Get The TLDR Of Any YouTube Video | Hacker News Reader

Get The TLDR Of Any YouTube Video

you-tldr.com

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I am a person who produces videos to publish on Youtube, and I want to add a different perspective to this.

Here is where we are currently at: - Everyone complains about the ads, so they install adblock. - Ads become worthless on Youtube for smaller creators, so they start taking sponsorships. - Everyone complains about the sponsors, they call creators shills and sponsorblock is gaining traction to block them. - Smaller creators shift to being dependent on direct support (Patreon, etc.)

Here is where we are going: - People complain a video is too long, so they extract the data directly avoiding youtube. - The creators don't get ads, don't get people to understand the effort put in and support directly, and don't get views. The videos just don't get watched.

A feedback loop is happening here where every possible method that allows making quality Youtube content sustainable is becoming impossible. The fact that anyone here is willing to pay for this service that will destroy the last shreds of this is extremely disheartening.

If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos.

That seems very reasonable to me. If I wanted to watch a long video, I wouldn’t use this service.

You are complaining that people don’t want what you are selling.

Yeah, I’m just not interested in 1 hour content with 10 minuite information density. I’m just not gonna watch 10 years long video even if it’s about how to bodyswap to Leonardo Dicaprio.

I wouldn't feel too disheartened just yet, if people wanted to read instead of watch videos then we all would've stuck with blogger, or even just go back to usenet. As you can see in the comments here, these services are a dime a dozen. Seems like everybody and their mother have made a youtube summarizer, its like the todo list app of the ChatGPT api.

> … if people wanted to read instead of watch videos …

Eh, I think it’s also “if creators wanted to write instead of shoot videos,” but it really is easier to just talk to the camera (with all the nuance of vocal and facial expressions) and put that online than to spend time deliberating on how to write is as a blog post.

It's also some degree of Google prioritizing videos in searches over written results.

I'd say that if people spend less time on YouTube, that's probably a good thing. I think people are just getting bored of social media/YouTube now that's it's lost its novelty. It feels super leveraged now, and hard to find the real substance. There is a return to long-form media like Podcasts, audiobooks, or books for this reason. Maybe people are also realizing there is only so much information they can absorb, and they'd rather absorb less, but of higher quality, than consume random videos.

A paid YouTube subscription, short quality videos, and a dislike button to combat clickbait sounds like the solution to most of those issues. A lot better than wasting millions of man hours to fulfill some ad quota. Granted, I understand that it's difficult but bundling it with YouTube Music seems to give it plenty of value.

Indeed, if you're not hung up on another music streaming service like Spotify and watch a lot of YouTubve (especially on mobile) then YouTube Premium is a pretty good offering.

Very sad.

I’m with you.

But you have to admit there’s quite a bit of fluff in so many videos just to extend the time and try to keep eyeballs long enough to mention the sponsor or show ads.

I am not representative of the wider YT audience, but when I want information, I’m not interested in the fluff. Get to the point. It’s as bad as those recipe sites we’ve all complained about. Most of the information I seek could have been a short 4-bullet text list.

Entertainment is different. But I must indeed be entertained. If you (not you specifically - creators in general) can’t begin to pull me in and promise a payoff (that you must deliver on), I’m moving on. Several YT channels that I subscribe can only be done via video. And I enjoy the content. I do get annoyed at the chosen timestamp for the inserted ads, but not enough to stop watching.

If you have good, succinct, informative content; or actually entertaining (as opposed to manufactured drama) content, use YT to pull me to your other content hosted elsewhere and I can contribute actual money.

The sad reality of the wider audience is that we’ve become accustomed to “free” with unavoidable ads (like broadcast TV.) Then when a technology comes along to avoid the obnoxious, irrelevant ads, we use it. This wider audience isn’t thinking about creators. If they think of anything besides their own gratification, it’s about screwing Big Corporate YouTube.

How do we solve that? I think it’s a symptom of a larger societal issue.

One thing, we were taught in my math degree that knowing how to explain something many different ways reflected deep understanding. Knowing how to explain something once reflected some base understanding. Two different ways is much better. Three, and you’re starting to see some real understanding. Works for how to solve problems and various things, too. Vanilla repetition works, too, of course. Oral communication involves a lot of repetition in person and is sometimes missed.

I’d suggest YTers consider avoiding fluff and looking into “repetition”. Many videos are just poor at communicating. Some will talk so fast I have to play them at 1/2 speed. Things like that.

Might be time for some YTers to reconnect with the basics of communication and presenting information. It’s not solely graphics that matter.

Edit-key facts like names/places/times etc are prime examples. It kills me when people say someone’s name then forever after use pronouns. It’s easy to forget or just gloss over significance with vagaries.

There's people who listen to podcasts and spoken books at least at 1,5 speed (or even 2 or more). Its a preference for sure. For me it depends on the content, the language, even what I am (also) doing. Sometimes when I found a part very interesting or didn't understood it I tend to relisten that excerpt or episode.

With regards to your example on repetition this is spot on. The value of repetition is taught at schools. However I suppose you, ianai, are aware as well how e.g. people on phone (e.g. marketeers) mention your name to catch your attention.

> when I want information, I’m not interested in the fluff. Get to the point.

A few months ago I started using AssemblyAI to read YouTube videos (by running speech recognition on them) instead of watching them.

Then I realized, there were usually only a few pieces of useful information in the video. So I'd copy-paste the transcript into ChatGPT and ask it what they are.

For longer videos it doesn't fit, so I made a tool to turn them into bullet points in 2 phases (summarize each chunk, then take that and summarize it).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35760598

Assembly charge $1/hour if you use the API (though their Playground is free) so I switched to just scraping the YouTube auto-captions. They're pretty bad but generally good enough input for a summary.

Genious move into outsource critical thinking, lol.

I use YouTube for entertainment and personalities. It puzzles me when people use YouTube for learning. I'm not saying that high-quality educational content doesn't exists on YouTube, but in my experience, it's rare to find a video that explains a concept better than a book or docs. Most videos tend to be padded with irrelevant information, which often leaves me feeling like I've wasted 15-20 minutes for minimal substance. However, once I started viewing YouTube as an entertainment platform rather than a learning resource, I stopped feeling frustrated about wasted time and began enjoying the content for what it is. For any real learning use books and other reference materials.

> It puzzles me when people use YouTube for learning. I'm not saying that high-quality educational content doesn't exists on YouTube, but in my experience, it's rare to find a video that explains a concept better than a book or docs.

Tell me you've never watched "DIY/home improvement/construction/car repair/any other repair YouTube" without telling me you've never watched "DIY/home improvement/construction/car repair/any other repair YouTube".

I shouldn't be snarky but the value of seeing someone fixing or making something on video far outweighs that gained by reading about it in a book or looking at static pictures. You can see more easily how everything fits together, how much force you have to put on a bolt to loosen it, or whatever. The information density of a well-made video on such a topic is far higher than you'd get from a book simply because you can see exactly what's happening.

I think your snark is understandable in this case. It’s a really solid life skill to be able to frame your own experience as not being the norm. It’s relatively easy to fall into the trap of thinking that how you use a tool is the only way folks should or do use it. Khan Academy is an easy example that shows YouTube can and has been used for education beyond entertainment.

> For any real learning use books and other reference materials.

Different people at different times and under different circumstances; and different teachers with different methods can all impact the best medium to engage with content or learn things.

I'm happy you've found what works for you. At the same time, I'll continue to consider YouTube a viable source of educational content when I find it the appropriate medium for such, which is often.

Honestly, the real loss to educational content has been the loss of dislike metrics, which can very effectively tell you if content is valuable or not in the education space. At least it's been partly replaced by a "users viewed here" histogram, which can be a true help.

> it's rare to find a video that explains a concept better than a book or docs.

Wow that’s not been my experience at all - with regard to anything science or math related, I’ve found YouTube a massive help over any other medium.

Software engineering, not as much with a few exceptions (algorithms, cryptography).

> leaves me feeling like I’ve wasted 15-20mins

This is how I feel about most books! I do hours of reading for something that could have been a few bullet points or a short video. Often finding the right book for your level is a challenge in itself

A book will probably explain a concept better than a YT video but the former will probably require many hours of reading and the latter just a couple minutes or an hour at most. Only "better" if time and effort aren't taken into account.

It depends. Imagine you want to learn how to tie your shoes for the first time in your life. Learning from a video would be much faster than from a textual guide.

Strong disagree. 3blue1brown has shed a new light and understanding on many mathematical concepts I already knew (and sometimes didn't) in ways that would have been impossible without video.

