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Comment by 5e92cb50239222b | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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

what are those proper youtube-dl config?

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.

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