Consider

I hate intros. There, I said it. Maybe that is an exaggeration or an overstatement, yet I believe you can empathise with me if you have spent at least 5 minutes on the internet. People seem to miss the point of what content should be: to get your point across as quickly as possible. I do not want to hear your entire life story on a page where you claim to give me the best paella recipe! I'm hungry, but not for a history lesson on the invention of paella. This applies to many aspects of my daily life too, so I would like to talk about the major ones in this post.

Every time I check an online recipe, after rejecting the cookies and closing multiple ads, I reflexively skip six paragraphs ahead to get to the actual recipe. Look, starving already is a difficult feeling and I accept I lose the capability of rational thinking easily this way. Every clock tick my stomach screams in pain and therefore my brain is focused on acquiring proper nutrition quickly by any means possible. If it takes me less time to go find the author and get my food in likely illegal ways than reading the autobiography that precedes the instructions, we both know what my next action will be. I don't want to do this, so don't make me do it. That simple.

So I consider this type of blog posts as intentional nutrition deprivation, which may classify as a torture method when we finally meet in the court. Was it worth the 0.12 cents you got by making me read two minutes nonsense?

Well, eventually I get something edible. After all, the recipe for most dishes is the same:

Prepare rice or pasta on the side, according to their respective instructions.
Fry the onions until they are pinkish color.
Fry more veggies you find hiding in the fridge.
Dump some spices.
Mix all you have.
Serve for 1-4 people.

Because I live far from society, I don't get to invite a lot of people for dinner. I'm often alone and it's awkward to eat in silence. What usually happens is that I get my phone and watch some videos on the side. Speaking of which, I have so much respect for you if you still don't have an adblocker! It's getting out of hand and one day I will finish my food before the preroll ads end on a YouTube video. When you finally reach the "content" you realize your innocent wishing has not prepared you for what's coming next.

I hope you like intros. Because that's what you are getting for the next five minutes. They have to mention why they haven't been posting for a while (often because of their trip in Philippines or a burnout they have been dealing with), their response to a "recent" controversy (often due to a semi-offensive joke they made 15 years ago), today's sponsor (either Raid Silhouette Legends or Rectanglespace), their gratitude towards their Patreons (and also how you can become one), a video essay on the motivation behind this video, and finally the CGI intro with very loud dubstep music. If you survive that, you get to watch a whole two minutes of content until you are bombarded with ads again.

At this point I am just curious how this does not affect their ad revenue due to low user retention. I don't think any sane being is sitting through all of this. I automatically turn the righthand side of my screen into a clicker game until it's over. Now thinking about it, they indirectly decrease the lifespan of my screen. Can I sue them for that? Is that considered damage to private property? If not, why not? Something to consider.

I understand that a lot of these people are trying to turn YouTube into their full time job and I respect that. They have to abuse the algorithm to their advantage to get noticed and sadly their methods affect the content itself in a negative way. To be eligible for the midroll ads they need to reach a length threshold, which pushes them to create these excruciatingly long intros. I cannot blame them for that, but it still gives me the right to create a blog and complain about it. It was not a word but now it is: I am omni-entitled to complain.

There is a certain irony with this too. I sense that a lot of media is switching to a more fast-paced structure. TikTok is a good example of this. Every major social media seems to be adding their own flavor of shorts. Even the content itself is undergoing hyperfast editing as we can observe from the rise of channels like MrBeast. Heck, even Spotify introduced a TikTok-like user interface to push videos to the users. So how come the content is becoming faster, but the intros are not?

Should we riot? Can we do anything about it? I really don't think so. I think the best approach is to filter through millions of websites and taking a note of the bearable ones. With AI becoming so popular, I am 100% sure one maniac will make a browser extension that removes the unnecessary intros of content. Some third-party video apps (whom I cannot legally advertise) already has an auto-skip feature of intros and sponsored sections, so I believe a world with intro-block is not far.

In a world where the attention span of an average individual is decreasing (source: I made it up), that is bound to happen. Here's to count down until we get rid of all of this redundancy. That day we will reach the levels of civilization we didn't know was possible. Until then, may the skip button and the scrollbar be with you!

If we shall not riot or anything, why did I even talk about this? I found it humorous that my first post is about intros and ironic that all of my following posts have a long intro. No regrets.

Bonus: If you are curious how much time you waste on video sharing platforms solely by watching intros, feel free to use the calculator below:

Number of videos watched per day

Length of an intro in minutes

You waste the following amount of time by watching intros:

10 minutes per day
3650 minutes per year
61 hours per year
2.53 days per year

Considering that the life expectancy is 73.16 years as of writing this post, a person who spent ages 15 to 73.16 every day watching videos would waste 147.42 days by watching intros.