> But you have to admit there’s quite a bit of fluff in so many videos just to extend the time and try to keep eyeballs long enough to mention the sponsor or show ads.

Eh, none of the channels I follow do this. You the customer need to use pressure on creator, just unsubscribe to those fluff channels.

I don’t subscribe until someone has earned it. These fluff-filled videos are the top links from a Google/DDG search on a topic. It’s not as if the only ways to see these videos is to subscribe. When they can’t immediately begin answering the question I asked, the one they claim to answer it their video title, I move on.

The best feature (IMO, for me) would be one to blocklist these creators when that happens.

Ads are not the solution. I'm gladly paying for Nebula but in my opinion the quality of the videos in there is not great at all. Unless it's a discovery issue and I don't see the good ones.

As someone who subscribes to a whole host of youtubers big and small, I wholeheartedly agree with this. It really annoys me to see people act as if they are entitled to free content, especially from independent creators who depend on the revenue to fund making content.

I am amazed people block sponsors. That is pretty sad, as there is not much reason to, they usually flow as they were picked by the video creator, not just injected by Google.

Anyway watching a video, reading the transcript and reading the summary are wildly different things. Can you learn anything meaningful through summaries? Probably only when the information was sparse to begin with.

Sponsors are usually just the same 5 things repeated over and over across many different videos. It's interesting to see how people manage to fit it in the various different styles of videos, but it gets annoying really quickly if you watch more than a few videos with the same sponsors. I block sponsors to save precious time, which is especially important when I am trying to understand something. In the end, sponsors are no different from ads, they are just messages from corporations to get you to buy things you most likely don't need.

Oh absolutely this… I’m completely sick of hearing about Raid Shadow Legends, NordVPN, and I’ll be completely sick of the next companies that spam sponsorship money around this much in the future.

I already have a VPN and I’m not going to switch now I know they’ve managed to rebuff the cops once ( Go Mullvad ) and I’m no at all interested in any of the heavily promoted VPN companies that sponsor so so much YouTube content.

You can press the L key to skip ahead 10 seconds. On mobile, double tap the right side of the screen.

Quite regularly I see sponsored content that is targeted at people living in the US. If the product is even available in my country there's a huge shipping cost and exchange rate that makes it not worth purchasing even with a discount code. I try not to spend too much time watching YouTube every day so skipping sponsors for products I cannot buy is a good way to save time.

How many VPN sponsor segments will it take before you subscribe to one?

And now people start to understand why ad targeting developed...

Most sponsored segments are just ads. Often the video creators do something clever to introduce them, but that's about the only difference with YouTube ads.

Yes they are picked by the video creator, but unfortunately, the choice is often not that great to the viewer, sometimes worse than what YouTube gives you. I mean, what good is watching the same pitch for the same VPN providers over and over? Some sponsors are downright scammers, which saddens me when the video itself is of high quality.

Some do a better job than others. ElectroBOOM is one of the best, they are well introduced and presented, clearly marked and also well chosen. For example, he may be sponsored by the brand of oscilloscopes he is using for his demonstration.

There are also cases where the content itself is the result of a sponsorship, this is a different thing an not what I am talking about.

I heard one of the guests on a recent Lex Fridman podcast remark that a professor friend of his was involved in some research where they proved that, for any given thing, if you optimize it then things improve up to a point, but if you continue to optimize for that one thing endlessly then it always gets worse in the end.

Does anyone know what paper he's referring to??

I don’t know the paper, but this sounds like Goodhart’s Law - when you try to optimize a system by optimizing for a proxy for the outcome you want, the proxy measurement will stop being a good proxy because the system will be optimized around the proxy instead of whatever you actually wanted.

Hmm I think it was a more fundamental result than just an eponymous law. It sounded like they proved it mathematically applied to anything. Was hoping one of the HN crowd might know the actual research that was mentioned.

Here's another perspective.

I want information. The niche thing I want seems like it may only be in a YouTube video. It looks like it's a 10m video (to optimize for ads). I have zero plans to engage or continue watching the creator. I just want my info as quickly and "free." I might use this if it gave useful results.

The reality is that creating a 10 fluff video to answer one specific question is bloat. So I feel zero qualms optimizing my experience to mitigate it.

The other side of that are the creators I enjoy (James Hoffman is a good example). I watch his content for him, and thus I want to see him continue creating content.

The other info video I tl;dr'd? That's the sort of info I hope I can soon access directly via ChatGPT without needing a creator to create a 10m video around it.

There's a class of content creation that will simply get valued less as AI adoption grows. It happened with the written word, blogs, and newspapers. It happened with photography, it happened with video, and now video is continuing to be further disrupted as our ability to tailor it to our needs improves.

Why waste time complaining and fighting against the current when you can run with it? Find forms of content not likely to be used with this sort of thing, or that an AI generated video can easily replace (we're practically there already). Differentiate. Build your brand.

“Find forms of content not likely to be used with this sort of thing, or that an AI generated video can easily replace (we're practically there already). Differentiate. Build your brand.”

So written word and video are off the table. What alternative forms of content are worth pursuing in your mind?

Most of these dorks have no idea what they want, but boy can they talk about they think they want.

I enjoy your content quite a bit and I hope you continue to make it for a long time. But would it be so terrible if we didn't have professional YouTubers anymore? I think I would be happier with a smaller pool of content made by folks that didn't feel compelled to shill for advertisers in order to make a living.

The problem isn’t that people feel compelled to shill for advertisers the problem is that people need to make a living. The quality of their content has nothing to do whether they pursue it professionally or not.

I understand the argument from creators. Blocking ads and sponsors prevents them from doing what they love. But the argument from users is equally compelling, since advertisements prevent them from enjoying what they love. Everybody is acting rationally and I'm not sure I/we/society owes anyone the ability to make a living as a YouTube video producer. I would not be sad to see a return to amateur folks making and uploading stuff just for fun, in their spare time.

“But the argument from users is equally compelling, since advertisements prevent them from enjoying what they love. Everybody is acting rationally and I'm not sure I/we/society owes anyone the ability to make a living as a YouTube video producer.”

It’s rational for users to undercut the ability of the creators they like to make money and produce more content? Nobody is saying YouTube video producers deserve free money but if users continue consuming their content while blocking their ads/sponsorships/not supporting them on Patreon then they are the entitled ones, not the producers.

Ads suck, don’t get me wrong but blocking them on people you like is short term thinking and not fair to the producer.

> would not be sad to see a return to amateur folks making and uploading stuff just for fun, in their spare time.

This is where it gets complicated. I could shoot an entire video with my phone, but it would be harder to see some things with the limited camera options. I could make videos with less time spent on them, but they have less to offer and get fewer views. I spend significant amounts of time to produce the videos I make, and I see a direct correlation to videos with more time spent on them returning more back to me. So you are incentivized to do better, spend more time and resources on production.

I think some people want youtube to evoke the project blogger experience because it feels more personal. But video is just too hard and takes too much time and equipment to communicate effectively. And current social internet trends have killed the personal blog. So this is what we are left with.

Some counter points..

1. Do it open source. Upload raw footage and notes, let others edit add graphics etc.

2. Make less videos, there is clearly too much youtube content in general. Topic/points not raised or covered by you will be by someone one day

3. Optimise for 0 edit etc. Come up with a format that requires less editing etc.

4. Go for a commissioning model instead. Kickstart/gofundme or similar each video individually based on the idea. Or wait for whales to stump up for topics they want covered that you like

5. Make money from merch or paid appearances or personal messages. Merch doesnt need to be so corny. I would pay for "seasons" of youtube from creators i like. Especially if it was personally prepared (e.g. usb stick with hand written note in the mail). Encoded how you want and ready for upload into jellyfin or similar.

Making money out of IP/content is fraught with issues, imho anything not just made out of sheer desire for that thing to exist is a compromise that will hopefully be eventually replaced by something better that was made for the love.

To be clear if you are making a living from youtube or similar more power to you, the world is far from perfect and there are way worse things you could be doing.. but on the consumer end i feel i owe you nothing other than thanks and respect (which are heavuly waited to you not qasting my time).

Though I more often select 1.25 or 1.5 playback speed, I enjoy well made long form videos*. I don't think people who will use this TLDR service are your voluntary viewer. It will be used in job or homework context.

Were it could become dangerous for content creators is when people use it to auto create YT-shorts or TikToks and call it fair use.

* In order not to feel bad about AdBlock and SponsorBlock I got YT-Premium**. I'm a YT-member on two channels and pay nearly 50€ a month with Patreon (Funny enough including your channel.)

