Editors who left the field or take less work: what came next? : r/editors
AI summary: An experienced video editor is experiencing burnout and seeking advice from others who have transitioned out of or reduced their work in the editing field, exploring alternative career paths or ways to balance editing with other pursuits.
Industry challenges:
- The post suggests that career progression and financial growth in editing may be stagnating
- There's an indication that the editing field might not be as rewarding or sustainable as it once was
Digital fatigue:
- The mention of "computer burnout" points to a growing issue of digital exhaustion in tech-heavy professions
- This reflects a broader trend of professionals seeking balance in the digital age
Shift in career values:
- There's a noticeable desire for tangible, physical work, suggesting a potential pushback against purely digital careers
- This could indicate a broader trend of reevaluating career satisfaction beyond traditional metrics of success
Gig economy pressures:
- The consideration of part-time work combined with freelancing hints at the challenges of stability in the gig economy
- It suggests that full-time roles in editing might be less available or less appealing
Community support importance:
- Reaching out to peers for advice highlights the value of professional communities in navigating career challenges
- This reflects a broader trend of using online platforms for career guidance and support
Work-life balance concerns:
- The post indicates a growing prioritization of lifestyle and well-being over traditional career paths
- This aligns with wider discussions about work-life balance, especially post-pandemic
Adaptability and multi-skilling:
- Considering diverse career options suggests a need for adaptability in the current job market
- It points to a trend of professionals looking to diversify their skills and income streams
How Are You Auramaxxing?
While readings like those that might come from an aura photographer had previously been done by assigning meanings to specific colors, a point system has emerged from teenagers on TikTok, where real-life interactions are gamified into gaining or losing “aura points.” There are celebrity compilations of “the worst aura moments of all time” and people posting concerns about losing aura because their boyfriend wants space. Taking care of your skin and taping your mouth while you sleep will gain you aura points. Same goes for developing an aesthetic, sitting in nature, making eye contact with women, using wired headphones, doing pull-ups, not speaking, and finding other friends with aura. While the aura math online is inconsistent and subjective (people usually debate the points in the comments), the general rule is you gain hundreds or thousands of points by doing something impressive, intriguing, charismatic, or authentic.
While learning how to auramaxx by preparing for conversations as an introvert and eating breakfast and working out in the morning may help some young men navigate life, and the mostly amusing aura point system may seem harmless, Derek Beres, author and co-host of Conspirituality, a podcast dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis, points out that auramaxxing content online is rife with misogyny. This comes as little surprise seeing as, according to Beres, wellness content online often has right-wing overlap, and looksmaxxing has roots within incel message boards. Aside from the obvious potential for harm toward women, Beres says that the pursuit of auramaxxing can also inevitably lead to guilt and shame for young men.
The secret digital behaviors of Gen Z
shift from traditional notions of information literacy to "information sensibility" among Gen Zers, who prioritize social signals and peer influence over fact-checking. The research by Jigsaw, a Google subsidiary, reveals that Gen Zers spend their digital lives in "timepass" mode, engaging with light content and trusting influencers over traditional news sources.
Comment sections for social validation and information signaling
When TikTok Therapy Is More Lucrative Than Seeing Patients
Before explaining “3 Ways Past Trauma Can Show Up in Your Present” or “5 Signs of a Highly Sensitive Person,” Dr. Julie will use a visual hook — she’ll pour out a bucket of candy, flip over a giant hourglass, or pose next to a tantalizingly tall stack of dominos (like any skilled content creator, she knows not to give us the final knockdown until at least halfway through) to keep you watching. Does it matter that “high-functioning depression” and “highly sensitive person” aren’t actual diagnoses? Maybe. Or maybe not.
