There's this video I really like by YouTuber an0nymooose called 'Rule Breaker'...
...and there are a million things worth saying about this video but I'm not really equipped to say many of them; I wonder if an0nymooose would even consider it an insult to try to find the 'deeper meaning' of a video of a cool dude what gets busted. Hell, I wonder if an0nymooose would consider it silly for me to think they would have an opinion on such analysis's existence at all. The point is this: it ends with 11 frames of an explosion caused by an aerial attack from the police that presumably kills the protagonist.
There's this other video I really like by YouTuber burnermunde called 'HufflePuff'...
...and a lot of the same anxieties apply: would it be silly of me to describe this video as a biting and urgent satire of anti-immigration sentiment? Would it be foolish of me to try to describe this video at all? Does it become less funny by virtue of being legible to someone like me, vape virgin that I am, such that I can try to "analyse" it? I neither know nor care; the point is that it too ends with just 5 frames of an explosion that kills the protagonists.
In both cases I feel like the explosion is improved immeasurably by being cut off specifically by the end of the video; I'm taken completely by surprise and my instinct is to look for any new information (did they survive? I must know!) and what I get back is a grid of suggested videos; I'm denied closure and am instead offered a reflexion of my watch history so I feel bad for two reasons, and yet I feel like that experience is very much intended by the creators; and so YouTube's nasty, bloated website becomes a core part of the medium conveying this message.
YouTube videos in general feel like a completely different medium to "legacy" films or TV shows or shorts. People are invited and expected to pan around, skip about, speed up and slow down, and perhaps even give up after the first few seconds. Video essays will drop a big block of text into a video and keep it there for less than a second, considering it the viewer's job to pause at the right time if they intend to read what's there.
Other platforms present video in such a way as to create a whole new medium again; YouTube came to support it with 'Shorts'. These expect a shorter length, different aspect ratio, and no desire/capability for a viewer to scan around or pause; when a video finishes, what would once have been silence and suggestions is now a pre-chosen and -loaded new video that starts playing immediately, and that repeats until the viewer is able to pull themself out of the horror. It's still video, and it's still on YouTube, and yet we have two different mediums (media?) here, that delivery wildly different experiences.
Many centuries ago YouTube had a five-star rating system rather than a flat 'like/dislike' system, and videos from this era encourage the user to "rate" or "five-star" what they're watching. That system, that medium, died at some point, and videos today call on the viewer to "like and subscribe" instead, but those older uploads are still there, still making requests the viewer can't possibly oblige. Other videos burn into their text their faith that a link that once appeared in the top-right corner will continue to do so; that a video description will be "below" rather than anywhere else; that parts 2 and 3 of a series can definitely still be found should the viewer be watching part 1. These videos acknowledge that YouTube is a load-bearing aspect of their medium, and should YouTube ever decide to change any of this, those videos will stop making sense in the way they once did. Already, the aggressive explosion cut of one of these videos is at risk of damage should a viewer have 'autoplay' on by default. Even here, on this page with embed links, the ends of the videos present differently to how they would if viewed on the site; perhaps even this has worsened the experience somewhat and I've damaged the medium myself.
Maybe an easier way to express this is to compare this problem to that faced by 90s TV shows today. They were mastered at resolutions way short of HD, in 4:3 aspect ratios with many close-up shots on faces so the drama would survive transmission on a tiny domestic CRT; bookended by charming yet unchanging credits tunes to give viewers time to realise the show had started and ended; interrupted at regular intervals by cliff-hangers that served little narrative purpose but helped squeeze in a few adverts. These adaptations to medium worked magnificently, but they almost work against the shows in 2026, where enormous TV screens scale blurry faces to comical size and sandwich them between giant black bars; where on-demand services deliver you the episode you chose immediately with no adverts and yet the credits and cliff-hangers are still there, still trying to encourage you to sit down and continue watching as though you hadn't chosen which episode to watch and when to watch it. When I watched 90s shows these impacts changed the show for me: I looked for the 'skip intro' button, and was annoyed if I couldn't find it; I skipped closing credits completely, denying myself the 'processing time' I might once have been forced to spend waiting for the next show to start; I saw mid-episode cliff-hangers coming early enough to stop paying attention, knowing I wouldn't be rewarded for the stress; I took the blurriness and close-up shots in stride, waving them off as simply 'older' or 'cheaper' forms of filmmaking. I've since tried to unlearn all of these behaviours because I risk drawing the conclusion that all of these old shows were simply not that well-made, even though many of them were brilliant.
I wonder if there will come a time where these quick-cut explosions and a hundred other artefacts unique to this YouTube-ian medium start to work against the videos themselves, and what (if anything) ought to be done about that. Would it make sense to re-introduce a jumble of irrelevant information to the end of a video to represent the video's abrupt ending, as one could perhaps re-insert a jumble of ads into an old episode of TV? Could one stand up a clone of an older version of YouTube in the same way one would shop around for an old CRT? Will content consumers in a decade's time be frustrated that neither of these videos can be watched on their app of choice without enormous bars above and blow, while others are frustrated that the only copies that persisted had been aggressively cropped for the trending aspect ratio, sacrificing a bunch of the visual gags?
YouTube's crimes are many and terrifying and sufficient to mandate its immediate binning, but I think it's important to treat YouTube as a medium (two if you count Shorts) now more than just a platform; and consider that little features like descriptions, suggestions, content policies, specific terminology, and even playback tools are all crucial aspects of that medium; and consider that these features are in conversation with the videos made for the platform, as surely as films are in conversation with cameras and cinemas and streaming services. There's no rule that sets that these forces work to better each other — film as a medium has suffered greatly at the hands of streaming services — but I'm more worried about YouTube because it could just decide one day that autoplay will be always enabled, and that will be the end of the abrupt video ending as it's experienced today (unless you're using the Southeastern Railway WiFi maybe).
I don't want this medium to be suddenly altered at the expense of real and genuinely beautiful art that depends on it, but I don't have much control over that. Instead, while the medium exists, I want to point to these two videos I like, and say that they're worthy of being consumed within the medium for which they're designed, ideally before that medium is whisked away by time, or apathy, or 'progress'.