** I almost rage quitted YT-Premium because these wankers collect Euros from a UK bank! So 2% foreign exchange charge is added! But many creators say the payout from YT-Premium viewers is more than from ad viewers. That is the only reason I stay.

YT-Premium is the best answer to this problem so far being completely honest. Being a direct supporter is the most beneficial to the creator (and I do appreciate it!) but does have a poor value proposition to the supporter. YT-premium is, from my experience, something like 5X compared to standard ad revenue per view and gets the user a better viewing experience. It's almost perfect, except that the more popular premium is, the more it lowers the value of ads to the advertisers reducing the other revenue source. So far that doesn't seem to be a problem based the % of YT-Premium users I see on my end though.

And personally as a creator, if you pay for YT-Premium I would absolve you of blocking ads and sponsors to just enjoy the subject material you do actually pay for. I don't do sponsors because I rely so much on direct supporters that I feel like they shouldn't have to deal with that.

As an aside, and with the note it's more the fault of the creators for making slow paced videos (which I am also guilty of), playing back at higher speeds reduces the watch time that is actually the real time spent watching which in turn reduces ad revenue. The system is full of gotchas.

I agree to an extent but i think the relative proportions of people doing any workaround falls off exponentially as you go down that list. Probably lots and lots of people do ad block, because ads are horrible and long and disruptive and just suck. Significantly less people do sponsor block, for one, you can just click through it, there's no unskippable 3 minute sponsor in a youtube video, and the actual sponsors are significantly less adversly psychological, a real human you trust telling you something is wayb easier to listen to than the product of many committees focused on obviously manipulating your emotions.

And then for the video summaries, probably some people will do it. But i would literally never, it's crazy. I enjoy the videos because of their creativity, their visuals are usually important, the voice is soothing and interesting, and the nuances of the content are all crafted by a human with your interests in mind. To replace that with some auto closed caption summarizing gpt shit would be ridiculous. I strongly doubt that this will gain significant traction anywhere near where sponsorblock currently is. If someone would rather see a paragraph summary then they probably wouldn't watch much of the video anyway.

This strikes me as scared and somewhat defeatist. As media changes, audiences and what they demand changes. We don't listen to radio periodicals anymore because we have better ways to get that information across. I don't see anything other than maybe augmented reality that could possibly usurp the throne that video currently sits upon. Certainly not some llm generated summary crap

> This strikes me as scared and somewhat defeatist.

You make good points, but this stuck out the most to me. It's less scared, but somewhat defeatist. I make videos that are mostly entertainment (so less likely to be summarized) but are also technical for the subject matter. I can tell you from years of experience that my typical audience is dramatically more likely to use tools available to circumvent things. When I have a video that has broader appeal that gets significantly above average views I can see a nearly exponential increase in ad revenue as I tap into a group of viewers less likely to be using adblock.

So for some creators I can see an LLM summary crushing their ability to monetize by having their views eliminated. If people are searching for these things, there is market demand for them to exist. This is introducing a middle man that skims off the top of that market.

This would seem to be what might be variously called a Tragedy of the Commons [1], a Multi-Polar Trap [2] or similarly the Prisoner's Dilemma, but at scale [3].

Obviously in the original Tragedy of the Commons, farmers with sheep grazing the common land, the tragedy was that if you didn't try to graze as many sheep as possible, someone else would and so you'd lose out, but because everyone was doing that the commons died out and everyone lost out.

(Disclaimer Generalisation) but that would seem to be what's happening here, "everyone" trying to maximise their utility just eats the system and it becomes unsustainable (be that content viewers trying to get content for free, Youtube trying to maximise revenue via maximal advertising, advertisers producing shit ads that I hope nobody ever acts on but then how else does money enter the system?, content creators and AI coders trying to make the best living).

Though unlike the original Tragedy of the Commons where everyone suffered equally, there's an interesting irony that the (content creators) who produce the most value (without which nothing else exists) have the least (individual?) power in the relationship probably "die" out first.

You could equally point to a similar situation in the music industry or any industry for that matter that doesn't have a strong enough or fast enough feedback loop to detect that the system is eating itself, but also have some ability to act on it.

As DanielS points out in the video below it's a coordination problem. If enough individuals in any of the groups defect from maximising their utility the system is stable. Be that content providers providing free content, advertisers giving free money without making you watch adverts, content viewers paying for content so no advertising needed, AI coders not producing a mechanism that summarises videos so people don't watch the videos and hence the adverts so no-one gets paid, <Youtube something>). You can extend this to coordination outside the system, you could argue this is why governments exist to provide a meta-framework that makes it illegal to do something that undermines the system, e.g. by having laws that prevent watching content for free.

You could also coordinate this at the meta level, if everyone involved in the problem got together and made sure that everyone was being looked after or say the content creators got together and collectively refused to provide any free content...

But obviously in the current system none of this is really possible, the more things change the more they stay the same, this would seem to be the price of progress, the same problems arising over and over just at increasing scales (and stakes). Just see the problem of musicians now back to square one because of streaming...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcLXqwZJQw

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

EDIT: The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't the best example here as prisoner's escaping jail despite doing a crime does have a negative societal impact, just I'm not aware of a better example from Game Theory?

TODO: Find a better explanation of Multi-Polar Traps that doesn't refer to Israel or Russia...

It’s the whole internet as far as small payments go.

Nobody wants to pay, advertisers pay… we become the product and everyone is upset.

I wish there was a small transactions system where I could pay or tip quickly for a view and it is worthwhile for everyone.

Perhaps I simply want to know where I'm headed before I spend 20 minutes of my time. Not all videos do a good job explaining the plot in the first 30 seconds. With this I can get a TL;DR instead of skipping 1/3 through the video to see what it is actually about.

Also note, youtube is directing producers to make entertainment-only content and that stuff has very little to summarize. It's viral because it's entertaining, you wouldn't TL;DR it.

I think the "Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address" is a perfect example of a link someone sends me that I want to preview before I schedule my time watching it.

It looks like making videos became your profession, since you expect monetization of your video views.

And I, as a viewer, simply don't want... professional content.

I want to watch videos made by hobbyists for the sake of fun and to inform/debate/educate.

So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests.

So much this.

And also, in many fields there is lots of professional content that's been fully paid for before it hits YouTube - for example, professors make available to the public work that they've already been paid for, and they have no need at all to get paid twice.

> So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests.

By not watching the video you would be voting for your interests.

By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just "stealing" content and trying to excuse yourself for it by wishing it was something it isn't.

The videos aren't put out for free, they are put out with a contract with Youtube to advertise on it. Youtube pays to host and you split the ad revenue when the creator is paid. Your hypothetical successful "hobbiest for the sake of fun" would either not enter the partner program and let Youtube keep all of the ad revenue they will run anyway, or enter the partner program and disable monetization and abuse Youtube for content hosting without delivering anything back to them. Obviously, neither of these happens in practice and if the latter started becoming common the ability to do it would be taken away or other penalties like making the creator pay to host imposed.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch."

> By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just "stealing" content

Would you also argue that a TV viewer that goes to the bathroom or the refrigerator in the commercial breaks steals content? Everyone avoids ads if they know how to.

This example is comparing apples to oranges.

We’re already paying for cable, we just watch ads because because there’s only one or two cable companies in town and they both show ads. If we could pay more to show no ads we would but it’s not an option. Netflix was letting us live the dream before every content producer decided to build their own streaming competitor, crippling their catalogue.

If you’re donating to GP skip their ads.

You could argue that you're stealing their extra revenue though.

The "problem" (I'm in favor of skipping ads) is that a business has setup a way to make money based on some theoretical consumer model, and they would prefer if the consumer behaves like their model. However when consumers are easily able to control the product they will avoid anything that is unpleasant and only consume the thing that they actually want.

As long as you’re paying more than they’re making in ads per person I think it’s fine but there’s nothing saying you can’t consume ads as well. Ideally the producer sets the donation price and provides a way to disable ads if you’re donating.

Extra revenue can come from higher pledges and merch but isn’t guaranteed.

YouTube premium lets you avoid most ads without having to frequently go to the bathroom or install extra software.

sponsorship and unnecessarily long duration videos will remain same as earlier.

Is "installing extra software" a real cost?

True but Youtube UX sucks. I tried it but I prefer my yt-dlp + vlc + syncthing system which just happens to be free.

That is different from the intentional act of installing an adblock or the Youtube specific sponsor blocker. You must decide to do that, not happen to walk out of the room while it is on.

My problem is with the above post is the lack of moral accountability of the *blockers by acting like they are doing it for some superior reason when it is self serving.

