YouTube forced to delete sarcastic tweet about creators stretching video length

A simple joke on social media has turned rather ugly in the waning hours of the day. The official YouTube Twitter account tweeted out a meme that other popular accounts have been tweeting for the past few days. However, YouTube decided to put its own spin on it and sarcastically poke at its content creators. 

The tweet in question seemingly made fun of creators who stretched their video’s introductions. As many in the community are aware, this is a common practice used today in order to meet the vaunted 10-minute mark for a video. Naturally, the community fired back at YouTube for making the joke as it was the site’s own algorithm that caused this practice to start in the first place. 

Joke tweet by YouTube Twitter account goes too far

The original tweet was only up for a short time, as the account was forced to delete it after a wave of negative backlash was sent their way. Below, you can see the original tweet and a passionate response from a community member detailing why the tweet wasn’t so funny. 

The response echoes what the entire community was thinking when they read the initial tweet. During the 2010s, YouTube started to tinker with its algorithm in a way that benefitted videos of longer length. Essentially, the algorithm supposedly recommends videos over around 10 minutes more than it recommends videos under that threshold. 

Additionally, creators stretch their videos out to 10 minutes to earn more ad revenue thanks to how the YouTube algorithm works. Traditionally, making a video’s introduction longer is how many creators have accomplished this. 

You created this issue with how you fucked the algorithms. https://t.co/cD8yyRM8Am

— Ryan B. (@PrestigeIsKey) October 3, 2020

After the backlash was received, YouTube took the tweet down and issued an apology for “missing the mark”. However, the community doesn’t seem to be buying this and are more concerned with how they made a joke out of a pretty serious issue on the platform. 

We hear you. You’re right and we apologize. Our now-deleted Tweet was intended in good faith, but we missed the mark and did not reflect the spirit of the Creator community that we love. - YouTube Social Team

— YouTube (@YouTube) October 3, 2020

This recent event will likely not cause anything to change on the algorithm side of things on YouTube. It’s safe to say there won’t be many future joke tweets sent out by any of YouTube’s official social media accounts.