TikTok, Youtube Shorts, Snapchat Spotlight, every social media has some short form content. Instagram Reels, however, are the most peculiar. TikTok is the default, Shorts are boring and no one even knows Spotlight exists, so Reels become the weirdest. This is for a multitude of reasons: The little to no monitoring of comment sections, the diversity of content that doesn’t seem to pop up elsewhere and the ease to spam others by sending them Reels. So are they really worth spending time on? Yes, but more than the reasons you think.

It’s important for me to preface here that I don’t have TikTok downloaded, so I’m only comparing Reels with the little experience I have on Youtube Shorts, but comparatively, Reels content is far superior. It’s more interesting, better to watch and most importantly, more entertaining. But now I have to explain why Reels are worth spending time on. 

Firstly, short form content is the most consistently funny content out there. When you click onto a twenty minute Youtube video or turn on a funny TV show, it’s either going to hit or miss. If it hits, great! You got entertained fully and completely for a bit! However, if it misses, you just wasted twenty minutes. Short form content is actually the same. You watch a Reel, and it either hits or misses. If it hits, you feel joy and laughter. If it misses, then oh darn, you won’t get those thirty seconds back. Short form content is like watching a mediocre comedian perform. Some of the jokes are good, and the bad ones don’t take long enough to upset the whole experience. 

Secondly, though I’m mainly arguing in support of short form content as a whole, I do believe Reels is the best way it’s done. People send Reels to each other so often that a type of person who sends a hundred Reels a day and gets no response is well known. The nature of posting Reels to a story, and adding notes on Reels creates so many options for communication and socialization, which is also a benefit of short form content as a whole. Whenever someone tells me to watch a half hour long Youtube Video, I immediately reject the idea in my head. When someone sends me a Reel, I’ll watch it, because it takes half a minute.

Now, there’s a lot of objection to this idea, and I’ll try to resolve a few, but because of how many there are and the type of people who are against stuff like this, I cannot hit every point. First off: ‘Doesn’t short form content decrease attention spans?’ Yes it does, but welcome to the 21st century. Everything decreases attention spans here. From fast food to ad blockers, everything around us is attempting to minimize the time we spend not enjoying things, it’s not just short form content. ‘Wait, doesn’t this stuff cause brain fog?’ Yes, it does, but it doesn’t make people stupider, it makes them more prone to procrastination and boredness, which, again, is not only caused by short form content, but everything in the 21st century. ‘But short form content limits social interaction!’ No, it doesn’t. It creates a new medium for it by sharing different Reels and content with others. It converts some amount of in-person conversation into online banter, but, once again, this is the 21st century where everything’s digitized.

Normally this, as in the call to action, is the hardest paragraph to write during an opinion, but here it’s pretty simple, because this is a simple problem with a simple solution. Let me watch my Reels. They’re entertaining and funny. Do not complain about screenagers these days, because I completely understand the drawbacks from watching Reels. I just value the short entertainment over everything else. I mean, if not to have fun and be entertained, what’s the point of life? So get off my back. Let me watch my Reels. And go back to minding your own business.