I can also decide to walk out of the room, check my phone, ignore the ads, etc

The problem with this part of your argument is that it ignores free will, and conflates morals with ethics. Blocking ads is a moral imperative for me, because I decide which programming I watch. The self-serving reasoning and the superior logical reasoning are one and the same.

Ethically, it might also be wrong to do. But not for the reasons you describe here.

I'm less interested in the semantic differences between "morals" and "ethics", I like old computers, not philosophy.

If you are taking something out of a system while intentionally preventing contributing back to it, you know you are having a negative impact.

I would prefer someone either make their stand by boycotting something they disagree with entirely or admit that it has value and pay with time for ads or directly. But acting like you disagree with the material while still engaging with it and depriving the creator is immature and selfish.

Then find another platform that doesn't artificially incentivize longer videos filled with crap. And I'm not even talking about the advertising, which is easy to skip. I'm talking about the fact that videos don't get to the point, lowering the signal-to-noise ratio. It is a cultural abomination.

I stopped trusting Youtube as soon as they added the 10 minute rule for monetization. That was quite awhile ago. You didn't see this coming and now you're blaming the viewers that are tired of having their time wasted and faith in humanity eroded from this crap. Don't make it our problem, we've dealt with it enough already.

This is such a weird view of ad space. It's not some "drink verification can" nonsense, it's selling the space where prospective customers might see it. I'm not even involved in the transaction. People who dislike ads enough to install blockers aren't sealing any more than when I immediately pitch junk mail despite it being a major revenue source for the USPS. If the means by which ads are delivered drives everyone into using blockers and drives the value to zero that's an ad problem not a user problem. No one owes you valuable ad real estate, that is and will forever be a you problem.

The very idea of admonishing people for not subjecting themselves to time wasting corporate propaganda garbage is insane. How is this where we're at? People with billboard space are allowed to sell it to advertisers, but in no universe does that transaction mean that I or anyone else have to look at it. The fact that technology has allowed for ads that are harder to avoid compared to not looking at a sign in the window doesn't change the dynamic.

> If you are taking something out of a system while intentionally preventing contributing back to it, you know you are having a negative impact.

This is the same flawed argument against software piracy, but even more absurd. Just like piracy, this is a service problem.

Some people refuse to be forced into the transaction of selling their attention to consume advertising. Being psychologically manipulated is not worth it, and certainly not in exchange for some digital content.

If content creators understood this, they would seek out alternative business models to capture this demographic.

If they want 100% of their audience to pay for their content, they should go on a different platform and put up a paywall. You can't simultaneously want the exposure that "free" access gives you, while objecting when people choose to not participate in the business transaction you've forced upon them.

What advertising does is introduce a sleazy middleman that gets rich by tarnishing the end product and harming the consumer. Then the platform that hosts the content decides how much of this wealth gets trickled down to the actual creator, who is then annoyed when it's not enough, and blames the consumer for it.

How about eliminating the middleman and producing something people will choose to pay you for directly?

Yeah, but walking out of the room while the video is playing still gets them money from the sponsor. Skipping or blocking the ad does not.

Skipping an ad using SponsorBlock has no impact on how much money the creator already received to do the ad.

But by your logic, the viewer who let's the ads play but doesn't watch them is stealing from the advertiser. If no one watched the ads then the companies paying for them would stop paying and both YouTube and the creators no longer have income.

Why is ad-blocking stealing but leaving the room during ads not?

Because the ad is delivered in one, and not in the other.

You're comparing two unlike things. The equivalent to leaving the room during TV ads would be leaving the room during YouTube ads (or changing windows/apps).

I am talking about not watching YouTube ads. Not comparing TV to YouTubre. As I asked another poster, is there also an obligation to buy the advertised product? After all, if no one acts on the ads the advertising will eventually stop.

They are not the same thing. TV ads are meant to be played with or without being watched. Show producers get paid either way, but if people don't watch their shows be ready for them to be pulled off the air. That's why Nielsen numbers are important.

YT producers don't get paid if no ads are playing. Really, if you don't want to see ads, then don't watch the content. If you really want it then get YT Premium. Simple as that. I find it immoral that you watch the content with ad blocker and then try to justify that is within your right. Sorry.

I wasn't talking about TV ads, I was talking about YouTube ads. And I understand that the creators only.get paid if the ads play. My question was whether the poster believed that there was also a moral obligation to stay in the room and watch the ads, and where that chain of obligation ends.

But thanks for answering, you made it clear that you believe putting eyeballs on the ads that play is the only moral path, which is what I was asking.

Do you also believe that if you REALLY like the content you also purchase one of the advertised items? Because again, if no one acts on the ads then the advertising will eventually stop.

I, for one, used to actively choose to mute the TV and go to the bathroom during ads. It wasn’t happenstance.

And I fail to see how doing so somehow meant I was taking without putting back.

The tv channel got paid the same. Advertisers just priced that into whatever they paid for the ads. One could hope for them that they wouldn’t pay for those if they didn’t find it to be worth it.

The only point I’d agree with here, is that if nobody wants to pay for these things, one way or another, then we shouldn’t be surprised if they don’t exist for long.

But then, why should they, if nobody thinks they’re worth paying for?

Adblocking is a problem created, in big part, by YouTube. I used to watch YouTube on the IPad app and I would get 5-10 second ads at the beginning of the video every now and then. That was ok but, at some point, I started getting two or three videos that I could not skip and then I got a Colgate ad that would appear everytime on and on and then I started getting the Colgate ads in the middle of the video... It all just became too much so I tried signing up for YouTube plus (or whatever it's called) but it was not available in my country. You know where this is going.

First of all, no, this word stealing does not mean what you think it does. Because in World Wide Web, the client decides what they do and do not see; not the server. I get it, you hate the World Wide Web because it doesn't give you the authority of power to demand such, but... alas, this is the reality you must deal with. And besides, even those who adblock and sponsorblock are still valuable for YouTube. Why? Profiling.

> Your hypothetical successful "hobbiest for the sake of fun" would either not enter the partner program and let Youtube keep all of the ad revenue they will run anyway, or enter the partner program and disable monetization and abuse Youtube for content hosting without delivering anything back to them.

Well, that is only because YouTube stopped paying out the small fish. You know, the ones which got YouTube popular to begin with? No longer needed, cause network effect 101 applies and the psychopath executive who got paid hundreds of dollars per hour coming up with schemes to increase shareholder value figured that out at some point, probably via 'market research'.

Now, I watch (more often: listen while doing other stuff) some 'creators' (the word alone is cringe, like 'influencer' (marketeer) and 'crypto' ('cryptocurrency' or 'ponzi scheme')). Their content is a lot of fluff, they don't have much substance, and the content can easily be better summarized. If anything, they're leaching valuable time. But I do get it! Its 'entertainment'. That's what 'creators' are: 'entertainers'. And also, liars and manipulators. Take clickbait titles, for example.

And I am totally fine with entertainment moving to paywalls. These probably contain more substance and less fluff. As much as I hated to pay for say Windows (more to do with... Windows, and Microsoft) or say CDs and vinyl, it is a more honest model than the advertising industry or the subscription shenanigans. And paying for something, makes it feel more special, so it better have some valuable content.

Like and subscribe my post if you enjoyed it. Imagine people writing such on forums under every post. You'd easily see what an annoying mess it would become. That's the gist of YouTube these days, probably TikTok as well (with these dumb challenges which are outright dangerous, and the 'creators' are getting away with such behavior). Another example of advertising gone insane: Google TV. When my kids turn on the TV, they see the apps and yes it might be locked the content. But Google advertises on the home screen, including with content not viable for my children. Its the same when I open the app for the Dutch public broadcasting content (the stuff I pay for via tax, akin to BBC). I immediately get suggestions for content. Why? I know what I want to watch: NOTHING. I'm trying to get to my kids profile to watch one of the series they always watch at this time of the day, after dinner.

Advertising is the cancer of the internet. It even started that way (it was Sun or DEC spamming Usenet). And it can be done in a non-obtrusive way. Look at the advertising on this website, how it works. It never bothered me. Because it isn't all shit and evil, just a lot of it is.

>Like and subscribe my post if you enjoyed it. Imagine people writing such on forums under every post.

You mean like people do on Stack Overflow? "Please mark my answer as accepted if it helped you."

For the next benefit of the platform (next people to visit the question) and OP (learn how the site works)

Very different goals for the person saying like/subscribe or mark my answer accepted.

Equally annoying. I can think of that myself. You could have an interactive tutorial for every new user though, or more simple: a welcome message. However given its text its easier to skip than audio or video.

