YouTube is not as grand an archive of sports history as it could be, but it's still the best means of delivering highlight aggregations to bored, stoned, or sleepy fans. If you put the algorithm in the right mood, it can deliver you a package of LeBron dunks, hockey dekes, hard hits, disc golf aces, funny technical fouls, MMA comebacks, or crazy catches. But see enough of these and you'll notice something. Despite coming from different channels, the titles are most often formatted in the same ungrammatical way: "X but they get increasingly more Y."
There are endless variations on this theme: "Connor McDavid Shootout Goals But They Get Increasingly More Impressive" or "Fernando Alonso rages but he gets increasingly more furious" or "Pure NBA chaos but it gets increasingly more chaotic." It extends beyond sports—"Norm Macdonald Jokes But They Get Increasingly More Savage"—but the phrase is undoubtedly rooted in the sports highlight genre. I hate it.
The appeal of this title format appears to be that in promising to save the best for last, the creators encourage you to watch the whole thing, which is good for their monetization. It gets results. Look at the NBA curator CoshReport, whose videos own a big piece of this market. They switched over to the "increasingly more" bit two years ago, and the view count on those—in the millions—dwarfs the five- and six-figure numbers that earlier videos pulled. Going chronologically through their post history, and comparing titles to view counts, you can almost pinpoint the exact moment when they realized the wording that clicked.
"Keep getting better" died a cruel and unfair death. But the flexible yet redundant "increasingly more" lives on, even as that phrase becomes increasingly painful for me as I encounter it on a daily basis. There's an extra word in all of these titles! "More" doesn't need to be there! Increasingly already means "more"! Just say "Long-distance shots but they get increasingly ridiculous."
I know it's silly to get worked up correcting the language of random thirsty content creators. But what's really sticking in my craw is the way that official YouTube accounts have glommed onto this syntax. Major League Baseball is posting videos called like "MLB Walk-Off Homers that get INCREASINGLY more epic!!" or "INCREDIBLE diving catches that get increasingly more INSANE!" The NFL is putting up "Throws BUT They Get Increasingly More Impossible!" which is grammatically incorrect in two ways. The Philadelphia Eagles account is doing "Eagles Big Hits But They Get Increasingly More Intense." It's obvious bait that makes me feel dumb for being the type of person they think they should dangle it in front of. Moreover, it contributes to the feeling that the gatekeepers of this once wide-open internet are pruning the paths to visibility. You see that in the consistently overcaffeinated voices of team social media, too: In a world of infinite possibility, everything sounds the same.
I'm a veteran of companies that have tried to get noticed by people on the websites that rule the world. The thing about all these jobs where you're paid to draw eyeballs is that nobody really knows what they should be doing. I don't mean that as a dig at the employees. This just isn't like getting your junk-food brand placed in a prime spot in the supermarket. There's no obvious cause and effect here. You can't just look inside their algorithms, see exactly what it is they prioritize, and tailor your message accordingly. They are secretive and mysterious, even as they drive the lion's share of news and entertainment. The most informed choice you can make, when running social media under these circumstances, is to copy other ideas that seem to do well. That's why so many YouTube thumbnails look like a guy receiving an electric shock, why so many headlines are "SEO-optimized" for the blandness of "Event: Date, Time, Live Stream." When there's no real way to tell the difference between correlation and causation, you get a cargo cult of engagement-farming. I wish this crap would get decreasingly less ubiquitous.
