I'll provide some background for people that aren't familiar with the game. It's an online vehicular combat game where you pilot tanks, planes, helicopters and warships. The vehicles range from pre-WW2 to modern. The game aims for realistic vehicle specifications, like armour thickness, penetration values etc.
For older, actually real vehicles, that information is more easily available. For modern, classified vehicles, and vehicles that were never actually produced, they have to make reasonable assumptions. Sometimes players get upset about these assumptions and how they impact the game balance, and post classified design documents on the forums to argue their points.
It’s part of a cheeky joke. There’s an adage that if you really need to find a correct answer, go online and confidently give the wrong answer. More people will jump on to tell you you’re wrong than would answer the question if you asked.
That’s called Cunningham’s law. The joke (which is actually quite funny) is that GP gave the wrong name for it and proved it.
It wasn’t clear and I understand the confusion but welcome into the joke, my friend. :)
Going to hijack the top comment to provide my own observations as a player
As a War Thunder player myself, here is some insights off the top of my head I can provide from the player base point of view, and as someone who has also submitted documentation to the devs to fix historical inaccuracies of some vehicles in the game...
-Players can submit bug reports for vehicles, reporting incorrect characteristics, missing features etc.
-In order to do so, players must research and compile documentation supporting their cases, from at least 2 primary sources. This means those devoted to such a report can spend hours or even days gathering material for their sources, sometimes going as far as digging through the historical archives of companies or countries for information
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Here's where problems start to arise:
-The bug reports are overseen by a few volunteers who review the bug reports and decide what gets sent to the developers and what does not, who have a track record of arbitrarily choosing what gets passed to the developers for fixing, and what does not. So even a well made bug report with more than enough documents and source materials can be denied, and all the efforts of the reporter are in vain.
-Even if a bug report gets passed to the developers, there is no timeline on when the missing features or inaccuracies of a vehicle will be fixed, and no communication from the developers whatsoever. It may be one month until its fixed, it may be 5 years, it may be never.
-The most heated discussion and reports revolve around modern day vehicles, where source materials may still be classified, or is available but marked as export restricted. The developers are very inconsistent when it comes to which bug fixes the accept or refuse when it comes to modern vehicles. For example, there were multiple reports of the Abrams and Challenger tanks armor being weaker in game than they should be, these reports were declined by the developers despite the multitude of sources. And yet on another occasion, a player submitted a report on the T-90 missing it's spall liners, and they were added by developers with the only source provided being a youtube video.
-The developers recently changed the bug reporting system so that once a bug report is submitted, only the bug report reviewers and the author of the bug report can see the documentation submitted; the lack of transparency leads to lack of trust, some believing some reports which get submitted may be approved and implemented based the personal biases and views of the developers or bug report reviewers
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So basically you have a playerbase of passionate players who like history and military vehicles, who go out of their way to perform the jobs of a historian to provide the correct information to the developers to correct historical inaccuracies in a game, only for their efforts to be disregarded due to arbitrary decision making of the developers or bug report reviewers, even if the compiled reports follow all guidelines.
They take wildly inaccurate propaganda numbers and implement them, but nerf the numbers on US vehicles where they exist plenty of actual data from the manufacturer itself in many cases.
I don't know the game, but wouldn't this make sense as a game balancing aspect? In real life some vehicles might be "strictly better" than others but doesn't make for very interesting gameplay
If I were to characterize your statement, you would agree that J.R.R. Tolkien should have written the hobbits as massive muscular warriors who can stand against the Uruk-hai as equally competent fighters. The Uruk-hai were "strictly better" weren't they?
No, because J.R.R tolkien isn't a game designer? Also even if it was a game you're misusing "strictly better". If their food consumption, costs to equip, costs to train are different even if in a 1v1 combat situation the uruk-hai would win that doesn't translate to strictly better
edit: also, the point of a game is to be fun not to accurately characterize the real world (i.e. how many games have you played where you have to urinate or poop for the character?)
Matches are so made that you will only fight vehicles with a similar strength. Each vehicle has its own rating and a a slight (dis)advantage is tolerated to more easily find a match.