While most full-time therapists whose rates are set by insurance companies max out at around $100,000 per year, therapists who are full- or part-time content creators can make much, much more. @TherapyJeff, real name Jeff Guenther, an individual and couples therapist in Portland, Oregon, says he can make eight or nine times that amount on social media in the form of brand deals, merch, and direct subscriptions. When I clarify whether he’s making nearly a million dollars, he says, “It’s been an especially good year.”
What works on the app is simple, visually arresting videos that make you feel like they landed in your lap with a kind of cosmic destiny (the comments on these videos often repeat some version of “my For You page really said ‘FOR YOU.’”)
Therapists do cute little dances next to cute little graphics about what it’s like to have both ADHD and PMDD; they’ll lip sync to trending songs in videos about how to spot a depressed client who might have made a suicide plan; they’ll hop onto memes as a way to criticize parents who haven’t gone to therapy.
The most successful TikTok counselors don’t typically advertise their one-on-one therapy services; instead, they’ll sell products that establish themselves as mental-health experts but have the potential to net influencer-size salaries.
“I have been accused of being a toxic validator,” he admits. “Like, imagine that your ex-boyfriend is watching my content. Somebody might be coming across, like, a piece of my content that they can use in order to feel better about themselves, even when they should probably actually be doing some work and taking accountability.” But ultimately, who TikTok shows his videos to isn’t in his control.
Even if viewers know watching therapy content isn’t the same thing as actually going to therapy, when a professional therapist comes up on your feed to tell you exactly what you most want to hear at a time when you’re most in need of hearing it — that you are good, that you will be okay, and also here’s a cute little visual hook — you’ll keep watching.
The power of TikTok Edits
In the past, I’ve only seen coverage of Edits focus on four things:How this is a popular form of content that is only being created more and moreHow those who create Edits have the ability to make clips take on an entirely new meaning and provoke strong emotions in viewers How they’re geared towards TV, film, and music – as that’s the realm of culture this form of media originated And lastly, the debate around Edits in terms of copyright and/or other infringementsBut today, we’re covering how the power of TikTok Edits is far greater than just those observations. Because as this person stated, “You can convince people of anything if you put it in a TikTok with a catchy sound.”
Edits now play an integral role in how people get introduced to topics and how they continue to keep up with them. While Edits have had various evolutions, in their current form, they can be defined as “compilation videos, typically set to music, that convey a narrative about a person, place, thing, or cultural topic.”
One weird trick for fixing Hollywood
A view of the challenges facing Hollywood, acknowledging the profound shifts in consumer behavior and media consumption driven by new technologies. The rise of smartphones and mobile entertainment apps has disrupted the traditional movie-going habits of the public, with people now less inclined to see films simply because they are playing. Free or low-paid labor on social media platforms like YouTube and TikTok is effectively competing with and undercutting the unionized Hollywood workforce.
the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it,3 have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on the free or barely compensated labor product of people acting as de facto writers, directors, producers, actors, and crew. Even if they’d never see it this way, YouTubers and TikTokers are effectively competing with Hollywood over the idle hours of consumers everywhere; more to the point, they’re doing what any non-union workforce does in an insufficiently organized industry: driving down labor compensation.
Almost no one I know has work; most people’s agents and managers have more or less told them there won’t be jobs until 2025. An executive recently told a friend that the only things getting made this year are “ultra premium limiteds,” which sounds like a kind of tampon but actually just means “six-episode miniseries that an A-List star wants to do.”
YouTubers’ lack of collective bargaining power isn’t just bad for me and other guild members; it’s bad for the YouTubers themselves. Ask any professional or semi-professional streamer what they think of the platform and you’ll hear a litany of complaints about its opacity and inconsistency
Companionship Content is King - by Anu Atluru
Long-form "companionship content" will outlast short-form video formats like TikTok, as the latter is more mentally draining and has a lower ceiling for user engagement over time.
- In contrast, companionship content that feels more human and less algorithmically optimized will continue to thrive, as it better meets people's needs for social connection and low-effort entertainment.
