Comment by V-2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by V-2 | Hacker News Reader

The drive for monetization certainly shows in the form of needlessly, absurdly long videos. I recently came across a "How to Make the Windows 11 Taskbar Completely Transparent" tutorial (I had a whim to do just that). The whole content boils down to "install such-and-such app". Length of the video? 5:50 :) (And the narrator calls it a "real quick video" by the way, so apparently that passes for being rather brief).

YT, or even videos in general, don't have a monopoly for that though. Eg. in my country some Sundays are shopping, some are not. Every now and then I need to google it out to find out if the shops are open next Sunday, and inevitably at the top of search results will sit a 4 screens long blog post starting with an 'immersive' story to the tune of "Imagine you wake up on Sunday morning, and your fridge is empty. That's a bummer, huh?", followed by paragraphs and paragraphs of such fluff with the only information any sane person could care about buried somewhere near the end : )

> 4 screens long blog post

Or blog posts that explain every little thing related to a topic before the information you searched for. In your case, for the article "Shops that are open on Sunday in 2022", <h2> titles would be:

"What is Sunday?"

"What is shopping?"

"Why you should prefer to shop on Sundays?"

"Is the distance to the shop important?"

"Remember to carry money"

etc...

There's a whole website seemingly built around this concept - WikiHow : )

It bursts at seams with brilliant "do not say!" type of tutorials - one my favorites is "How to Survive a Coup". Here's some of the advice given by the expert authors (who clearly must have survived a few coups back in the day):

"The most important thing to do during a coup is to stay out of range of gunfire [...] Stay tuned into social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to get regular updates on what is happening [...] If you have television, then you can also try watching your local news channel for updates [...] Leave the country or go to a safer region if the conflict continues"

So remember, try staying out of range of gunfire and don't forget to subscribe, everyone

There's a variety of youtube "creators" that I follow as I have the same interests or hobbies, okay, I'm an aviation nerd, and the videos from the same creators have over time morphed from ad-hoc, homemade, quicky explainers into very professional looking videos clearly put together by a team. And they are longer. And they are selling their merch. And they are all cross-promoting each other. And they are all advertising the same vpns.

And it's become so professional, so impersonal, that watching now feels much more like a chore

That's the problem. And it is said that internet has shortened our attention span - probably true. But the common wisdom is that it did so by being brief and to the point. But it's the opposite. Modern internet does that by drowning us in so much fluff (subscribe to our newsletter, or do you want to see our useless chatbot utterly fail to help you) that we've all developed our personal "skip intro" heuristics.

And we now have this knee-jerk reaction to aggressively cut through fluff even when there's actually no fluff.

Back in the day the list of shopping Sundays would be printed in my pocketbook calendar that I'd buy in early January. And it would be a simple list without all the "...shopping for goods is such an important part of life, you need to eat after all (sometimes too much, am I right!). But did you know that on some days..." BS. Because paper is an actual commodity, and no editor would publish a pocketbook calendar the size of a brick. Unlike paper though, kilobytes cost nothing, so there you go.

When channels start cross-promotions it usually foesn't take long for me to un-subscribe. Dead sure sign the main focus is switching to impressions and monetization. As are reaction videos, or worse reaction videos together with other youtube channels...

The 'SponsorBlock' browser plugin helps a lot to shorten these long videos by skipping sponsored sections, intros, promotions, credits, etc. 'uBlock Origin' also helps by removing the ads.

For avoiding channels that are effectively spam, 'Channel Blocker' is helpful by adding an 'x' button you can click to block videos from that channel from being displayed. Another one, 'BlockTube' is good too which lets you auto-block videos based on keywords in video titles.

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