Problem is, nerfed vehicles like the HSTV-L have a higher rating than OP stuff like the 2S38, even though the HSTV-L is worse than it actually should be IRL.
The higher BR a vehicle has the more capable vehicles it has to fight.
Apparently the game divides the various vehicles into tiers based on their performance. Within a match, only vehicles from a certain "band" of performance may be played, meaning either those vehicles are similar in power or have playerbases that manages a similar output.
Sounds like this could inspire a simple test as to whether someone should have access to classified information, which would also positively indicate their more mature than a twelve year old.
At least once, someone has reported online that they were asked if their friend played War Thunder when they were doing an interview to explore their friend's getting a clearance, so...
There are also lots of people creating fake classified documents, and people in posession of "classified" stuff that has long ago been declassified. Those two groups, imho, outnumber all the people who leak actual info by 10x.
(Remember too that having a clearance and having access are different things. Only a rare few have unfettered access to download/print/email to/from classified systems. Lots of gamers work at/for the NSA. That doesnt mean they can all browse the f35 flight manual over lunch.)
There's a lot less security around that data than you'd think, there was the very recent saga of Jack Teixeira in the Air National Guard who was smuggling out tons of classified data to impress his friends on Discord just by taking documents out or sneaking his phone in to take pictures. There's a LOT of people with access to the data and it's partially on the honor system and the threat of massive jail time when you're caught to keep people from doing this all the time.
Anthony Bourdain supposedly found the best restaurants by using this trick
> Get online and write something along the lines of, “hey guys, I just had the absolute best chicken rice at [restaurant x] in Singapore, no questions asked, hands down, everything else pales in comparison,” then sit back and enjoy the show as the internet foodie elite each jump into the fray to defend their own picks to the death. You’ll get a much bigger response, more passionate praise, and it’ll probably end up being a little fun to boot.
if you link to the image directly, then you'll never learn the numbers. 356 is nerd sniping,
927 is standards, lucky 10,000 is 1053, load bearing is 2347, bobby tables is 327, research team is 1425...
I've been a dedicated geek and a firm believer that there's always an xkcd for every situation for quite a while but I don't think I'm at a place where I'm referring to comics by their number. Being said, I could imagine a comic about just this particular topic with cueball doing something that could be considered a reference then quietly giggling to himself while muttering "219" or w/e is the number of the appropriate comic.
A man goes to prison and the first night while he's laying in bed contemplating his situation, he hears someone yell out, "44!" Followed by laughter from the other prisoners.
He thought that was pretty odd, then he heard someone else yell out, "72!" Followed by even more laughter.
"What's going on?" he asked his cellmate.
"Well, we've all heard every joke so many times, we've given them each a number to make it easier."
"Oh," he says, "can I try?"
"Sure, go ahead."
So, he yells out "102!" and the place is dead quiet save for a few groans. Confused, he looks at his cellmate who is just shaking his head.
"Hey, what happened?"
"Well, some people can tell a joke, some people can't."
> I don't think I'm at a place where I'm referring to comics by their number.
not with that attitude! 927 comes up often enough, and it's memorable because 3^2*100 + 3^3 , or Yoda's age - 900 + the 27 club of musicians who killed themselves so start there...
Answer: they don't leak classified info, they leak restricted info that's effectively public domain.
Because both sound bad, there's benefits to all involved to do a little bait and switch there.
Notably, reputable publications don't play along.
This sounds disagreeable, but it's the boring truth. Some sourcing:
- "declassified information can still be considered “restricted,” and thus violates the game’s rules, [the game developer] said. In fact, the restricted manuals are available for purchase on legitimate websites."
The UK Defence Journal is the worst offender, they're not reputable, but rather a bog-standard republisher that reliably finds a way to publish a headline on this every 6 months.
Very true. The most recent "leak" was of a document that is available on archive.org and has been for years[1]. But the bottoms of the pages have "NATO RESTRICTED" printed, so it was declined, and news sites once again exploded with "War Thunder player leaks secret military documents on forum!!"
I remember a time when crossing the 10 minute mark was really stretching it on YouTube. Nowadays most videos hit the 1 hour mark... I'm not sure if this is what the market demands, or this is just Google nudging creators in this direction.