> By not watching the video you would be voting for your interests. By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just "stealing" content and trying to excuse yourself for it by wishing it was something it isn't.

I'm going to ignore the moralizing for the moment.

Either it works as a vote, or it doesn't.

Your initial post about needing to shift monetization strategies clearly describes it working as a vote. Right?

Some of professional videos contain some valuable bits that I am after. And I simply don't let anyone else decide for me what I should and shouldn't watch.

> you are just "stealing" content and trying to excuse yourself for it by wishing it was something it isn't.

> The videos aren't put out for free

I don't even try to excuse myself if you call it 'stealing', instead I'll just agree, since from your point of view - me watching your videos with adblockers enabled basically makes me a thief of your potential profits (which isn't a direct loss, but a somewhat comparable thing).

Thing is (which many people that upvoted my previous post would probably disagree with) - I am not nice at all:

I don't care about your profits.

I don't owe you anything.

You want money for your videos? You are free to sell them! Don't upload them into public!

Oh, but you did? Well, I might watch them for free now with all my adblockers (if, I wish so), because that's now for me to decide. I might rewind your videos if I get bored or annoyed by some parts.

And I don't care what you think about it.

I just wanted to explain my position that your choices affect you and my choices affect me: you can't command me and I can't command you.

You chose to become a professional youtuber - go you!

I chose to be a pirate - yarrr! I might watch your content for free!

p.s.: another thought that entertains me: as you might have not noticed - you didn't pay me for reading my comment. Does this make you a hypocrite? [That's a joke, re-read my comments for free as many times as you like, I'm a hobbyist poster!]

> I chose to be a pirate - yarrr! I might watch your content for free!

At least you are honest that you are stealing the content. And you don’t care what the creators think about it. Respected!

> You want money for your videos? You are free to sell them! Don't upload them into public!

Can anything that are public be taken away? Can I take your backpack if you leave it next to you in public? How do I know what your intention is if you don’t hold it?

> another thought that entertains me: as you might have not noticed - you didn't pay me for reading my comment.

I doubt you can comment on HN with an ad. Unless you do product placement, perhaps being a shill. Are you? (I’m only joking of course)

If you'd steal a copy of my backpack - I wouldn't mind at all.

If you put something online you have to accept it will eventually be public and free. At the end of the day moralism changes nothing.

Then again, either I'm in control of what I see and hear on my screen or I live in a totalitarian society. There's no middle ground here.

YouTube puts out the video files without ads without requirement payments before providing them. If you have a problem with that, don't host on youtube. Don't complain when people do things you don't like on their own computer.

> By not watching the video you would be voting for your interests.

I don't browse YouTube and only watch anything from there when it is either linked in a community I participate in or spammed in search results. I am not going to exclude myself from discussion or submit myself to psychological manipulation to take part in it. If you don't want people watching your shit for free then be hones about it and put a price tag on it. And for the second case I usually don't want a video in the first place but only one small bit of information which is where TFA comes in.

> By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just "stealing" content and trying to excuse yourself for it by wishing it was something it isn't.

Seethe harder. By engaging in advertising-based business models you are making the world a worse place.

Ideally they wouln't hose on YouTube at all but if they must (which they might for visibility) then choosing the second option is the morally right thing to do.

And in case you still don't get it, read this quote:

> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

> You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

> Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

> You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

– Banksy

It’d be a stronger vote if you just didn’t watch the professional videos.

If YT let me switch it off I would in a heartbeat.

YouTube don’t exactly make that easy

Why? Not seeing the ads is not seeing the ads.

Then don't watch professional content. But remember that a ton of the content on YouTube that might seem to be non-professional, or that started out non-professional, now is generated by a large group of people, because it requires a lot more work to produce good quality content than one hobbyist can devote to the cause.

Kurzgesagt started with a small group, but now numbers 64.

I'm not sure how many people are on the Answers with Joe team, but it's more than a few.

The first Crash Course video from 11 years ago lists 13 people in the credits.

So my guess is that there is much more "professional" content than might be obvious.

It's a self-reinforcing cycle, people don't want to support small channels with sloppy editing or rough audio, so eventually those small channels grow large enough that they can hire people to handle aspects they cannot. This quality difference and quantity output increase tends to be favorable to them and YouTube so they get recommended more. In turn viewers also expect this absurd quality and quantity output from not only that channel but all others. Then suddenly they're at 64 people.

I think people would be shocked to find out how many channels are ran by teams of people. It's exceptionally common for people to have an editor or two to manage their social accounts or edit for their YouTube/TikTok due to the demand to have daily/weekly content is so high.

> I think people would be shocked to find out how many channels are ran by teams of people.

Indeed! I was surprised recently when a video creator mentioned the cameraman and producer in the room with them - up to this point I had naively assumed a one-man show, maybe with a video editor.

I'm the other way now; if the channel is monetized and "making money" I assume they have at a bare minimum an editor/clipper; and likely more people onsite.

Even livestreamers/twitch people often have separate editors, they simply don't have the time to livestream AND edit (though there are more and more things that help with that, "edit as you go").

To use one of your examples, Kurzgesagt’s value is as much in the provided information as in the way it is provided.

Unlike many supposedly professional or amateurish YouTube videos that just artificially elongate their introduction by repeat the same three introductory sentences in fifty different ways before finally getting to the 20 words-long point.

> To use one of your examples, Kurzgesagt’s value is as much in the provided information as in the way it is provided.

Couldn't you say that about almost any information? But the goal is to communicate, and that depends as much on how (effectively) the information is presented as on how compelling the raw information is.

About almost any information? Yes and no. Value isn’t absolute. Value is in the eye of beholder.

But when a video is about one specific topic and people start posting timestamps along with it to tell viewers when to start watching, it means that specific content’s form is of no value to them, and many others.

> timestamps

People do that? Especially with Kurzgesagt, I can't remember a portion of their videos I've found to be valueless.

Yes, they do. But usually not for Kurzsegagt.

Kurzgesagt, here, is an example of professional content without much, if any, fluff.

Contrary to lots of content, professional or lot, which relies on artificially increasing it’s without adding any value. For these videos, people often share the timestamps at which the desired information can be found.

YouTube just inserts ads regardless.

My videos sometimes get ads but I get $0.00

Wish they didn't but whatever

> that started out non-professional, now is generated by a large group of people

And usually the quality goes down when that happens because now creating the videos is a business which needs consistent returns which means publishing on a schedule instead of when the creator actually has something worthwhile.

Who says a hobby should not be rewarded or paid?

Watching ads is a pretty ineficient way to reward hobby creators.

Then we can all get back to writing instead. Good.

I am old enough to remember youtube before monetization, like, comment, and subscribe. It was great. Better than it is now. If others remember the dawn of the Internet, it was a similar feel. People definitely did and still do make videos for free, and actually for free in the sense of the improvement of mankind, not "free" but they are still getting some benefit out of it. If you ask me, those videos are much better than the revenue optimized spam videos made by "content creators".

Wouldn't be sad to see the current ecosystem go. Yes, people would probably start watching more again if they didn't need to wade through ads and pseudo ads.

someone thought TV would kill radio because it has extra dimension but that never happen infact now we have other form of content that share same audio aspect getting more popular like podcasts, what I am trying to say there will always be audience for all kind of content, some people would like to read a summery of the video and there will always be people who want to watch the video instead

> someone thought TV would kill radio because it has extra dimension but that never happen

It mostly did in the US (still growing globally, mostly thanks to the developed world.) Oh, the US radio industry still exists its just experiencing a long decline in total and same-station revenues over time.

You can probably still find a company making buggy-whips, but that doesn’t mean that the automobile didn’t practically destroy the industry.

Good! YouTube and video in general sucks as a format for delivering general information. Finding out how to do things has become far more difficult since the idea of making money on videos has polluted all the content. It use to be very simple to find detailed tutorials with images and then many posts of relevant discussion on how to fix any part of a vehicle or many other tasks. The people doing them weren't doing it for money. When I could make my own or improve an existing tutorial I did so. Now everything is keyword spammed YouTube videos that are challenging to consume and rarely provided the needed granularity to actually complete a task. Then the most you can hope for in discussion is a bunch of unrelated or unreplied to comments.

Please bring on the death of micro-monetization.

> The people doing them weren't doing it for money

Not everyone but plenty were doing it for the money. Using ads on their blogs/sites/forums (heck even Stackoverflow ran on ads only for a long time until they brought in more sources of revenue). But with proliferation of ad blockers, they stopped producing textual content and shifted focus to videos. Now ad blockers have gotten smarter and block ads on video too. So it won't be long until even this format disappears as well. We need to find ways to help creators monetize their knowledge rather than stifling their sources of income to such an extent that they have no other means to earn from it. We did it to books too (piracy). Only music seems to not be affected that much due to streaming rights (though music industry went through a similar phase during Napster Era).

