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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Hook this up to a language model, and maybe a user could instantly get the one sentence worth of information that the YouTube video creator buries in 10 minutes of monetized noise.

And also save yourself time when the creator teases that they provide the info, but it turns out they don't, they're just trying to get views.

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YouTube created that problem by incentivizing longer videos. And now we have videos with tons of fluff.

Similarly Google incentivizes longer webpages, so now we have recipes that start with a novella about grandma’s cooking before showing the actual recipe.

It used to be nice to see a video’s thumbs up to thumbs down ratio to know if you’ve been click baited or not before watching the whole video. But that signal has been removed now too.

As a

recipe reader

I want to

dismiss cookies, have a video ad follow me down the page, and read why this cake conjures up memories of the author's childhood, before reaching the actual recipe

so that

I feel connected to the author, before fully committing to mixing ingredients

That "user story" is like a tragically misinterpreted comment by someone at a prospective customer, speaking of a special time with their grandmother, but garbled through N layers of field sales, marketing, product managers, engineering hierarchy, and Agile task management.

Including the part about declining more cookies offered (to save room for grandma's lasagna).

Tom Redman had this idea but he took feedback from Twitter. https://digg.com/2021/one-main-character-tom-redman-recipeas...

Are you sure Google prefers longer pages? I find (annoyingly) that Google likes the search version of my page for lots of things. E.g. a page called "best x of the y" the page for searching comments on that page called "best x of y search" where the only text is the title and a search input, will rank really well

Try to search for recepies :) I also see long novels which seem to disguise the ridiculous amount ads which google seems to like as well (these are mostly provided by no other than themselves!).

I blame it on automated advertising. When you had to work to get someone to pay you you made good content. Now anyone can get paid as long as they're digestible. It's created the interesting situation where the average quality of demonetized content is far high than monetized content.

That is definitely true. I actually try and make my videos as short as possible but I noticed that over time the longer ones are definitely prioritized by the algorithm, yet I get lots of comments saying how people appreciate my very short videos.

As a hack, I wonder if tacking 10 minutes of ambient video onto the end (after a "And now, 10 minutes of ambient video" warning) would help.

I am not so sure because YouTube keeps track of watch time. If no one watches past 2 minutes, then I think that would also be penalized, though I have no insight into the algorithm so I am not sure.

Do you know if YouTube measures wall time or percent of video watched? If percent, then a hack might be slow-mo the content and encourage audience ti watch at 2x speed.

I think it is percent of video watched, because if you check out the analytics in YouTube Studio, it says how many people are still watching by a certain point. So your hack makes sense, but I'm not sure it would work because it is VERY hard to keep anyone's attention on YouTube. The moment it's something even slightly less than interesting, the vast majority of people go onto the next video.

Nice. Worth trying.

Or maybe just repeat the same content a few times.

...or, just follow decent creators.

No snark intended, but i just gave up with the dross. And even some of them, of late, are getting a bit crafty. But, creators get one chance from me now - give me decent content, or even with the fancy chapters, you're not getting my eyeballs past two minutes. What I have found is that leaving the decent stuff on, what auto-plays after is 'generally' of similar quality. A quick set of back-buttoning and bookmarking has fairly often got me some interesting results.

Good idea, but I don't follow anyone on YouTube. I was thinking about searching the Web for a bit of info, the search hits include YouTube videos (but no finer resolution than "this entire video").

A search engine could, narrow in on the few sentences AV in the video that it thinks correspond to what I was searching for, and summarize that, and also link me to the AV start timepoint in case I also want to watch the video.

This might change the economics of some YouTube video content creation.

Google does exactly that, if a video shows up in the search results, it shows you only the relevant small part.

I've never seen this before now, but I just got a Google search result video page with a kind of table-of-contents index on one of the video hits just now. (These TOC entries don't correspond to the marked segments on the timeline. I don't know whether this is something YouTube is doing, or something the content creator did.)

Is this what you mean? (Pardon if I'm not familiar with the latest Google Search features; I've mostly been using DDG lately, so don't have occasion to see all the features that exhibit only occasionally.)

Sadly enough, I have the same issue with written content: BS websites add a ton of fluff to their texts as their deplorable approach to SEO and making some space for ads.

"Streaming your phone screen to a TV is something many people at some point want to do. But seeing the picture of your smartphone on a television or other device can be a daunting task. Here we list multiple ways how you can achieve the goal of sharing a mobile screen of an Android or an iOS device on a different device. It works for any manufacturer, like Samsung Smart TVs or Apple TV."

(goes on for another 15 paragrpahs before presenting a non-solution)

It's hard to put in words the amount of hate I feel for the authors of such pages. I'm desperately looking forward to the day Google comes up with better models for detecting useful content and those trash piles can burn in hell.

Or Google has sorted the results by how many advert placement sites you'll have been exposed to on that page before it's predicted you'll stop reading, so having the paydirt right at the end looks great, and it doesn't matter if it's fool's gold.

Sad thing is, the next generation of AI models is probably being trained on that type of content.

It sucks because time on page plus how much you scroll and once you find your answer you don’t click on any more results signals to Google that you were satisfied.

I’m just not convinced the preambles are needed.

I put something like this together to collect transcripts for uni videos. It’s dumps all transcripts into a directory, with URL links, so I can just search the whole directory to find the keyword I need.

Helped a lot with take home exams.

YouTube-dl had the ability to rip just subtitles. I once used this to grep for some information I wanted after downloading all of the transcripts.

I built an entire website based on that, there's a few other ones out there too.

I've had luck with pasting the transcript into ChatGPT and asking it for a seven-bullet list of main talking points.

Or hook it up with sponsorblock and remove all the non content time stamps

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