- YouTube as the dominant platform among teens, and notes that successful TikTok creators often funnel their audiences to longer-form YouTube content.
- Platforms enabling deep, direct creator-fan relationships and higher creator payouts, like YouTube, are expected to be the long-term winners in the content landscape.
Companionship content is long-form content that can be consumed passively — allowing the consumer to be incompletely attentive, and providing a sense of relaxation, comfort, and community.
Interestingly, each individual “unit” of music is short-form (e.g. a 3-5 minute song), but how we consume it tends to be long-form and passive (i.e. via curated stations, lengthy playlists, or algorithms that adapt to our taste).
If you’re rewatching a show or movie, it’s likely to be companionship content. (Life-like conversational sitcoms can be consumed this way too.) As streaming matures, platforms are growing their passive-watch library.
content isn’t always prescriptively passive, rather it’s rooted in how consumers engage it.
That said, some content lends better to being companionship content: Long-form over short. Conversational over action. Simple plot versus complex.
Short-form video requires more attention & action in a few ways:
Context switching, i.e. wrapping your head around a new piece of context every 30 seconds, especially if they’re on unrelated topics with different styles
Judgment & decision-making, i.e. contemplating whether to keep watching or swipe to the next video effectively the entire time you’re watching a video
Multi-sensory attention, i.e. default full-screen and requires visual and audio focus, especially since videos are so short that you can easily lose context
Interactive components, e.g. liking, saving, bookmarking,
With how performative, edited, and algorithmically over-optimized it is, TikTok feels sub-human. TikTok has quickly become one of the most goal-seeking places on earth. I could easily describe TikTok as a global focus group for commercials. It’s the product personification of a means to an end, and the end is attention.
even TikTok creators are adapting the historically rigid format to appeal to more companionship-esque emotions and improve retention.
When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.
While short-form content edits are meant to be spectacular and attention-grabbing, long-form content tends to be more subtle in its emotional journey
Long-form engagement with any single character or narrative or genre lets you develop stronger understanding, affinity, and parasocial bonds
Talk-based content (e.g. talk shows, podcasts, comedy, vlogs, life-like sitcoms) especially evokes a feeling of companionship and is less energy-draining
The trends around loneliness and the acceleration of remote work has and will continue to make companionship content even more desirable
As we move into new technology frontiers, we might unlock novel types of companionship content itself, but I’d expect this to take 5-10 years at least
TikTok is where you connect with an audience, YouTube is where you consolidate it.5 Long-form content also earns creators more, with YouTube a standout in revenue sharing.
YouTube paid out $16 billion to creators in 2022 (which is 55% of its annual $30 billion in revenue) and the other four social networks paid out about $1 billion each from their respective creator funds. In total, that yields $20 billion.”
Mr. Beast, YouTube’s top creator, says YouTube is now the final destination, not “traditional” hollywood stardom which is the dream of generations past. Creators also want to funnel audiences to apps & community platforms where they can own user relationships, rely less on algorithms, engage more directly and deeply with followers, and enable follower-to-follower engagement too
Interestingly of course, an increasing amount of short-form video, including formats like clips and edits, seems to be made from what originally was long-form content.8 And in return, these recycled short-form videos can drive tremendous traffic to long-form formats and platforms.
90% of people use a second screen while watching TV. We generally talk about “second screen” experiences in the context of multiple devices, but you can have complementary apps and content running on the same device — you can have the “second screen” on the same screen.
YouTube itself also cites a trend of people putting YouTube on their real TV screens:
“There are more Americans gathering around the living room TV to watch YouTube than any other platform. Why? Put simply, people want choices and variety … It’s a one stop shop for video viewing. Think about something historically associated with linear TV: Sports. Now, with [our NFL partnership], people can not only watch the games, but watch post-game highlights and commentary in one place.”
If I were to build an on-demand streaming product or any kind of content product for that matter, I’d build for the companionship use case — not only because I think it has a higher ceiling of consumer attention, but also because it can support more authentic, natural, human engagement.
