Clickbait title: Hey when I get inevitably popular for my great writing ability and someone reads out this article on a live-stream and the live-stream gets distilled into a YouTube video, be sure to watch the video at 4x speed.

It is no secret that I have chosen YouTube to be a major part of my media diet. Only speaking about video content, I’d say 95% of all I’ve consumed in the last 5 years has been YouTube videos. There’s a lot of reasons for this. YouTube has/had a lot of videos I was interested in. It also has addictive design. But I think I can blame the speedup feature in great part.

On a normal YouTube video you’ve been able to speed it up to 2x speed for a long time. I think I must’ve started using it to go up to 1.25x and 1.5x for maybe 7 years. The value proposition is pretty simple: Some people talk quite slowly or don’t bother cutting out unnecessary pauses. So speed it up to get the thing you want more quickly. I would say about 2 years ago, 1.5x speed has become the norm for me on most videos, with 2x speed on many slower speakers.

Now YouTube is adding speedup controls of up to 4x for some users. I’ve been creeping up past 2x since then and just recently had my first video where I actually unironically used the 4x speed. It chopped a 1h video into the 15 min I wanted to spend before going to bed. What crazy information density that is probably impossible to absorb fully. My brain bandwidth was surely fully filled up during it.

Well, now I just tried watching a video of a creator I really respect at 1x speed, partly because the video deserved it (it played with atmosphere) but also as an experiment to myself. And it was kind of shocking how bored I was. And that felt kind of nice. I felt myself relaxing and let my mind wander along the thoughts brought up by the video. But then I looked at the bar of the video. It was moving incredibly slowly. I realised I was not that happy about having to spend actually 30 minutes on a video that was 30 minutes long.

The world I envision where speed controls are uncontroversial is one of pure efficiency. You have some videos with low information density that you need to search through for something. Sure use speed controls, or jump through with shortcuts. You are done with your task much faster than before.

But I am clearly using YouTube for information and entertainment. Or at least I tell myself that. Both information and entertainment don’t really have a direct correlation between usefulness and information density. And still I speed them up to get more information per second. I think it’s because I have subtly conditioned myself to no longer want to feel bored.

There’s schools of thought about how social media addiction works, using any model from slot machine to attachment theory. The one I want to focus on here is the idea of “comfortable overwhelmedness”. That’s kind of an oxymoron, but the idea is interesting. We voluntarily put ourselves in a state where we feel overwhelmed so we don’t have our mind wandering about thinking about things that might make us uncomfortable.

Exams coming up? Bathroom needs cleaning? Someone is upset with you? “Sorry” we tell ourselves “can’t deal with that right now, I’m all overwhelmed over here”. Now of course some problems are slow tigers and the best strategy may actually just be to take your mind off of it. But why then opt for something as passive as watching videos? Because it is still comfortable. There’s no adrenaline, there’s no real effort and it’s incredibly accessible from your pocket.

So what’s the problem with speed controls? They allow you to dial in the amount of information you want to feel just overwhelmed enough to not need to think about everything else. It also stops any thoughts about what you are even doing right now, for example if the current video is even worth watching. Oh and because the time spent on the video is now shorter, it feels less like a commitment.

This is I think why I felt uncomfortable at 1x speed. It made me question if this is really the best way to spend my time. Because the truth is, yes I could’ve watched the video at 2x speed but I would’ve just filled the remaining 15 min with another video.

And extending speed controls clearly shows that YouTube figured out that some people really like speed controls. And I doubt its just for searching through footage. Higher speeds I think enable even more overwhelmedness, especially for users like me who have gotten quite good at ingesting 2x speech.

One of my most “old yells at cloud” positions is probably my opposition to short-form video. I don’t allow myself to get into it and I feel bad for anyone who uses it a lot. I do think it does actually hurt society in the long-term. And I think the 4x speed controls enable a very similar addiction pattern. For one because now every video can become more “short-form” by being sped-up but because it has the same value proposition: Why watch one video when you can watch many, in the same amount of time?

I think there’s a very dangerous equivalence being drawn between number of videos watched compared to “gain made”. But really, I think it can be quite the opposite. Echoing some pretty common wisdom, I think the biggest variable in expertise is the number of hours spent in dedicated attention on the topic. And higher speed-ups reduce your attention, not increase it. And if the video is boring without the speedup, is it actually worth watching?