> Nowadays most videos hit the 1 hour mark... I'm not sure if this is what the market demands
For many genres, this is simply what pays the most for the creators.
Some people just flip on a video and let it play — maybe just in the background, maybe as they fall asleep. The ads that get played when they aren’t paying attention still generate revenue for the creator.
This is one reason why any working streamer should pretty much always have some sort of a long-form channel. It makes bank for relatively little additional effort.
Interesting. I don't see anything fortunate about that myself. I guess it's a "different strokes for different folks" thing. Personally, I rarely watch any video that's less than 20 minutes long. I think of short videos as being too small to contain enough useful info to be worth my time (although that's obviously not literally true for all short videos). And generally speaking, I prefer videos that are 30 minutes to an hour long, that really dive into the nitty gritty of some topic.
I don't know how representative of "the market" I am (probably not very) but I can at least attest that there are those of us out there with this particular preference.
The problem with everyone making long videos is that it leads to a situation where, intentional or not, it seems like everyone is trying to waste your time.
Some things just aren’t worth talking about for that long.
Pretty much this. A short video is a fairly strong indication that the author did his work and respects your time, while a long one is a fair indication of the opposite. I've come to recognize some red flags in longer videos, such as including unnecessary bloopers, reading very slowly, reading long and frequent definitions, going on tangents, and generally not synthesizing the information enough such that all the bits presented tie into the main topic.
I would lie if I said that I don't consume long form documentaries on Youtube. I do and there are some channels that I deeply enjoy. But for a while, especially since they removed the dislike button, I've become wary of discovering new channels. It's often hit or miss, and the overall time investment doesn't look justifiable in retrospect. For this exact reason, I've removed all my subscriptions, and disabled all recommendations. I mostly poll for channels that I remember had good content that was meaningful to me.
There’s a third option that I’ve run into since I’ve started learning how to create video content.
I have a bit of a background in print journalism so telling stories that convey information isn’t new to me. By the end, I was pretty good at conveying enough information in a limited number of inches.
Video is a totally different beast and short videos are very hard. I have a couple of 10 minute videos that may as well be presented in a foreign language that I don’t speak…and I made them.
Reading this, I think I’m just going to quit. It’s really not worth the time investment.
The SponsorBlock extension has a useful feature where users can contribute a highlight point, which then adds a "skip to highlight" button. Many long form videos will pad the beginning with excessive background information to pad the length, skipping to highlight has saved me many hours. Because the data is crowdsourced the highlight qualities vary, but I've found them to be generally useful.
In my experience long videos on YouTube are extremely inefficient at conveying information, often repeating themselves in order to pad out the length. This is even the case for the better creators
I've noticed this too, it's becoming somewhat infamous that modern YouTube videos are all these 1+ hour long 'video essays' on topics which could easily be replaced with 2-3 page articles to be read in half the time.
While back in the day a long video essay was usually borne out of necessity and thus information-dense and high-quality—not unlike a documentary, actually—it feels like length itself is an objective for a lot of newer videos.
I suspect many subconsciously think "if my video is 2+ hours long, then clearly it's high-quality and well-researched", regardless of the actual density of information.
And don't even get me started on content creators that use AI-generated sludge because they don't have enough relevant visuals for the runtime of the video. Like dude, just make the video shorter.
One way to tell that a video isn't worth my time is if after the intro they say "To tell this story, we need to go back to 1724" or whatever. If they're going way back in time to explain a modern concept, they're often just doing it to pad the runtime. Obviously doesn't work for all topics; like I expect a history video about the american revolution to go back to at least the mid 1700s.
You can still make money writing blog or article if you have a sponsor. Just because you are on some platform it doesn't mean you will get free visitors. Its very competitive. You need to be among the top creators to be featured on YouTube et.al. Almost all creators have sponsors because you make so little money on the ads because the platform takes a crazy huge cut. The platforms are just middlemen rent seekers profitting on mindless zombies who are cunsuming content and just watch the next video in the recommendation flow.
You can. But it's much easier to be a YouTuber – and it's not only the top creators who get paid.
Which is easier of these choices:
Talking or writing?
Uploading to YouTube or publishing to a blog?
