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Comment by scambier | Hacker News Reader

I almost never watch videos, unless it's the necessary medium for the context (i.e. music teaching or movie analysis), because I _need_ text to learn.

But.

Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI

tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I genuinely felt robbed of my time.

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I learned recently that you can make tea from roasted buckwheat. I googled it, and found a seven minute video of a man making tea with his daughters. And I don't mean an artful exposition or something, just full-on Youtube "yo what's up welcome back to the channel so since last time we've been really loving BUCKWHEAT TEA here's how to make it don't forget to LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE" drivel around pouring water on buckwheat.

A weird thing I learned while working on my own YouTube channel is that saying "Like and subscribe" actually does work. As in, you get more likes and subscribers by saying it compared to not saying it. It's like people need to be reminded that they can or should click those buttons.

I could never bring myself to say it at the start of a YouTube video but I added it at the end and saw improvements in the analytics from videos that had the reminder versus not.

Do you get more people to do it by saying like and smash that subscribe button vs just saying like and subscribe?

I never experimented with it that much. My only test was asking people to like and subscribe versus not.

My intuition would be that you should use the phrasing that is authentic to your channel and voice. Most of my content was reading quotes from government reports, academic research, and news reports and then explaining what I thought about it in a calm monotone. (My vocal inspiration was Sam Harris). At the end of my videos I said "If you enjoyed this video please let me know by clicking the 'Like' button. If you'd like to see more content in a similar style, please subscribe." Which I felt represented the tone and pace of my videos.

On the other hand, if your channel is faster paced, more energetic, focused on being funny etc, then you probably should come up with a wacky or creative way to say "like and subscribe." I don't think anyone is going to subscribe just for how clever your saying is, but it will be more consistent with the tone of the channel. I think the main benefit of saying "Like and subscribe" is just to remind people to do that. Some people will be watching your video and enjoying it but just need an extra push to think "Oh yeah, I should subscribe, I do like these videos."

You should check out sponsor block

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/

Why are you not skipping the bullshit? I feed most of my youtube addiction through mpv and have configured several key combinations which allow me to quickly bisect the video. These videos are always full of comments like "why did I have to spend 20 minutes on this", while they never take more than 15 to 20 seconds from me.

By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser:

  $ mpv 'never gonna give you up'

It the best way to watch youtube by any measure that I can think of right now.

Can you elaborate on the key combinations thing? Is it just for jumping around in the video or is there more to it than that?

I don't know if it's what OP meant, but I'm imaging starting at the 50% mark, then jumping forward or back 25%, then jumping forward or back 12.5% etc, until you've zeroed in on the nugget of content in the sea of noise.

Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work better. Large jumps forward until you hit something interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.

An old memory just popped up > The Wadsworth Constant is the idea (and 2011 meme) that one can safely skip past the first 30 percent of any YouTube video without missing any important content. https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/the-wadsworth-const...

The funniest part of that meme is that YouTube implemented a (now obviously removed) "wadsworth" query parameter that skipped the first 30% of a video.

I also prefer text to videos, but there are many times when you need to churn through six lousy vids to get the one thing you need.

I use Movist Pro (Mac-only) for videos that work with youtube-dl. Once you set it up it's like magic. I can set keys for any speed or jump size I desire.

I have gotten pretty good at watching fast and jumping around to see if this vid is worth a look, or will cover the information I need. When I'm away from my computer and have to wade through vids on another machine it's like torture.

By the way, the modern internet is way better than the 1995- 2005 version. Everything you could want is there, you just have to learn how to get past the fluff and BS. I have fond memories of 1997 internet because for the first time I could access so much information from home, but I would never go back.

> Why are you not skipping the bullshit

Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting.

What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitched together, like and subscribe"

Is there enough of a market for extremely short YouTube videos so that people could make a living just making “It’s 2 videos stitched together”?

Honestly, my heart wants it to be true.

Short videos get killed by the YouTube algorithm since it’s difficult to show ads.

They do youtube shorts for 1 minute videos

Right! Exactly!

That’s why I’m curious if it’s possible for creators to make 1-2 sentence videos that are profitable enough for the platform those videos are on that they can pay the creators well.

I think that's where TikTok and other emerging video platforms might have an edge.

Imgur includes a fair bit of video with roughly a 60s cap.

Monetisation seems mostly to be based around branding / influencing.

Pretty soon the industry will be reduced to bunches of three preteen content creators in a trenchcoat.

Yeah, TikTok.

Hahaha, I knew this comment was coming. Fun fact: TikTok is experimenting with longer videos. I think they’re up to 3min already.

Eventually all these things converge on an identical feature set, I guess.

I never understood why. Look at Snapchat: when it was just 1:1 messages that disappeared people got that. People liked it, used it, tried to get their friends on it, and so-on.

Now it’s instagram, so why not just use instagram?

By moving away from their market differentiator they made themselves replaceable.

> out of a 8:30 minutes video

A friend of mine who has an youtube channel once explained to me that he had to add more content to one of his videos which otherwise would end up being too short, since there's a minimum length before youtube can monetize the video. IIRC, the minimum length was something like 8 minutes.

And here we have yet another example of the GooTube monopoly making the internet shittier.

Skip forward rapidly until something interesting is being said.

When it is, skip back a bit to find the start of that segment.

As with others, I make heavy use of mpv to (mostly listen to, occasionally actually watch) video, on YT and elsewhere. It's exceedingly good at pulling media references out of random URLs, though not bulletproof.

Earlier today I had to scan through the downloaded HTML to find, and fix, the audio URL for a This American Life episode covering Reality Winner. Then I rapidly scanned through the downloaded audio looking for the start of the segment I was interested in --- 37 minutes into a 1 hour programme.

Much as you don't have to read an entire book to find the chapter or passage of interest (I'm mostly referring to non-fiction here), you don't need to placidly sit through full audio or video sessions either.

You can, of course, also repeat sections of particular interest.

what are those proper youtube-dl config?

I recently learned pressing the number keys on youtube.com jumps to 0/10/20/...% of the runtime.

You’re missing something important: You have built the intuition necessary to pick up on pacing cues so that you can skip ahead and quickly get a sense of where they put the info.

Not everyone understands those cues, and of the ones that understand them not everyone can process them as quickly.

Always play at 1.5x and skip the first third. That's the secret. You can skim videos just like skimming text. It's a learned skill.

I've ramped it up to 2.0, and am annoyed I can't go to 2.5!

I wonder if after the current Tik-Tok/YouTube Shorts/other version of video settles down we’ll start to see videos that don’t need to be long utilize this format and that will get pushed into search results.

Linking that video you're playing their game, adding pointless rambling is a way to increase video length for more ads.

> they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium.

Do you have link to that video? It sounds more (read: at all) interesting than the one you linked.

Sure, here it is: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/380564412135768064/84...

Thanks!

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