OP-ED - Week one of making YouTube Shorts taught me why my colleague calls it "twerking for the algorithm"
When viral reach comes at the cost of analytical rigour, African creators risk becoming content farmers rather than discourse shapers.
A commenter on my first YouTube Short (dubbed McKinsey Uses ChatGPT. So What Are You Actually Paying For?) told me I had "no idea what I was talking about." He then proceeded to explain McKinsey's AI strategy to me with the confidence of someone who'd just discovered it.
A bit of sleuthing reveals dude might be a senior manager at a boutique enterprise tech consultancy specialising in Oracle solutions, with undergraduate and master's degrees in IT from a university Forbes ranks 114 in the US. In other words, someone who'd actually know his way around enterprise AI deployments.
The irony being that my 3-minute riff on AI disrupting consulting was based on months of research, multiple conversations with ecosystem players, and a 1,200-word piece I'd published days earlier examining exactly the dynamics he was lecturing me about.
But here's the thing: the fact that he responded that way shouldn't surprise (his grating keyboard manner notwithstanding). The format demands oversimplification. Three minutes doesn't leave room for nuance, caveats, or the kind of layered analysis I've built my work around. What surprised me wasn't the critique but how quickly I felt the pull to keep making sub-3-minute videos anyway.
Andile Masuku
The first Short (put out on YouTube, Linkedin and X) got more direct engagement in 48 hours than I typically see from this column, which reaches over four million readers who I mostly never hear from. Views climbed. Comments rolled in. The algorithm smiled. And I felt the pressure immediately: keep it going, stay consistent, feed the machine.
Gyrating for the algorithm
An esteemed media industry colleague of mine frames this phenomenon bluntly. He argues that algorithmic ritual publishing is largely a distraction from producing seminal work. Unless you're using these platforms strictly for distribution and marketing, you're mostly "twerking for the algorithm," he says, contorting yourself to please machinery that rewards volume and velocity over depth and rigour. *cringe*
I can't shake that distasteful image. Especially when what I'm low-key advocating for in the Short itself is precisely the opposite: the democratisation of analytical capability, the breaking of information monopolies, the value of genuine contextual understanding over credentialist performance.
But then the McKinsey-WPP development broke last week, after my piece published. WPP hired McKinsey to fix WPP. WPP is, of course, one of the world's largest advertising groups.
Global brand strategist Gustaf Wick nailed the irony: McKinsey charges millions for work increasingly powered by tools costing twenty dollars a month. The timing felt validating, but it also highlighted the limitation of the format. How do you unpack that kind of complexity in a Short without reducing it to hot takes?
The stakes beyond metrics
Here's where the broader stakes kick in. If African creators only show up in these algorithmic spaces as content farmers, producing digestible bites optimised for attention rather than understanding, we're not participating in discourse, we're just making cheap sausage with trash meat.
The West is already experiencing its social media fatigue, with Gen Z abandoning endless scroll for intentional communities. Meanwhile, Africa is building connectivity infrastructure at scale. The question isn't whether we show up, it's whether we show up as discourse-shapers or just algorithm-feeders.
Andile Masuku
My worry isn't that I can't handle critique from strangers who don't think I've sufficiently researched a subject I choose to explore journalistically. My concern is that the format itself might erode the thing I'm trying to protect: rigorous grappling with complexity, strongly held but loosely held views, and a commitment to learning in public without performing certainty I don't possess.
So where does that leave me? Honestly, still figuring it out. I'm not abandoning the Shorts, but I'm also not pretending they're a substitute for the longer, deeper work (i.e. long-form podcasts and writing). Oversimplification remains the enemy. The goal isn't to choose between depth and reach but to find ways to let each serve the other without compromising what makes the work worth doing in the first place.
Week one as a YouTuber taught me that engagement is easy to chase and hard to metabolise. The real test isn't whether I can keep making Shorts. It's whether I can do it without becoming the kind of intermediary I'm critiquing, the kind who optimises for platform metrics over actual understanding.
If you've been tracking the Shorts on social, thanks for the engagement. If you've been reading the long-form pieces or listening to the pods, thanks for your invaluable attention. And if you're the commenter who sparked this reflection, mate, I appreciate the passion even if you wildly underestimated what I know about McKinsey's AI deployment.
The conversation continues. Just maybe not in three minutes or less.
Editorial Note: A version of this opinion editorial was first published by Business Report on 18 November 2024.