Building an audience of millions or already having them on the platform?
Considering that online creativity should be for everybody and not just hacker and academic types.
> The platforms are just middlemen rent seekers profitting on mindless zombies who are cunsuming content and just watch the next video in the recommendation flow.
Oh never mind, you are stuck in illusions. YouTube as of 2025 has the highest quality and biggest quantity visual media library in history. If you actually press the like and subscribe button on good videos a bunch of times, YouTube will start recommending videos of the highest quality possible. Going in-depth into any subject imaginable. Made by some of the world's most professional film crews. You're really missing out if you're deciding to be an angry hacker about this.
It's not just uploading a video... you are right about there's a loot of high quality videos, those take more work then writing a blog post though, several hours of video is cut down to minutes of content.
But the platform takes most of the ad money, almost all professional Youtubers have sponsors.
I still argue that you would be better off publishing content on your own website, but one problem is people now a day don't actually search for content, we are mindless zombies fed by algoritms, where most videos are just "clickbait".
For the YouTuber who is merely talking into the camera, it is mostly just a matter of uploading a video. How would he be better off making a website and publishing the content there? It would be difficult to find an audience and almost impossible to get paid. I agree that it would make more sense for this content to be a textual article, but until better monetization opportunities and easier publishing becomes available for people, they are going to keep recording themselves talking into the camera.
> but one problem is people now a day don't actually search for content, we are mindless zombies fed by algoritms
People choose to be like that. Think of it like a supermarket: Up in front is the worst kind of garbage "food", literal sewage that will destroy your health while living and kill you prematurely. In the back you have the highest quality produce and ingredients in abundance. You can go to the back of the supermarket and enjoy the benefits of having this broad access. Or do like most people and go to the front shelves and fill up your cart with poison. It's a choice.
If you go back in time around year 2000-2005 there where a lot of people making good money writing text articles on the web. You could earn much more then you do now on Youtube. You could earn $10 if just one person clicked an ad on your website. Now it still costs $10 to get a click from an advertiser, but little of that money goes to content creators, the platforms take most of it. You could almost make a living with only a few thousand followers. I think Google gave up on Google ads because of the click farmers faking clicks on ads.
Google ads was a middleman between advertisers and content creator/publishers. Now you can still make money on your blog but you need to be big enough so that you can talk with companies directly asking if they want to sponsor your site/channel.
I don't find this to be the case. Bad creators make bad videos, regardless of their length. Truly good creators, though... well, let me put it this way - I've watched 7+ hour long videos which contained not one sentence of repetition or padding. They just had that much to say.
A lot of long videos have very little informational content but they become long because their creator rambles, repeats himself, tells shitty repetitive jokes and wastes time with sarcasm and then clarifying those sarcastic remarks because otherwise some people won't get it, etc.
Drachinifel is a prime example of this. The channel "WWII US Bombers" is an example of the opposite, somebody creating information dense short videos because he has laser tight focus and no time for joking around. (Examples chosen for the conceptual proximity of their content, historic military ships and historic military aircraft.)
I guess I've just been mostly lucky to avoid those videos. And to be fair, most of the longer videos I watch aren't "purpose made" for Youtube - they're recordings of lectures, conference presentations, etc., where the length of the video just happens to be a factor of the length of the original session.
Pretty sure the answer is ads. "Long-form" content has more opportunities to insert ads or sponsored content. There's not a lot of money to be made being quick and to the point.
People's viewing habits have also changed in response, rather than having the algorithm bounce them around they'd rather half-pay-attention to a 3 hour video. But I think the trend of ever-growing video lengths was spawned by a desire for more revenue.
The market bifurcated. Short form content became Snapchat and tiktoks and YouTube shorts. There were never any significant competitors to YouTube for long form content because of how expensive streaming it is, so all of that content remained on the one platform with an audience and decent payouts.
I only go to youtube when I want to learn something that is hard to explain with pictures. Usually that is diy stuff for me, but I can see it being something like a dance move or a boss fight in a game, those things take longer than a minute to explain but never take more than 15 unless it is padded.
Youtube used to add mid-roll ads to videos that were at least 10 minutes, so your video would basically make twice as much if you stretched it that long. I think the threshold is 8 minutes nowadays.
