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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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!).

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