiques of internet debate culture, as a way of understanding this)