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Comment by ddmichael | Hacker News Reader

You asked about bots and spam but I want to talk about the content degradation. YT has been heavily commercialised and lots of people are trying to make a living out of it. Most videos are about keeping viewers for as much time possible watching your content. As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video with introductions, discussions about the weather and silly sales/crowd manipulation tricks. Content is key and I really don't have the time for such a time waster: I'm always skipping to the point or completely ignoring absurdly long videos.

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I looked up how to pronounce a word the other day and found a 30-second YouTube video. I expected it to be a looping track of someone saying the word over and over, but what I got instead was 25 seconds of someone describing the word's origin (without saying the word itself), and explaining how many people want to know how to pronounce it. Only as the thumbnail overlay popped up at the end of the video did they actually say the word.

This is one thing Google still does well.

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+pronounce+foxes

Reminded me of this YouTube channel that started to pop out in my recommendations called PronunciationManual [1].

Trolling the algorithm seems fun, but I've had a few undesired encounters when trying to search for recipes for example.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/c/PronunciationManual

It unfortunately doesn't seem to work with all words. https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+pronounce+schnitzel

This seems to work: https://www.google.com/search?q=schnitzel+etymology

Try Forvo:

"Forvo is the largest pronunciation reference online. Our goal is to compile native speaker pronunciations for all the words that exist in the world, including names."

https://forvo.com/faq/

The sad thing is, this is the same problem TV has had for a long time that YouTube was solving. TV programming will take 10 minutes of content and stretch it into 40 minutes of filler with 20 minutes of commercials. YouTube used to have a much better content to filler ratio in general. "It was said that you would destroy the TV producers, not join them."

What you experience as short videos turning into long ones was to me the addition of ads inside videos everywhere.

SponsorBlock has saved my enjoyment of YouTube and allowed me to subscribe to channels I never would have watched because of their constant self-promotion.

With an adblocker stopping the ads outside the video, and SponsorBlock to stop the ads inside, I enjoy YouTube like never before.

YouTube requires videos to be eight minutes or longer to include mid-roll ads. So everybody making money from YouTube ads has an incentive to extend their video lengths to at least eight minutes.

>As a result what would have been a 2-minute video becomes a 20-minute video

Or shouldn't have been a video at all.

Lots of people come up with some schtick they don't give a damn about because they see (or think they see) all these other people getting rich on YouTube and TikTok.

And recommendation engines are awful in general. It's a problem that even those genuinely trying to solve it really haven't.

Today's story[0] from the NYtimes sheds some light on the Youtube content industry. Basically these people are ruining it for the rest of us.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/technology/youtube-automa...

You are correct ... because if I'm only going to make a 2 minute video I would put it on TikTok or Instagram. Way easier to get likes (which is what I'm after if I'm not monetizing it), and way easier to make that content.

I think YouTube knows this which is why they are pushing shorts so hard.

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