People don’t like it because:
- It’s the new thing. If alcohol were introduced today it would be banned in every country on earth. People tolerate Facebook, Twitter, Insta because that’s what’s been around. They all do the same thing, but TikTok is new and scary.
- Short form video is scary! It’s a new form of entertainment, and old people don’t like new forms of entertainment. See: every newly introduced form of entertainment in history, books included.
- They are misinformed about what data a mobile application can and cannot do, and the level of security built into both iOS and Android. Rest “assured”, they are collecting as much data as they can – just like every app creator on the planet. What they aren’t doing is capturing mic data while you’re sleeping (that’s not how microphones in phones work), stealing your passwords from your clipboard (OS’s notify users about clipboard paste)
- China bad. This primes people to consider negative press about it with a less skeptical eye, feeding the above points. (Don’t misconstrue me as being pro-China, I’m not, and that’s not what this post is about.)
The video format is made for the device format where most people consume it. It’s just as annoying when someone clips a widescreen formatted video on TikTok. The ability to learn from something isn’t affected by the video being horizontal or vertical.
If you look at most videos on the internet. Videos that are tall are not usually educational compared widescreen videos. If a content creator wanted to make a video on WWII, they will likely use video editing tools and whip up a widescreen video. When people want to share how their day is, they do not use a video editor, they open up an app and record themselves.
I find tall videos annoying, even on smartphones.
There’s more widescreen content because it’s an older format. A video creator doesn’t innately prefer one format or another; they use the format of their platform. This argument is no different than saying “if someone wants to educate, they’ll never use videos, they’ll only use books”.
So I guess after this whole thread, the thing we land on is: agreeing to disagree that “vertical videos are annoying”.