The Carcinization of Content

Everything, in the end, becomes TikTok

Everything is Crabs

One of my favorite little fun facts about evolution is that in the long run, we all turn into crabs.

What you think of as ‘crabs’ is actually a fairly poorly defined category. The subgroup that scientists call ‘true crabs’ show up about 200 million years ago during the Jurassic period, but they aren’t the only ones. It’s now believed that on at least five other occasions, at various points in time and coming from separate origins, different creatures evolved into what looks like a crab-like animals. King crabs, hermit crabs, porcelain crabs, hairy stone crabs and true crabs all evolved into crabs completely independently of each other.

This is known as convergent evolution, the process by which different animals evolve extremely similar features because those features are naturally selected for. In this particular case, so many different creatures have ended up evolving into crabs that we developed a name for it - Carcinization. Maybe crabs are just some kind of evolutionary local maxima - for a certain kind of animal, its evolutionary fitness can only be improved by becoming more crab-like. Or maybe nature just really loves making crabs?

---

The metaphor will not be subtle

In January 2013, Vine launched the first real short-form vertical video app. It allowed you to post videos up to 6 seconds in length, and quickly became a sensation. Within just a few months it was the most downloaded app in the world on the iOS App Store, and it was the fastest growing app in the world in 2013.

Vine itself didn’t last long. The company was purchased by Twitter and shut down in January 2017, but Vine’s influence was immense.¹ It created a whole new category of social media and rocketed celebrities like Shawn Mendes, David Dobrik, and Jake and Logan Paul to fame. And more importantly, it spawned imitators.

So, so many imitators.

Instagram was one of the first - they launched Instagram video in June 2013, less than six months after Vine’s launch. That would eventually lead to Instagram Reels a few years later. And years later, now that TikTok’s success is undeniable, it seems like every single social media site is introducing shortform vertical video.

Instagram, as mentioned, has Reels. YouTube rolled out YouTube Shorts in 2019. Those two are the most direct competitive threats to TikTok², but they’re not alone. Snapchat is no longer just a messaging service - it’s now a social media platform with content creators and has been leaning into Snapchat Spotlight, an algorithmic vertical video feed. Facebook infamously pivoted to video in 2010s, but did you know that in 2022 they did a second pivot to video where Mark Zuckerberg directed the company to put more shortform video in the News Feed? X under Elon Musk has performed its own pivot to video, despite X being a mostly text-based conversation platform. Musk has repeatedly talked up his plans to focus on video, boost video content, and compete with YouTube.

And it doesn’t stop there! Nobody is safe! Reddit’s redesign from a few years back heavily emphasizes short video clips while de-emphasizing links and text. Pinterest launched Idea Pins, their own form of vertical video content. Longform streaming platforms Kick and Twitch heavily promote shortform clips, and provide specific tools to make it easy for anyone to create shortform clips from longer streams. LinkedIn of all places introduced a shortform vertical video tab on their site! Even Substack - which sometimes acts as though it’s the anti-social media form of social media - has introduced shortform video and created a fund to try to woo TikTok creators.

If every animal eventually ends up evolving into a crab, every social media site eventually ends up morphing into TikTok. Shortform vertical video is eating everything online.

How Bad Is It Really?

I worry the preceding paragraphs, despite sounding fairly alarmist, don’t really capture the full scope of how dominant shortform video is becoming.

It’s always tricky to get reliable statistics out of companies like YouTube, Instagram or TikTok. They like to release only the metrics that make them look good, and many of the stats come from sketchy third party sites. But even in the informational murk, it’s clear that Reels and Shorts are absolutely exploding. Mark Zuckerberg said in mid-2024 that Reels had grown so big that it accounted for 50% of all screen time on Instagram - and I will remind you that Instagram has over 2 billion active users. YouTube Shorts might be growing even more explosively. YouTube recently announced that they’re getting more than 200 billion views per day on YouTube Shorts, more than tripling the view counts they reported in 2024. TikTok stopped reporting daily views a while ago, and part of me wonders if it’s because we’re at the point where Shorts has surpassed them in size.

YouTube creators are increasingly pivoting to producing more Shorts, and the top viewed videos in any given week are completely dominated by Shorts. Here’s a list of the top 100 videos on YouTube in the last seven days by view count - on the day this published, every single video in the top 100 is a Short! Using view count rather than overall time viewed biases the list to short videos, sure. But it’s still astonishing that not a single longform video could even crack the top 100. Some executives within YouTube are even leaking to the press how concerned they are by the success of Shorts - they think it’s too successful and might be cannibalizing every other form of content on the site.

