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I like Cal Newport and own all of his books, but this sort of commentary is ultimately just pretentious. Aristocrats back in the day had similar thoughts about peasants even being literate.

I assure you, by sheer virtue of quantity, no matter what criteria you use YouTube/TikTok/Shorts/etc has a [set of videos] which demonstrates quality similar to any novel or literary work.

It's true there's more garbage out there than ever before, but this is an artifact of democratization of creation and this is good imho. I also reject the premise that time to creation is an indication of quality.

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> no matter what criteria you use YouTube/TikTok/Shorts/etc has a [set of videos] which demonstrates quality similar to any novel or literary work.

Could you provide some examples that match the best literary works? I'd love to see them. Edit: Here are some proposed examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46388246

Nothing prevents the video medium from matching literature - full-length films, for example, are on that level. I think there are two drawbacks to short video: First, the amount of content - their length - limits what they can accomplish, like short stories are limited. Second, the medium hasn't had time to mature as an artform; novels and film, for example, were both around for a long time before there was much great art.

That reasoning doesn’t make any sense. Half a billion litres of Coca Cola are produced every single day, but the chance of a bottle of Coca Cola being made whose quality is similar to that of a good imperial stout is exactly zero, even though they’re both brown carbonated beverages. No amount of quantity can overcome a process intended to standardise for something other than quality. If the algorithm aggressively selects for mediocrity, mediocrity is what will be produced.

I'm not sure I understand your analogy. YouTube has both diversity and quantity at levels tens of orders of magnitude higher than any high-quality-low-quantity good. Given the subjectivity of quality and amounts considered it's simply statistical fact that YouTube will always have things at the highest ends of subjective quality for any category.

The algorithm doesn't select for mediocrity - it selects for viewership, but regardless there are millions of creators at there that aren't optimizing for views anyway. It's the same reason some set of random blog posts or comments on sites such as this one will have quality similar to snippets of the highest quality technical documentation. Sheer diversity and quantity will always win.

I don’t see how it’s is a statistical fact. There’s nothing I’ve seen on YouTube that compares even slightly to a high quality movie or TV series (unless it’s an unauthorised copy of a movie or TV series…).

that's a funny example, because something like Cobra Kai literally began on YouTube, there are others like Hazbin Hotel.

anyway, as for the statistics, for the case of YouTube since there are is no forced directive to which all videos must follow (creatively), you can treat all videos as random attempts. then it's just stats to show that such a distribution will have outliers that match or exceed in subjective quality the gate kept works (traditional tvs or literature).

Well, you’ll never see an erotic film on YouTube, or a war documentary using real combat footage for example, so there are many categories where it’s simply not capable of competing. And even without straight-up banned content, ‘advertiser-unfriendly’ content is aggressively buried by the algorithm, which discourages people from making it, so the ‘quantity’ part might not be true. Some content might be so heavily punished by the algorithm that almost nobody thinks to make it. This is a problem for your position, as it’s not enough for YouTube to win in some categories; it has to win in every category.

sure, but my point wasn't exclusive to them (hence the etc in the first comment). it was just related to any mass media platform, all of them collectively will win. you are right about YouTube in particular though, good point.

That logic only works if you take a “1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters” approach to thinking about creativity.

If you want to argue that art is created by pure randomness that’s fine, but I don’t think we’re going to come to an agreement.

3Blue1Brown. Veratasium. Contrapoints. Tom Nicholas. They have all made extremely high quality, and often profound videos.

YouTube I'd grant you, not Shorts/Reels/TikTok - the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced. To me that reads akin to "there are so many tweets that for any criteria a [set of tweets] demonstrate quality similar to any long-form written piece."

> the format of the media simply isn't amenable to output matching longer-form work, no matter how much gets produced

why not? seems like a tautology. what's a robust set of criteria we can use the evaluate this objectively. I bet you TikTok will win. mind you I am not saying the average TikTok is good, just that there's probably some set of videos that that are of comparable quality than something put together over a longer period of time like a novel.

But that’s more of a theoretical truth than a practical one, isn’t it? High quality novels are easily found. TikTok videos of equally high quality and depth? Perhaps not so, or exceedingly rarely.

Infinite monkeys with infinite time could surely also produce something spectacular and eye-opening, statistically speaking. But umm, you’d have to wait infinite time for it to be done, so it’s not really efficient when time is a finite resource.

Even movies won’t capture the nuances of a somewhat decent novels. I have no hope to see something really complex like “The Malazan Book of the Fallen” in any other form.

I understand what you're saying and that you're not talking about the average. The problem is specifically that short form things are short. It's like the monkeys on typewriters - you'll get some beautifully crafted sentences, but you're never going to get a number of sentences that add up to an actual work of Shakespeare - they're aren't enough atoms in the universe for the number of monkeys and typewriters you'd need.

If a quote can be profound, so can a short.

Nobody's making the claim that a quote or a short can't be profound. Simply that longer-form works have emergent properties.

That's fair. I misinterpreted your comment, perhaps because I skimmed it too lightly because shorts have taught me to skim through information.

The quality of Coca Cola can only be compared to other colas. Comparing a soft drink to an imperial stout makes no sense. In my book, the imperial stout always has zero quality, because I would never see a reason to voluntarily drink it, whereas I might indulge in a diet coke every now and then.

But that’s why comparing subjective qualities of different things is a waste of time.

YouTube has many highly educational videos that are better than most professional production tv, especially for the hard sciences.

But GP said their reasoning worked regardless of what standards for quality were being used. It was a much stronger statement than the one you’re defending.

Comparing one billion exact copies of the exact same thing to a different thing that shares some superficial qualities doesn’t make any sense whatsoever when the GP is simply saying that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms.

Edit: to phrase it differently, GP stated that among the huge quantity of content on TikTok and YouTube some short form videos are are as artistically valuable as the best examples of any other more traditional media forms. The short form content on both platforms isn’t all good, but there is so much variety that some of it is. You responded that Coca Cola isn’t an Imperial Stout. It isn’t, but that has absolutely nothing to do with GP’s point.

Why is stout a higher quality than coca cola? Are they not just different? Its not like stout is an objectively superior product or something

Time alone doesn't equate to quality, but you can't deny that creating something really good doesn't take a long while.

I think you mean "creating something really good doesn't take a short time"

Can't deny that it takes a long time... Pretty sure that's right.

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