> Please bring on the death of micro-monetization.

What is the alternative?

> It use to be very simple to find detailed tutorials with images and then many posts of relevant discussion on how to fix any part of a vehicle ... The people doing them weren't doing it for money

Uh, pardon? This was and continues to be a very well-monetized industry for the major players, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilton_Company

This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35607574 Maybe videos just aren't the right format for some things

I feel for you, but I hate videos. In an ideal world, content creators would release both a video version and a text version of their content.

That’s why UBI is plain needed at this point. Same thing was happening in acedemics ages ago. I write an extensive paper about certain subject and then someone else makes huge loads of money from publishing books on that same subject with slighht twist just enough to evade copyright claim.

> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos.

I feel for you, but as someone who made online video content before monetization became a real thing - I'm not sure that's true. The issue is our culture forces people to focus on creating for money instead of creating for the simple pleasure itself.

No. Money is what enables ordinary people to produce creative output and feed themselves while not depending on others. We're living in the first time in human history where producing cultural output is now available to most people, rather than a privilege of a minority sponsored by patrons at a royal court or privileged heirs. This is because, not despite the fact, that culture is now a business.

Do you think culture being a business should be our end goal?

No, it's a means and not an end at all. The goal is to produce the best work you can do, but the fact that working people can turn it into a sustainable business greatly expands who can participate.

Someone with a Youtube channel with say 200k subscribers today can make about 2k-4k per month. At the inconvenience of a bunch of ads or sponsors people who could have never done creative work can do it full time now and actually be rewarded for their work.

> No. Money is what enables ordinary people to produce creative output and feed themselves while not depending on others.

Money is the embodiment of being dependent on others. You can't eat money. Money has no use except to exchange for something else.

> We're living in the first time in human history where producing cultural output is now available to most people, rather than a privilege of a minority sponsored by patrons at a royal court or privileged heirs.

There was some "high art" that wan't available to everyone but saying the majority of cultural output was. Sharing it was just not as efficient as it is today.

> This is because, not despite the fact, that culture is now a business.

No, it's because copying digital content costs nothing.

Also because farming has become efficient enough that we don't actually need everyone to work full time to survive. Not even close to. But we are still stuck in an economic model that is based on trading scarce resources.

I liked YouTube a lot better when 95% of the channels weren’t trying to make money.

If your video Can be condensed into 20 seconds, you’re just whopping up cream, soo better be funny and/or charismatic.

Otherwise you’re just wasting my time.

If the Sunday isn’t enough, congrats, people are fine watching your video, including placement/ads.

Even if you block them or have YouTube premium, placement will be seen, and should be paid for.

I never clicked on Athletic greens, nordvpn, but I know about them

Ironically, TikTok allows and encourages such incredibly short form content xD

Except that I wouldn’t be watching the video in the first place, but google has decide they want to promote videos when I am searching for webpages.

I’ll go further

Soon there will be no demand for human labor at all when it comes to online content. There will be a glut of content and for something custom, people will want to simply ask AI to generate what they want, at scale.

> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos.

Deal!

> every possible method that allows making quality Youtube content sustainable is becoming impossible

Is it impossible to stop the rambling so that people don't have to make comments like: "actual content matching the title starts at 0:47"?

Often, the rambling doesn't have anything to do with sponsors or ads. It's just a very long-winded introduction of the topic, or some video set-up that should have been cut out, or rambling about their channel and previous video (perhaps recapping some previous topic that is not pertinent to this video).

>Everyone complains about the ads, so they install adblock. - Ads become worthless on Youtube for smaller creators, so they start taking sponsorships.

What percentage of youtube watchers use adblock? I doubt it's more than 5. And for sponsorblock, I can't see it being more than 0.1%. Nowhere close to them being "worthless", pretty sure it's just creators wanting more revenue streams, because why not?

You had me until this:

> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos.

Nope! The correct sentence is:

If you stop watching videos, there will be no profit into making the videos.

The reason to make them still exists: sharing knowledge.

You have to ubderstand that all digital products are inherently repulsed by the market economy because of the 0 cost to reproduce. The history of the monetization problems of video, music, software and anything digital reflects the attempt to lure them back into the market. Up to one degree you can do it, but it is inevitable that in the long term you won't be able to make money out of digital products as easily as you do with classic "physical" ones.

A huge number of instructional videos would be far better-served in an illustrated post on Substack. For instance, there are a ton of Stable Diffusion instruction videos that feature essential code and other text-based information which is very hard to make usable with video content. In many cases I have had to download the video and export it raw in AviDemux in order to try and glean the text-based content from the source.

But Substack doesn't have the same sweet 'influencer' ecostructure, so many creators and posters would rather put a tute in the wrong medium and get the 'follower' benefit than suit the material to the medium.

I imagine there are orders of magnitude more:

  * Minecraft tutorial videos
  * "how to fix your _____ in your apartment"

videos than there are informational/educational/tutorial videos about Stable Diffusion.

Well, I wouldn't necessarily agree with the numbers. But I certainly would rather see a washer being changed in a YT video than explained in Substack, I grant you that.

Game tutorials are also almost always better in text + image form.

I did not know about this service. I just used it for bunch of videos i have in my "to watch list" which is basically pile of shame of material i never get to watch for reasons like questionable useful information density or in complexity of the topic. It helped me to select those i really want to watch and i watched them. Imho this is godsend for creators. Unless you are just click-baiting and luring into watching something that could be summed up into 2 sentences just to go over you list of sponsors.

It sounds like people don't like videos with ads, sponsors, plugs for patreon or overly long fluff. So those videos will no longer get made and instead other videos will. I'm sorry that your style of video seems to be becoming less popular for you personally, but it sounds like the future videos being made will be better for me.

If a TLDR is an adequate replacement for watching a video, then maybe that video shouldn’t exist in the first place.

On the other hand, TLDRs can be useful, and arguably the video description on YouTube should be exactly that.

Part that I dont understand, whenever new tech comes up why affected dont use it at their own advantage. Why don't creators don't use it to create their own (better) summarization (for example as a short video), and work with (new) aggregators?

Do you think that AI summarization is better than your own, of your own video? If there is a value in summarized version, create it and leverage it.

Just curious how you consume news? Do you pay any subscriptions to NYTimes, WSJ, or any regional or local news sites? Do you have ad blockers on when you browse?

Your perspective is valid and this will hurt creators but a bit of "market destruction" can be positive. TLDRs tools aren't silver bullets, they will make dark patterns less viable and creators that make short & informative content more attractive.

> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos.

I had a happy life pre-Youtube. I don't think the world will be a worse place if 99% of Youtube videos disappear because they are not viable to make.

people doing dumb shit, because they can instead of asking "why" ?

literally short-terminism.

next thing you know - all those educational videos on youtube gone. the only other content will be 3 minute garbage snippets on tik tok.

read books

I believe this tool can be useful to quickly go through very bad quality tutorial videos. If you really can't find the information in text form somewhere else.

I see no way to avoid this. There is simply too much content out there. I have created this summarizer for myself last week and my productivity went through the roof. My Youtube Watchlist shrank from 50 videos, some of them being in there for more than a year, to zero.

In all cases, the summary that I got was perfectly fine and satisfied my curiosity about the topic.

We have to learn how to deal with this new world. People want raw information, they don't want to look at a talking heads artificially spreading out that information into 30-60 minute videos when the actual facts can be summed up and consumed in 20 seconds.

If the creator delivers value to viewers - they will find a way to pay for it. If it is just a time filler to push down audience throat using recommendation algorithms - world will be a better place without it.

Good. I'm tired of commercialized content. Feel free to stop creating. There will be others left who do it without financial motive.

"Summarize Tech" is a similar tool: Get a summary of any long YouTube video, like a lecture, live event or a government meeting. Powered by ChatGPT. https://www.summarize.tech/ Pros: It can summarize larger videos for free. Cons: no chat, English only, no full transcript viewer, no settings, no transcript download.

How does that handle videos longer than the token limit?

Split to smaller chunks, summarize them. Then summarize summaries.

You might want to overlap the first pass of chunks, something could get lost at the chunk boundaries. Not any sort of expert on this sort of thing, it just seems like an obvious pitfall for the context length.

I really like this idea. It’s basically applying similar principles as are used in image based nets - i.e. sliding window convolutional kernels - to text.

