A Video Essay On Terrible Video Essays

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Everyone hates video essays, myself included. I genuinely believe they are the lowest form of video on this site.

[00:00:06]And that's because for the most part, they're recitation. It's just repeating things that have already been said. The most effective way to write a video essay on YouTube for financial gain is to pick a safe topic everyone has already talked about and give it a good thumbnail and a title like person everyone hates is cooked or why the game everyone loves is good or why something from your childhood is about something that it clearly isn't which is boring as hell and useful to nobody. AI is good at very few things but one of those things is regurgitating [ __ ] that other people said. Hell, I really couldn't tell the difference if a person wrote these or an AI did. That is how basic the function of most of these video essay channels are. They basically run an article they read or another video that they've watched through a thesaurus and come out with one to three hours of highly monetizable high watchtime generating YouTube video. It's a niche that exists as a byproduct of the systems in place on YouTube. The creators of these videos know this, which is why they call it content. When you hear someone on this site refer to what they make as content, that is a dead giveaway that what they make is deliberately geared toward catering to the back-end systems of YouTube and not the actual audience. It is a way of making things that you know people will not actively watch, retain, or really even discuss. It is meant to be placed on a second monitor and used primarily as background noise. In which case, I might as well just blow into my microphone and make some white noise for you. Still, I think it's important to have an adequate respect for the medium.

[00:01:27]And by that, I mean not very much at all. This is YouTube. Making videos here is like being a fast food restaurant.

[00:01:33]It's up to you whether you want to be Arby's or if you want to be In-N-Out, >> but at the end of the day, you're still a fast food joint. Putting gold leaf on my Big Mac is of no substantive benefit whatsoever to me. So many of the video essay channels seem to lean into this academic word salad that sounds really intelligent to someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. But if you do know what they're talking about, you wonder why they wasted so many words of their script saying something that could have just been one sentence. Here's an example related to gaming. The way the cutscenes are so different from what happens in the game is weird, and it's hard to relate to my character since the game starts midway through the story, and I already know what's going to happen from the TV show. Some of the loading screens even spoil the plot versus the ludo narrative dissonance present in this title may hamper player immersion and some trans media storytelling choices may even lead the end user to conclude that the franchise's emphasis placed on non-diioetic storytelling is needlessly excessive. The fact that it begins in media res, that's a quote may lead some players to feel disconnected from the protagonist's core motivations.

[00:02:32]Those mean exactly the same thing. One is significantly less efficient. Why use many word when few word do trick?

[00:02:40]Writing a script that serves no purpose other than to stroke your own or your viewers's ego is dumb. To be fair, it is sales 101 though.

[00:02:47]>> Remember Patrick, flatter the customer, make him feel good.

[00:02:51]>> Hello, I love you.

[00:02:55]>> That's the same reason why you have so many YouTubers that are all about developing a community. If you make people feel smart and understood, they're more willing to buy a $75 hoodie from you or give you money on Patreon.

[00:03:05]That dynamic relies on the creator making themselves out to be better than their audience or above them, which is pretty lame to me, but hey, that's how they do it in the business kid. Anyway, the purpose of language is to communicate concepts. If you are deliberately inefficient in your method of communication, that's dumb. As Shakespeare once said, brevity is the soul of wit. Which means, don't waste my [ __ ] time, [ __ ] Speaking of wasting time, there's always been this sentiment on YouTube for some reason that if you have a good thumbnail or an eye-catching title, that that's clickbait and you suck. No, it's not clickbait. That's what people click on.

[00:03:37]Clickbait would be if I had a girl with her boobs out in my thumbnail and then the video was actually about me cutting broccoli. Let me instead tell you how this website works. I've I've been around for a few years and I've tested this sort of stuff. And it basically works like this. The way that YouTube recommends videos, which is where almost all of your viewers come from, is by tracking what proportion of people click on a video when it's shown in their feed. For shorter videos, if it drops lower than about 4%, the video mostly stops being recommended. For longer videos, that is not the case. The more total watch time or the higher the average view percentage, the less YouTube tends to care about the rate that people click on it. So longer videos tend to be recommended more frequently and for a greater duration because YouTube wants to keep people on their site and watching ads because that's how they make money. Aside from those two things, and as long as enough people like or comment on the video, pretty much nothing else matters. In my experience, the video itself really does not matter. That's why with video essays that people leave running on their second monitor, these videos do so unbelievably well despite how much everyone clowns on them. They farm watch time from people who mostly are not even actively watching the video. Personally, I think that's pretty shitty as a viewer. And I think it's crazy we've reached the point where the genre of person talking over footage about something is one of the most despised on the platform. I'd even say it's pretentious to call a video of again someone talking over footage of something a video essay. The point of making a video to me is either to inform people about something they may otherwise have never heard of, entertain the viewer, or start a discussion about a topic I see infrequently discussed.

[00:05:09]Usually a mixture of all three. If a video isn't content, if it isn't just a milktoast recitation of factual information, you will have people in the comments flipping tables, pissing themselves, and throwing it back because the person who made it is biased.