Short form is hard to monetize (if you are Google 8 years ago) since you need to split ad revenue and attribution among the several videos you watch between ads. This goes against a ton of prior trends in the ad industry where last touch attribution is still king and ad fraud is hard to combat. If course tiktok did it late with creator rewards.
YouTube generates a transcript that’s on the sidebar (above the recommended videos). It is kind of broken text though, so I copy and paste the block into Gemini (it’s free and has a huge context) and ask it to read it and generate the points for me
You should try watching the video instead of complaining about it's length. It turns out that it actually takes a bit of time to cover the history of Russia and Germany sufficiently well to explain the situation. Yes, those turn out to be relevant to answering the question.
I gave it a go, not to the video in the OP, but another one that caught my eye - the one about gatcha and korean gender wars. I got through the end and found out that it was actually a part 1, the second part being almost 2 hours. I'm low-key upset about this situation.
That was back before Google purchased YouTube and they had their own video service called Google Video. Google Video was great because they didn't have that limit.
I'm guessing you're either missing or deliberately excluding the HUGE push by Youtube for "Youtube Shorts". Personally, I vastly prefer long (20+ minute) videos. However short videos are good for quick DIY / tutorials when I'm unable to find a written equivalent.
the huge push for youtube shorts is to compete with tiktok and instagram for that segment of the market. the longer form videos are a different segment of the market, they aren't entirely related
I simply can't believe there isn't some incentive for longer videos. It may be that YouTube only cares about total watch time and doesn't care if a creator pushes lots of short ones or a few long ones, as long as viewers keep viewing. I see so many videos like this:
Tie Shoes Like a Pro
"If you're watching this video you probably want to know the secrets to good shoe tying. We'll show you how in this video. It's surprisingly easy, so don't go anywhere. But first, have you ever wondered why we tie our shoes? The first shoes weren't actually tied but were just soles that people nailed to their feet. <Cue hammer sound effect and scream> Haha, actually this didn't hurt at all because... <10 minutes pass> ...and then in 1890 Eritrea was founded, but you don't care about that! Haha! You're here to learn how to tie shoes! Don't worry, we'll get to that too! Anyway, also in 1890 all the leather factories in France burned down and so they couldn't spare leather for shoe buckles, so they began using bits of string..."
The "youtube meta" has changed overtime and not all creators have stayed current with it, so you can find old videos which were once optimized for youtube but no longer are, or new videos being created in an outdated style. With some channels though, I think they've decided to make suboptimal videos from the youtube algorithm perspective because they're getting most of their revenue from a loyal fanbase donating to them on patron/etc, so they cater to the preferences of that specific crowd.
There could be multiple valid strategies too. I’ve seen some creators will put out a video once every few months, but that video will be shown on everyone’s feed and will get millions of views. While mass content posters like gaming channels probably get less exposure or their videos spend less time on the top.
True. And different kinds of content may have different metas. Some content needs to be timely and can only get views for a short period of time before effectively expiring. Other content is evergreen and can play the long game, counting on getting reliable view numbers for years.
Not really true anymore. Creators have talked about how youtube's incentive structure is pushing towards longer videos now. Not necessarily higher-quality ones, and posting more volume is still generally going to help, but because youtube's now optimising for watch time instead of views, long videos are pretty heavily rewarded. (In fact, as always, the high-effort but short content like animations are the least 'efficient' genre on youtube).
It's this kind of leak that makes me 100% confident that there are no alien UFOs, there has been no alien contact, the US government wasn't behind the JFK assassination and so many other conspiracies. Why? Because people really can't keep secrets, particularly when they're not personally invested in them.
Pretty much all conspiracy theories boil down to a lack of understanding about whatever the theory concerns.
Some will object to that and point to examples like the United Fruit Company, various CIA-backed coups and so on but that's the point isn't it? Those things aren't secret.
For older, actually real vehicles, that information is more easily available. For modern, classified vehicles, and vehicles that were never actually produced, they have to make reasonable assumptions. Sometimes players get upset about these assumptions and how they impact the game balance, and post classified design documents on the forums to argue their points.
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