Hacker News Reader

Comment by medion | Hacker News Reader

Encourages people to make long rambling pages which don’t get to the point? Ever seen YouTube, it’s exactly the same. 10-11+ min videos saying almost nothing because it’s the most lucrative length. The internet of today is just everyone gaming everything for a dollar.

View on HN

In the case of Youtube, the video thumbnail itself is usually a strong enough signal as to whether it's worth watching.

Enormous swathes of the platform are filled with gossip channels (politics, crypto, stonks, celebrities, music) hosted by clout chasers desperate to be seen as authorities on that topic.

Of course there can be good content inside of these categories, but you can generally tell which channels are "optimized for engagement", i.e. run like a business, and those are more amateurish and perhaps more authentic.

At least Youtube has a timeline (with sometimes even chapters) that let you jump ahead. The thumbnails are also a good indication on what type of content you can expect from a video.

Web pages have a timeline in the form of a scroll bar on the right

Actually that's a cool idea, put a graph on the scroll bar which shows where most people spent their time, same as the Youtube widget.

Medium kinda does something like this by highlighting the most shared part. Alternatively, you can also use AI to summarize the text on web pages.

Most YouTube junk does not even have a proper meaningful description, just some buzzwords for SEO.

I sometimes search for specific keywords in the transcript of the video to directly jump to the point in very long videos. Otherwise i just click at the middle & judge.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com