[00:05:23]Personally, I have never heard someone state an opinion that has irritated me beyond me going, "Nah." and continuing to scroll. The internet's catastrophic obsession with debate, also known as the art of talking about a topic so precisely that it doesn't matter what's actually true or real, only how you said it, has led people to always look for a winning side in any issue rather than actually discussing it. Which is part of why so many creators basically just read Wikipedia. Debate is perhaps the lamest thing you can ever do in your entire life. Focusing on words themselves rather than the concept that those words represent is small-minded behavior. It's also the reason you cannot use phrases like generally speaking or most of the time anymore because your audience will inevitably go, "Well, what about this time or that's a generalization?" Yes.

[00:06:08]Do you want me to list every single example of what I'm talking about and make the video 9 hours long?

[00:06:14]Unfortunately, the answer frequently seems to be yes. Being verbally intelligent is great. You know, having a really well-developed command of language that lets you communicate your ideas well. It makes you naturally good at debating. The problem is if you're only verbally intelligent, you manage to sound like you know what you're talking about while bringing absolutely nothing to the table.

[00:06:33]>> Give me everything you got for this wet ass p word. I mean, a bucket and a mop.

[00:06:38]This sounds like there there's some there's something that is going on here that is not biologically normal.

[00:06:43]>> Debate is the nerd version of sumo wrestling. At the end of the day, no matter who wins, you're both still [ __ ] fat and nothing changes.

[00:06:50]Discussion, as in attempting to broaden your understanding of something by parsing new concepts exchanged between yourself and other people and engaging in an active dialogue with them, is superior in every way. I think that's why people seem to take every topic so insanely seriously now is that they want to win or be right, like this is a political debate when I mean, what the [ __ ] is wrong with you? It's like everyone's trying to reach some sort of definitive end state where everyone just realizes that they're so intelligent and right and then everyone claps. If someone likes a movie I don't like, I'm not going to pop an aderall and go all Big Bang Theory on them trying to prove why actually I'm an intellectual heavyweight and their opinion is objectively factually incorrect. The biggest giveaway to me that this is the mentality is that you'll constantly see people online trying to torpedo a discussion by going, "Well, that's just your opinion." Yes, that's the point.

[00:07:38]The person making the video is not talking to you directly. This is probably why people seem to commonly refer to someone publicly stating an opinion they disagree with as rage bait, which speaks volumes about you as a person. If hearing something you disagree with immediately fills you with rage, just because someone isn't remaining strictly neutral for financial gain or catering to the corporate sanctioned narrative, that doesn't mean they're personally trying to piss you off. In fact, most of the time, if you see someone say that somebody's rage baiting them, you can replace that with disagreeing with them, and that's much closer to reality. me when I drive home from work and shake my fist at every restaurant I pass because it is eat bait and I have no control over my actions or emotions. I also don't understand why someone would get incredibly frustrated over someone else's opinion when I have zero interest in listening to people I agree with. What am I going to do? Sit down and watch a 45minute long video of someone else saying things that I already think and nod my head and say, "Hell yeah, brother." To me, the value of entertainment can usually be measured by what it makes me think about or ponder. Hearing someone say what I already think is completely useless to me. But that's what most video essays are, or at least to their target demographic they are. The trick with writing, or at least it used to be, was that what you don't say is way more important than what you do say. Knowing how to lead the reader or listener to the precipice of a conclusion, but leaving room for them to connect the dots themselves is the mark of good writing. It's much harder to do that now when so many people seem to be addicted to verbal fencing where they need every single gap explained to them over the course of eight hours or they will declare the piece invalid by way of technicality. I think there's a certain element of viewers being conditioned to expect a video of someone with a decent microphone talking over footage of the subject to be essentially them turning Wikipedia into an audio book. So, it's jarring when they come across videos or even articles that sound like they were actually made by a human and not the collective contribution of thousands of people to an encyclopedia and they just don't know how to take it. I'm not just talking about my videos here. I'm talking about what I see on YouTube in general. My point is that the slop long predates the AI. And that's why video essays are so hated. And I'd say partially the reason why so many people seem to be incapable of interacting with anything on the internet without spuring out and shouting debate terminology like straw man bad faith or ad homonym every time somebody makes a joke. This is part of what I've seen a lot of people call the decline of media literacy. And I think that the epidemic of completely regurgitated several hourong deep dive videos that make viewers feel smart without intellectually challenging them or making a statement of value in any way is part of the problem. I'm sure you could say Tik Tok and short form content plays a role, but I think the video essays are actually worse. They get people feeling nice and comfortable. You know, stroke their ego with their addiction, affirm that the viewer is intelligent just like them. Then at some point over the course of the video essay, you know, like around minute 40, they drop something equivalent to saying, "Obviously putting lead in gasoline is good." Or clearly you should sleep with your phone right next to your head. And it's like, whoa, be careful.

[00:10:33]If an impressionable stupid person was watching this, you probably just subconsciously got them to instantly agree with you because of how much you affirmed them right before you made that statement. And disagreeing with you now would be uncomfortable for them. You know what I'm talking about. Like like getting a dog to take a pill with peanut butter. Yeah, just accept the commonly held opinion. There's nobody nobody would ever disagree with you. That would be bad for business. I still tag my videos as video essays, though, because that's what people seem to call them, and it's really funny to me. I don't even fully script these a lot of the time. It's more of just an outline.

[00:11:02]Personally, I call my videos videos.