I built summarize.tech

Yes it's a great idea and I have a version that is basically a convolution over the transcript. It works much better than the current version - it can automatically create cohesive chapters and summaries of those chapters - however, it consumes an order of magnitude more ChatGPT API calls making it uneconomical (for now!)

Can you please eli5 the difference of old and new?

Sure. The old one just splits the transcript into 5 minute chunks and summarizes those. The reason this sucks is because each 5 minute chunk could contain multiple topics, or the same topic could be repeated across multiple chunks.

This dumb technique is actually pretty useful for a lot of people though, and has the advantages of being super easy to parallelize and requiring only 1 pass through the data.

The more advanced technique does a pass through large chunks of the transcript to create lists of chapters in each chunk. Then it combines them to a single canonical chapter list with timestamps (it usually takes a few tries for the model to get it right). Then it does a second pass through the transcript, summarizing the content for each chapter.

The end result is a lot more useful, but is way slower and more expensive.

I'm inspired that this is a side project, given everything you run. Kudos.

Thanks for the kind words. I built it on a few cross-country plane rides and now I mostly just leave it alone. The infrastructure and tooling we have these days is so incredible.

This is the standard practice already

Summary worked flawlessly on my own video.

This is way better. Than the first one. It was able to process a YouTube live video with it.

This is awesome. It described my video better than I can do it myself.

Did very poorly at a popular Java programming video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFbBI85oTnY

It works very well. The premium subscription is very very expensive though.

Looking through the comments here is a list of similar tools people have written that do this:

- https://www.summarize.tech/

- https://kagi.com/summarizer

- https://youtubetranscript.com/

- https://youtube-summarizer.ashellunts.repl.co/

- https://github.com/fmeyer/tldw

I made a similar one, https://summatim.app/ , it's an extension that adds timestamp block near youtube videos, and allows you to jump to these sections.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it was deleted from producthunt, so I'm scared to post it here. :(

I use https://kagi.com/summarizer/index.html?url=&target_language=... which summarizes YouTube, articles, books, links...

"You can summarize many types of web content, including:

Text web pages, articles, and forum threads PDF documents PowerPoint documents (.pptx) Audio files (mp3/wav) YouTube URLs"...

It doesn't actually state video, do you know if it's summarizing the actual YouTube video, or the subtitles?

Whilst they may seem the same, I can see the former being able to be refined over time based on e.g. in scene visual context

It appears to summarize the subtitles alone. I asked it to summarize a video that didn’t have subtitles (silent film) and it refused.

Edit: I missed some of the context, comment above is re you-tldr, not kagi which I haven’t tried.

if it is based solely on subtitles it would seem that those with conversations between characters would get very confusing summaries.

I reached the daily limit on the first video I tried to summarize.

I would like to get a sum of "Linux Full Course 11 hours" but in 666 words.

me too.

Yeah. I tried two videos. The site demanded money because it was too long. Then I tried a shorter one, and the site demanded money because I'd reached my daily limit.

Is this for real?

Ok, someone has to mention it: TLDW would be more precise. ;)

I’m not sure. I tried one video and got:

Something went wrong! The video could be missing subtitles for the language you selected.

So it was TLDR in my case. Almost.

TLADW actually.. (A for the ad) - great service! Now please we need a bot that posts the summary under every youtube submission.

Chrome extension maybe?

I built a similar thing with the GPT-4 APIs a few weeks ago; thanks for the reminder that I must put it on GitHub at some point, as it's only about 30 lines of code.

I need this, but for Vimeo videos.

It should be doable. What I built only works for videos with transcripts, but I've been looking to improve it using OpenAI's Whisper for Speech-To-Text. I'm just lazy so I haven't gotten around to it (...which is why I spent an hour throwing together a 30-line script to summarize youtube videos for me)

For you or anyone else reading this I recently ran across this video documenting setting up and using whisper. It's probably a little overdetailed, but I found the github docs a little underdetailed so might be useful. Whisper is pretty powerful. One of the more useful open source ai tools available right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX-ET_-onYU

But as you implied in your comment, it should be possible to do it quite well with any video by transcripting with whisper and then sending the text to gpt or another LLM to summarize.

I'll check it out (or maybe let my script check it out first), thanks.

From what I remember the Whisper API docs weren't too bad, but I didn't try actually implementing anything, so you could be right that they're underdetailed.

I’m currently working on this with the caveat that I want to do the work locally. Using whisper but the summarization portion if this task is not straightforward given the limited context size of models.

Does anyone have any additional insight into this problem?

I’ve done something similar here https://github.com/mcdallas/summarize it feeds an audio file to whisper and then summarizes the transcript. You can easily wrap it with yt-dlp to download the audio portion of a video

I also did the same but its a web app, https://github.com/mkagenius/audioGPT (i also have it hosted but I am afraid if i post the link, it would eat through all my credits)

Maybe one for TikTok videos? Would be the scourge of influencers...

The GPT4 API is not generally available yet right? At least for the public?

You can apply for access, and you'll be added to a waiting list. I only have access to the GPT4 API with 8K context, not 32K.

it’s accessible via the beta. they gave me access after a day or two of waiting, but I don’t know if that’s typical or not

There's a waiting list. I applied on the first day and only just got access.

No :(. I applied several weeks ago and I still don't have access

Please do. Curious how you transform a YouTube video to text before sending to chatgpt?

Youtube offers transcripts / cc

https://github.com/musabgultekin/youtube-tldw/blob/main/main...

Yep, it’s pretty much that except using GPT-4 and a wider context.

Tried it and immediately says I'm out of quota? Probably got hugged to death by HN?

same here.

I've been using https://youtubetranscript.com and then having GPT4 summarize but admittedly it will miss some things and for example a marketing video you it might miss the one interesting thing that I'd want to hear in the summary.

Will give this and other things in the thread a shot!

I threw a Lex Fridman video at it.

Summary: "The transcript is a jumbled collection of unrelated phrases and sentences, with no clear message or insights."

I'm sold.

Shouldn't it be TLDW? (Too Long, Didn't Watch)

Yes, it should. Does it matter? No, it does not.

technically it's not summarizing the video. It's summarizing the transcript of the video. So if it's a silent video with no spoken words, it likely won't do anything. So it is tl;dr of the spoken words, as parsed by Youtube ML since most videos don't have provided transcripts, though some do.

When will we get GPT that can watch video and make sense of it?

There are already many models for describing images, and Midjourney has a "/describe" feature now which takes a photo and turns it back into a text prompt. Only a matter of time until we can do video.

I've been using Glarity to do this for free without leaving YouTube. Site: https://glarity.app Source: https://github.com/sparticleinc/chatgpt-google-summary-exten...

I have also built similar thing. https://github.com/ashellunts/youtube-summarizer

From time to time, it is useful for me.

https://youtube-summarizer.ashellunts.repl.co

I got an internal server error. Looks like your site was also hugged to death? Will try later.

It may be due to not supported url format.

You have a typo ("wihthout") in both prompts, which are both (apparently) handled correctly by OpenAI - too lazy to send a PR :)

I built something similar for my own usage, to get an overview of long lectures. I prefer bullet points to summaries, find it much easier to read (especially skim for useful info).

I have it as two command line tools right now: one to get the transcript[0], and one to convert a long text file into a bullet point summary (two passes) [1]:

The token math is approximate so it fails on foreign languages, but for English it works fine. (Use Tiktoken if you want it to be exact.)

[0] https://gist.github.com/avelican/4a161089b7391415a092833e7ac...

[1] https://gist.github.com/avelican/11f429d0bb62891439f144bd7c0...

This is the wavefront of a bunch of useful tools to come. I very rarely watch video (for many reasons but mainly because the value/unit time is so low, especially compared to reading) and never listen to podcasts. I get a lot of redundant articles in my various streams (RSS feeds mainly, but twitter, FB, HN, slack, even email and messages).

Would love to funnel all that into a huge summarizer that would pull out the interesting stuff, combine scraps from otherwise mostly overlapping articles, and, yes, even YouTube etc, so I could get the gist plus get to “the” original if desired. I expect to be able to do this very soon (and expect some of those channels to resist…which will simply finish driving me away.

https://videohighlight.com/ is another option, mostly focused on note taking.

There are no limits so at this stage.

Wow! I love everything about this! Great product, great pricing model. I tried it out on a video I had recently watched and can confirm it works well. Giving away free summaries without even requiring a login feels very generous whereas the videos I really want to pop in are longer than the free tier allows. But the pricing still seems more than fair.

Very cool product, excited to use it more. Have you considered adding browser extension functionality? A one click button on each youtube video might be nice.

