Why I Still Write Long-Form

This is episode 4 and I want to talk about something that’s been bugging me for a while: pretty much everything we consume now is short-form. Reels, sixty-second explainers, AI summaries of articles most of us are never actually going to read. And I want to explain why I still sit down and write long-form, still do these podcasts, still make the longer YouTube videos, even though all of that takes the better part of a day each, sometimes more.

I don’t think it’s habit. I think it’s a reaction. A reaction to the fact that nobody is really engaging with anything anymore. We’re all just kind of zoning out and consuming. I caught myself doing the same thing, sitting back after two hours of reels with genuinely nothing to show for it. So yeah, this is worth saying out loud.

How My Consumption Habits Actually Changed

There was no single moment where I noticed it. It sort of crept up on me. I used to read full-length articles, genuinely read them, not skim the subheadings and bounce out. I used to sit down with a course on Udemy or Pluralsight and work through hours of material because that was just how you learned something new. Want to pick up Python? You built a foundation. Want to understand Docker? You spent weeks on it before you trusted yourself to run anything in production.

And now I catch myself skim-reading articles because my brain has just been conditioned to expect the highlight reel version. I’ll open a technical blog post, someone’s actually taken the time to write something useful, and I’m already scrolling for the code block before I’ve finished the second paragraph. That’s not reading. That’s pattern matching for the bits I think I need.

The moment that genuinely rattled me was when I decided to start learning Swift. Personal side project, building something for iPhone, nothing to do with work, just something I wanted to do. And my first instinct wasn’t to open a course or find a tutorial series. It was to open Claude and say, right, just write this for me. I mean, AI coding has come a long way, so why am I going to spend weeks learning the language myself when I can just get it done in a couple of days with AI? And I caught that instinct happening and thought, hang on, that’s not learning. That’s outsourcing. There’s a real difference between getting something done and understanding how it works.

I’ve talked in previous episodes about how AI can make you a bit lazier if you’re not careful, and I really think this is part of that same thing. We’re no longer deep diving into technology. We’re no longer spending the time to actually become subject matter experts. We’re scratching the surface, reading a high-level summary, and moving on.

This is the same conversation I keep having with people who ask where to start when they want to learn something new, a new coding language, a new technology, whatever it is. My answer is always the same: start at the fundamentals. What is a variable in this language? What does a conditional look like? What does a data structure look like compared to what you already know? Not because those things are glamorous, but because without that foundation you can’t transfer the skills to anything else, and you can’t troubleshoot when something breaks. You’re just following someone else’s instructions and hoping they got it right.

What Writing Long-Form Actually Forces Me to Do

This is probably the part I feel most strongly about, and it’s got nothing to do with the reader at all.

I write a lot of how-to content around backups, virtualisation, Kubernetes. And the honest truth is that if I don’t know a topic well enough to write about it in depth, I don’t write about it. That sounds obvious, but it’s actually a useful forcing function. The act of writing long-form, really committing to walking someone through something properly, requires me to understand it properly first. Not surface level. Not “I watched a video and it seemed to work.” Actually understand it.

For every blog post I do publish, there are probably three or four I’ve started and abandoned because I got halfway through and realised I didn’t know the topic well enough to be authoritative about it. That’s not a failure, that’s the filter working exactly as it should. The research required to write a proper long-form post is itself the learning. I’ve genuinely figured out that I had gaps in my understanding of things I thought I knew, simply because I tried to write about them and couldn’t hold the explanation together. That’s not something a one-minute reel will ever do for you.

The retention gap is real too. Something I’ve read slowly, really worked through, sticks around in a way that something I’ve scrolled past absolutely does not. I can go back to a blog post I read three years ago and remember not just what it said but how I was thinking about the problem when I read it. I cannot tell you a single thing I learned from any particular reel I watched last Tuesday.

And look, I know I’ve got a beautiful voice, but honestly, when I sit down to record one of these, I spend a lot of time deciding whether this is actually worth 20 minutes of someone’s day. That pressure is useful. It forces me to prepare properly. If I can’t clearly articulate why a topic matters, I go back and think harder before I hit record.

That’s the argument for long-form as reference material that still stands up, even when people say video is better, even when AI can summarise anything in thirty seconds. There’s a kind of depth that comes from reading carefully and thinking while you read that doesn’t translate into other formats. And I think we’re at risk of forgetting that experience is even available to us, because the algorithm is doing everything it can to make sure we never slow down long enough to access it.

Where Video Wins and Where It Doesn’t

I’m obviously biased here, I write, I do these podcasts, I make the longer YouTube videos, but I’ll give video its credit where it’s actually due.

For how-to content, video is genuinely excellent. Clicking through a process, showing the exact screens, demonstrating the sequence of steps, that’s a case where watching someone do it is more efficient than reading a description of it. When I do a YouTube video on setting something up, I’ll spend ten or fifteen minutes on the why behind the steps, not just the clicks. That matters. That’s what separates a useful video from a recipe where you just follow along and end up with something you can’t explain or reproduce without the video in front of you.

But for reference? For troubleshooting at 11pm when something’s broken and you need to find the specific configuration option you remember reading about? Video is a disaster. Nobody wants to scrub through a forty-minute recording to find the thirty-second answer. A well-structured written post with clear headings and code blocks you can copy is miles ahead for that use case, and always will be.

Short-form video has its own legitimate place and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I’ve genuinely discovered things I wouldn’t have found through short-form, new tools, new applications, technology I didn’t know existed that I then went and actually learned properly. That’s a real function. The algorithm surfacing things you didn’t know you were interested in is actually useful for discovery. Where it falls apart is when discovery is where the engagement ends and you never go any deeper than the reel that introduced you to the thing.

Why the Numbers Don’t Bother Me Anymore

Nobody asked me to write HomeLabPro. There’s no mandate, no editor, no brief. I just started doing it because I wanted to share what I was actually working on, and at some point it became the way I work through ideas properly. The podcast came from the same place, a way to sit with a topic long enough to say something real about it, rather than just gesture at it.

The honest truth is that long-form content doesn’t hit big numbers. It doesn’t get the reach that a well-timed reel gets. The algorithm doesn’t reward it, the platforms aren’t optimised for it, and the general direction of everything suggests the audience for it is only going to get smaller as people’s attention gets shorter. I know all of that.

I still do it because I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is zoning out and nobody is doing the work to go deep on anything. And because, practically speaking, if nobody is making long-form content anymore, there’s going to be nothing left to summarise. A lot of what the AI tools are trained on, a lot of what the short-form explainers are drawing from, is the long-form material that people took the time to write properly. If that pipeline dries up, the whole ecosystem becomes shallower. Not immediately, but steadily. That worries me more than my own view count.

And there’s something in the making of it that I think is worth protecting just for its own sake. Writing a long post makes me a better thinker about the topic. Recording a proper episode, one I’ve actually prepared for rather than just rambled into a microphone, makes me articulate the things I half-understood and forces me to decide where I actually stand. That’s valuable to me even if nobody reads it or listens. The audience is almost a bonus.

The blogs and the podcast episodes complement each other rather than compete, and that’s deliberate. I want someone to read an article and then listen to the episode that grew out of the same ideas and feel the thread between them. That kind of connection across formats is only possible if both of them are long enough to actually say something. You can’t build that out of sixty-second clips.

Short-form is fine for discovery. But if we all stop making the long stuff, there’s nothing left worth discovering.

If this is a topic you’ve been thinking about, I’d genuinely love to hear your take. What does your relationship with long-form look like these days? Are you still going deep on things, or has the algorithm got you too? Reach out and let me know, always happy to have that conversation.

As always, keep on learning.