All the creators that are ‘made’ on TikTok are looking for a place to go to consolidate the attention they’ve amassed. TikTok is commercials. YouTube is TV. (Though yes, they’re both trying to become each other).
certainly AI and all the new creator tools enabled by it will help people mix and match and remix long and short formats all day, blurring the historically strict distinctions between them. It’ll take some time before we see a new physical product + content combo thrive, and meanwhile the iPhone and its comps will be competing hard to stay the default device.
The new default seems to be that we’re not lonely as long as we’re streaming. We can view this entirely in a negative light and talk about how much the internet and media is contributing to the loneliness epidemic. Or we could think about how to create media for good. Companionship content can be less the quick dopamine-hit-delivering clips and more of this, and perhaps even truly social.
Long-form wants to become the conversational third space for consumers too. The “comments” sections of TikTok, YouTube and all broadcast platforms are improving, but they still have a long way to go before they become even more community-oriented.
I’m not an “AI-head” but I am more curious about what it’s going to enable in long-form content than all the short-form clips it’s going to help generate and illustrate, etc.
The foreground tends to be utilities or low-cognitive / audio effort (text or silent video). Tiktok is a foreground app for now, YouTube is both (and I’d say trending towards being background).
Welcome to the video bloat era
A Pivot To Video tends to arrive in stages, with each stage being more expensive and producing less interesting content as things progress. Usually it goes like this: The experimentation phase, the factory phase, and the bloat phase. A great editor I worked for during the second Pivot To Video, roughly 2013-2017, who, herself worked through the first, roughly 2003-2007, described it as a massive waste of resources that wastes more resources as it becomes clearer to everyone not directly involved how much of a waste of resources it is.
It’s a fundamental issue with video as a medium that online platforms haven’t fixed and, I suspect, never will because it makes user-generated content platforms feel more professional and consistent. Like TV. The cost to produce video content always balloons as you add more people, more tools, more structure to the workflow, pushing out smaller creators and teams. And even with the pandemic lowering the barrier of entry for making video online considerably, it’s still happening again. We’re in the bloat phase now.
MrBeast, the platform’s biggest star, is spending between $3-$5 million per video right now, up from around $200,000 a video just a few years ago. To put that absolutely outrageous number in perspective, a MrBeast video is roughly the same cost per video as any episode from the first five seasons of Game Of Thrones.
Guides last year were saying you had to capture viewers in the first three seconds. I’ve read a few guides from this year that are now saying hooking a TikTok user has to happen in the first 1.5 seconds. There’s an oft-quoted “shoeshine boy” theory of markets, usually attributed to Joe Kennedy in the late 1920s, who said that when the boy shining his shoes had stock tips, he knew the market was about to collapse. Well, here’s a similar rule for digital video: If you’re trying to optimize your video in microseconds, the video pivot is probably already over.
YouTube is laser-focused on capturing the world’s televisions. In fact, the platform’s CEO, Neal Mohan announced yesterday that the platform is adding even more features for YouTube’s TV app. And TikTok, if it’s not banned or whatever, is trying to use its massive inventory of short-form video content to prop up both a search engine and an e-commerce operation. And we haven’t even talked about Meta’s video products here. There is simply no incentive for these platforms to regress even though users seem to want them to.
Tastes are clearly changing. The Washington Post article pointed to Sam Sulek, a giant muscleman on YouTube who posts 30-minute workout vlogs with barely any editing as a possible direction this is all headed in. I tried watching one of his recent videos and I’m not even sure it has any cuts in it? It’s possible that’s what’s coming next, but it’s less certain if platforms will, or rather can, allow it. Time to find out if they know how to pivot.
Tiktok’s enshittification (21 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company's $31b "advertising" program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.
Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees).
This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they're locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they're locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.
This made publications truly dependent on Facebook – their readers no longer visited the publications' websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to "boost" their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.
Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you're a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It's a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a "pivot to video" based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:
These videos go into Tiktok users' ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos "ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app." In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience – the rest of the time, it's full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.
"Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count.
"Monetize" is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an "Attention Economy." You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it.
The algorithm creates conditions for which the necessity of ads exists
For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by "heating" the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok's format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).
every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to se
I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money.
Compuserve could have "monetized" its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the "From:" line on email before you opened the message – charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening – but they didn't.
Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was "woke shadowbanning," whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.
Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four"
policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created
technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom – our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.
even Tiktok's critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn't resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see.
On bait
Content creators chasing engagement, regardless of what kind, to grow their followings happens all the time. And content creators morphing into a weird caricature of themselves much to the chagrin of their audience is pretty normal too.
unlike still-image memes, we still think they must contain some kind of truthfulness to them. And, worse, the more they’re shared, the more we believe it. So when we see a video like the ones Zesu makes — something that appears to be shot out in the world, without any immediately obvious tells that it’s staged, being passed around different platforms — we continue to share it as if it were real. And smart creators, like Zesu, or the porn star with the fake podcast, are taking advantage of that as a growth hack. But it’s also hard not to think that this is, at a macro level, making social media a more annoying place to be.
Dirt: The indomitable human spirit
what stretches ahead is a banal ending that refuses to end: the slow violence of capitalism and climate change, a future of could-haves and should-haves void of capital-M meaning.
A core reason behind this genre’s popular success lies in the fact that it lacks the cloying, naïve quality so often associated with positivity. While this partially stems from the aesthetic and language employed—which, thanks to its poetic tenor, internet avant-garde style, and general high-low approach, reads as more online-experimental for those in-the-know and less cheesy iFunny reposts for Boomers—these would matter little if it weren’t for the honest realism that underpins this trend’s optimism
Unlike the deluded optimism espoused by politicians, technologists, and millionaires—which views progress as linear or believes that technology will save us from ourselves or thinks that watching celebrities sing will solve crisis—this trend, like the pessimists it responds to, recognizes that there seems to be no turning back from the precipice.
The genre positions the exercise and resilience of the “Indomitable Human Spirit” at the scale of a single life at the center of its philosophical optimism—not our ability to save the future, but rather our willingness to try and endure with grace.
Is It Cringe If You Can Monetize It? - Garbage Day Newsletter
these reactions seem to signal that our understanding of virality is evolving. When people first started going viral online, there was a real curiosity about what to do with these people. For a while they were basically just a new kind of America’s Funniest Home Videos contestant. In fact, Tay Zonday and Rebecca Black actually performed on America’s Got Talent in 2011. But about five years ago, right around when TikTok was first taking off in the US, we started to view virality with assumption that you could make money on it — if you went viral in a good way. And, now, I think it’s possible that as users continue to learn how to attention-hack on TikTok, we’re going to see more creators who just don’t care what kind of attention they’re getting as long as people are watching. Which makes sense. These newest creators have never known a non-viral world. And the algorithms that put this content in front of us don’t care how it makes us feel, as long as we feel something. So why should we, right?
What China Can Teach Us About the Future of TikTok and Video Search | Andreessen Horowitz
if you go into the Shanghai City Guide, it’s easy to put together a list of must-visit restaurants or family-friendly activities. Plus, not only is it easy to create bookmarks of places you want to save, but you can also browse other public bookmarks curated by creators and influencers, and then sort the bookmarks by location or distance. This type of bookmark discovery is a completely different use case than how we use Google Maps or Yelp today. Our Western location-based platforms use a manual, search-based process that primarily works for high-intent discovery. In contrast, thanks to the algorithms and user behavior on Douyin, the app can push new places to a user that he or she would never have thought to search for. Short video effectively enables the continuous discovery of the best places around you, and it gets better with every swipe as the platform better understands you and your interests.