Response formats that place a new video alongside an existing one changed the shape of online humour. They converted commentary, which used to sit in a comment thread, into publishable material of its own.
Reaction stopped being a dead end
Before response formats, the audience for a funny video expressed itself in text underneath. Those comments could be excellent and they went nowhere, because a comment cannot be distributed on its own.
Attaching a video response gives the reaction its own life in the feed. It is ranked, shared and recommended exactly like an original post.
The consequence is that reacting became a viable creative position. A person with good timing and no production ability can build an audience purely on responses.
A joke can now be finished by a stranger
Traditional comedy is authored end to end. The setup and the punchline belong to the same person, and the audience receives a completed object.
Response formats split that apart. Someone posts a premise, sometimes unintentionally, and someone else supplies the resolution days later.
The finished joke exists only in the pairing, which means neither participant made it alone. This is genuinely new as a mass form, and it explains why so much online humour is unattributable.
Chains create escalation
Because a response can itself be responded to, formats grow into stacks. Each layer is visible inside the frame, so the history of the joke is carried with it.
Escalation is the natural direction, since a new entry has to justify its place. Later additions get stranger because the obvious responses were taken early.
Stacks eventually collapse under their own weight, when the frames become too small to read and the original premise is no longer visible. The format has a built-in ending.
The original poster loses control
Anyone can attach themselves to a video, including people mocking it. A post that finds an audience through hostile responses reaches enormous numbers while its author has no say in the framing.
Platforms offer settings that restrict who may respond, but restricting them also removes the mechanism that spreads the post. Creators face a direct trade between reach and control.
Most choose reach, which is why hostile stacks persist even where the tools to prevent them exist.
Why this format keeps being copied
Every major platform has adopted some version of it, because it solves a supply problem. A response format generates fresh material out of material the platform already has.
It also raises the value of anything that goes moderately well, since a single successful post spawns hundreds of derivatives. The platform captures the attention from all of them.
That multiplication effect, rather than any comic quality, is why the button exists everywhere and why it will not be removed.