Are people too dumb to turn their phones 90°?

Something has been bothering me for a while now:

People don't seem to get that you lose screen space (on a real computer) if you film in "portrait" mode on a phone. If this were good, cinemas would be narrow and high. There was even a song about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2picMQC-9E

It's really annoying. It is even less understandable because you can easily turn your phone 90° for a landscape video.

Yea but this is what zoomers want and I don't think tiktok and Instagram lets people upload non vertical videos annoying I wish things where more like in the 2000s but most people just want to be trendy and don't care if the video is good and I can also rant about terrible music and filters.

Portrait mode is good for vertically oriented scenes like a single person dancing, which is like 80% of TikTok. It's also pretty good for a single person posing, e.g. practicing for a fitness or bodybuilding contest. A landscape video would not fill the screen with the subject of the video nearly as well. I used landscape myself with some videos of the kids. Square video and even cropped videos have their uses.

The old names, portrait and landscape, reflect this. Portrait of one person, vs a landscape.

You lose space "on a real computer" watching vertical video, but you don't on a phone or tablet. You can rotate a portable device really easily, 90 degrees. You can't rotate most computer displays (though mine can), and you can't rotate a cinema unless you're Godzilla.

So, you're calling people dumb, but what is really going on is they are optimizing for each other, and not for you.

It reminds me of people with older 4:3 TVs complaining about letterboxed video when 16:9 became common for DVDs. Their 4:3 TV had wasted space! But the alternatives were either to zoom in, losing part of the picture, or to upgrade to the expected display.

FYI: Instagram allows you to upload many formats and aspect ratios. For landscape they recommend 16:9. TikTok allows landscape videos if you know what you're doing, but the default methods are all portrait. But yes both platforms are dominated by vertical formats.

So, you're calling people dumb, but what is really going on is they are optimizing for each other, and not for you.

This. The majority of people now consume media on a phone. And yeah, portrait works well in some cases. Lone figure, full body, it makes more sense to use portrait. It used to bug me, but it's the way of things.