I've built the same thing using chatGPT, it doesn't handle large content yet, but it's good enough to filter the majority of videos and help me decide if I should watch it or not.

some sample here

https://gist.github.com/fmeyer/87fce5279bb06e215828e7732fed7...

code: https://github.com/fmeyer/tldw

ps: don’t mind my crappy rust.

I’ve always wanted to talk to people who make these tools and whether they realize the harm they can cause. A lot of people complain about YouTube videos having lots of fluff, trying to meet certain length requirements, having sponsor spots. Of course they do. They are trying to make a living on something that is free so they can continue to make content. Everything that they do is an adaptation to the fact that people don’t want to pay for content at all.

There will always be super fans who will donate on patreon, buy merch, subscribe to YouTube memberships, do super chats etc. But even larger channels have a hard time doing that without constant calls to action. This is why reacting has gotten so popular. It takes a long time to shoot, edit and upload even a well produced 5minute YouTube video. Linus tech tips talks about how much easier it is to do that type of content in his video explaining why they were thinking of making a react channel. By reacting you get a constant stream of videos you can put out everyday that please the algorithm, and only take 1 take to do.

Other high value content like FreyaHolmer’s video on Splines, which is a high quality, hour long video, get hundreds of thousands of views, take over a year to make, but do very poorly in revenue, making valuable educational content on YouTube that is actually useful unsustainable withought all the other tactics mentioned above.

This is partly YouTube’s fault as people expect it to be free and I don’t think that will ever change. Which is a shame because I know Google would pull the plug if it stoped being profitable and the watch times plummeted, and the creators left. But if we kill YouTube we will have noone to blame but ourselves. I think Substack has a better model for creators, and there is an expectation that creators will monetize their Substack once it gets larger. Casey Muratori talks about this, and says it’s why he puts his educational content there instead of on YouTube for free.

Show HN: You-tldr-Summarize and Interact with YouTube Videos in your language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35280312 - March 2023 (2 comments)

Show HN: You-tldr – easy-to-read transcripts of Youtube videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26048946 - Feb 2021 (72 comments)

Do you ever sleep? :-)

> Daily Limit Reached

> You've reached the daily limit of summaries allowed.

On the first successful video (the first video I tried didn't have subtitles)

Same here, maybe they ran out of trial budget for a day considering it's been 3 hours since this is posted.

Hey there are still some of us small hobbyist youtubers out there who don't run a single ad or sponsor ever. We're just harder to find due to youtube's ever changing recommended algorithm. :D Also there's more content than just informational videos on youtube. Video games are a big chunk as well.

Really cool. I tried one of the primitive technology videos: https://youtu.be/JsObuHO1tMA

They are silent but have pretty good captions explaining what is going on. Seems like this site is also reading the captions.

I assume this works by letting AI (ChatGPT or alike) summarize based on subtitles/transcript?

Unfortunately the auto-generated subtitles for some languages (e.g. Japanese) on YouTube is pretty bad so I don't think it's gonna work well for these languages.

Looks useful.

Suggestion: as a non-paying user I don't immediately know what the chat tab does. You can find out under the pricing tab but it's not obvious where to find this information. Might be good to say what it does on the chat tab if you're not a paid user.

[Music]

you know the rules

[Music] gotta make you understand

[Music]

goodbye [Music] we've known each other for so long your heart's been

[Music] going aching

[Music]

never gonna say goodbye

[Music] never gonna make you gonna say cry

[Music]

So first I tried it on a video that was too long. It produced a transcript though. Which is something. But it was an easy test. I chose an episode of a television show that is uploaded to YouTube.

So I said, "fuck it", and chose a more difficult example. A video with no talking. It's just music and images. Some algodoo/Unity physics sandbox marble competition our son likes to watch.

It just gave up.

Then I was going to try another short video with talking, but apparently you only get one summary.

So, it seems like it's a way to generate transcripts of videos and have that summarized. Neat, but not exactly what's being advertised.

Hey, at least you got one. I tried one and it said my limit was reached.

> It produced a transcript though. Which is something.

You can get those directly in YouTube, so not really something.

It's a shame; it said throttled on the first and second video I tried.

For those that don't know how:

1. Watch a Youtube video which has subtitles

2. Click the "..." button below the video, then "Show Transcript"

So many people don't know about this, it's crazy.

If anyone wants to self-host these YouTube summary tools, made a video on exactly how to do that here https://youtu.be/dqtliRSLmQo

This tutorial video is way too long... If only there was a tool to summarize it into text using AI....

Funny enough, I also made a YouTube video explaining how to summarize YouTube videos, and used it on my own video!

YouTube: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WtMrp2hp94E

Blog post: https://www.jerpint.io/blog/yougptube/

The transcript is really bad for a podcast I tried, I'm almost certain that's OpenAIs whisper, which when I tested wasn't very accurate when people don't speak extremely clearly or over each other.

Is it the small or large model? Whisper is leagues beyond anything previously available, while being runnable on consumer grade hardware.

Do you have the source? Would like to try it through my tools

I wanted to make something like this, but I think youtube is going to send them a notice sooner or later, correct me if I am wrong, there is no official way to download a video from youtube https://stackoverflow.com/a/8081778

The site is super fast, wrt generating transcript and even the summary is super fast. I am very impressed with this.

If I want to generate a summary on bunch of text? do i have to use embeddings? anyone has done something similar?

Just made open source version of it (core): https://github.com/musabgultekin/youtube-tldw

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7057961...

Unlike past, Youtube inserts Ads anyways. I am not eligible for Ads program yet Youtube inserts Ads and I get nothing. At the end, it's the Google who emerges as a winner.

It's really restricted for free-tryout users. I'm not sure why it's so restricted though.

Seems like it might be helpful to offer a 1-5x try-out of videos up to 2 hours and then go down from there? I went straight for 1+ hour YT videos that came to mind, but was told to upgrade.

Ideally this experience could be smoothed out a bit, especially since the transcript is in some cases functionally unreadable and jarringly different from a summary.

“You've reached the daily limit of summaries allowed”

I was starting to build this! Great idea, all we need is a flawless talking head to read it to us before every video to see if we should watch it!

Tortoise TTS + SadTalker

Looks useful

There are creators that put out videos with potential but they're very bad at editing or just drag on and on about stuff.

As much as Shorts have, well, pushed for shorter videos, a lot of the longer videos need to get better at getting to the point. It doesn't have to be a short video, but think about the value you're adding by keeping something in the video instead of taking it out.

It said I reached the daily limit on the first video I entered and didn’t even give me a summary :(

same, not a great user experience, why would I pay money when you've already shown me you fail at doing the thing?

We let users build similar apps at https://trypromptly.com without writing code

When YouTube urls are used, we extract audio and transcribe it so users can either save as datasource or pass that content to other LLMs.

Ask YC (https://trypromptly.com/app/bd0a3f40-44a9-4789-b3d6-ec185134...) is an app built with content from YC startup library and some of them are YouTube videos

Excuse me sir, but why does your website have such God awful colors and contrast that I almost need therapy for my eyes after looking at it for 2 minutes?

Do feel free to hire me and have it fixed no problem. Message here if interested.

Seems like the summary is just random parts from the transcript thrown together randomly, at least for the five videos that I tested.

Appears to only work if the video has subtitles.

I made a version which works on any video, uses whisper to get the transcript. Might be time to whip it into a demo

Video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WtMrp2hp94E

Blog: https://www.jerpint.io/blog/yougptube/

Wanted to summarize "Stu pickles makes Pudding at 4AM in the morning" but I reached the daily limit. First video.

Ok then. shrug

didn't get to try - Daily Limit Reached

You've reached the daily limit of summaries allowed.

Please upgrade to Pro to continue using the service.

This looks like a paid service, do they have any way of sharing the revenue with the creators who made those videos?

When I made an icon to have a link to that website - the icon is face of some guy.

The miniicon seems to be setup wrong?

The tool is solid and delivers priceless value proposition for someone like me who learns by reading not by listening.

Bravo!

Would be a nice product to offer to media companies that have a lot of video content.

*Any youtube video that has closed captions

False advertising, it doesn’t work with just any one

summary. or synopsis

lets kill that already-anachronistic hipster acronym. ideally with fire

(LKTAAHA;IWF)

also: kids, get off my lawn

Where's the one that takes screenshots, I like that better

I wish there was pay for usage instead of a monthly sub.

Trying to summarize "Rick rolling"

Should be TL;DW

I watch videos , don't read them, you?

TLDW?

Why would I tldr max 30mins video, I tried tlrd'ing 2hrs video but not in the free tier.

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