On sites like X and Reddit, where I spend a great deal of my time, videos are becoming more and more omnipresent. Both sites are theoretically format neutral, and can show text, external links, images or video. But in practice, X and Reddit are becoming more video focused over time. Video aggregation accounts like Nature is Amazing, Kira, or Non Aesthetic Things are some of the most successful and fastest growing accounts on X, and despite me doing nothing to interact with them they pop up on my feed with increasing regularity. And the front page of reddit’s /r/all or /r/popular is increasingly tilted towards short videos.

Live streamers on sites like Twitch are, by their nature, supposed to be the antithesis of shortform video. They often stream for six, eight, ten hours at a time. The content is slow and easy going. But even they can’t escape the shortformization of their work. A highly successful streamer might average 5,000-10,000 viewers on their live streams. But you know how most people are consuming the best moments on those streams? Clips. On the subreddit LiveStreamFail popular clips will get orders of magnitude more than views than that - maybe 5,000 people saw that fun moment happen live on stream, but 500,000 or 5,000,000 people will see it clipped and shared as a short video on LSF.³

Even sites completely divorced from social media like comedy streaming site Dropout are mostly able to grow their audience via popularity on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. The companies that make corporate training videos are now changing their work to be more like TikTok.

This transformation of the social internet is very real. It’s everywhere you look. Every single type of content is slowly turning into shortform video. And I think it’s concerning.

---

Maybe this is a pointless exercise, a Millennial raging against how the Gen Z internet works. Maybe I’m just a bitter guy who wants to return to the glory days of forums and blogs and classic old videos that I loved years ago.

Artist’s rendition: “Jeremiah is mad about the state of the internet”

But I really do think this is a problem. We’ve all heard about all the various ways that smartphones and social media are messing with society - making us lonelier, more polarized, more addicting to scrolling, etc.

It's Always Smartphones

And while I don’t have any way to provide hard proof for this, every single instinct that I have from years of writing about social media screams that shortform vertical video is the culmination of this trend. It’s more addicting, it provides less human connection or value of any kind, and it does more to make people polarized and extremist and insane than any other kind of social media. If text-based social media is opium, shortform vertical video is fentanyl, technically in the same category but so much more potent as to make comparisons seem foolish.

Why do so many unrelated creatures end up evolving into crabs? Because there must be some advantage from it - evolution is pushing them into the most advantageous and fittest form. Now why do you think so many unrelated social media platforms are all embracing vertical video? Because it’s the most addicting form of content. It outcompetes other formats. It’s the final boss of melting your brain.

I often hear friends and acquaintances talk about how they think social media is killing their attention spans, making it harder to concentrate, rewiring their brain. But when I dig deeper, they’re never talking about social media in the sense of ‘long discussions in Reddit comments’ or ‘reading lots of Substacks’. They’re talking about Reels or TikTok.

And it keeps marching forward. It keeps conquering new things, assimilating them into the vertical video Borg. YouTube, in a real dogshit-on-top-of-catshit moment, is building AI tools to make producing AI short videos easier and faster. It’s even impacting non-social media culture - the average length of bestselling books is now shorter than ever!

I think the absolute dominance of shortform video is a form of market failure, that it has massive negative externalities that society is not doing a very good job of understanding or grappling with. And it’s ultimately not even a satisfying product. Hours of mindlessly scrolling produces anhedonia, the reduced ability to enjoy things normally. You’ve probably had the experience of starting to scroll Reels, Shorts or TikTok, then realizing an hour later you were still scrolling and feeling like you utterly wasted an hour without even enjoying it very much.

It sucks that this is the direction the internet is going in. It sucks that an entire generation of our smartest engineers are spending their lives working on algorithms to get you even more addicted to scrolling. And even if you think you can resist the army of PhDs trying to trick you into spending more time staring at your phone, most people can’t. There are a lot of populations that have almost no antibodies against this kind of thing - old people, teens and pre-teens, people with ADHD, and so many other groups.

Nobody says “My plan is to spend all weekend on my phone”, but that’s the reality for a lot of us now. At best we utterly waste our time, at worst we develop crippling anxieties or extremist politics. I wish I had some magic wand to wave that could tell you how we turn this around, but I’m not sure there is any way to change it. But if nothing else, we should be aware. If we’re aware of what’s happening and how it’s affecting us, we’ll at least have a chance to resist turning into crabs.

1. It’s out of scope for this post, but it’s really incredible how Twitter essentially owned TikTok before TikTok and mismanaged the whole thing so badly they just ended up voluntarily killing it - and once they did, TikTok exploded a few months later. One of the most staggering failures in modern corporate history.

2. This is all assuming TikTok doesn’t end up getting banned. By law it should already be banned, but Donald Trump has just unilaterally decided that the law Congress passed doesn’t count and he’s not going to enforce it.

3. Not to mention being shared on X, Instagram, and other platforms.