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Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed something similar on youtube.

I search for "how to do X", and instead of just showing me how to do it, which might take 30 seconds, they put a ton of fluff and filler in to the video to make it last 5 minutes.

Typical video goes something like:

0 - Ads, if you're not using an ad blocker

1 - Intro graphics/animation

2 - "Hi, I'm ___, and in this video I'm going to show you how to do X"

3 - "Before I get in to that, I want to tell you about my channel and all the great things I do."

4 - "Like and subscribe."

5 - "Now let's get in to it..."

6 - "What is X?"

7 - "What's the history of X?"

8 - "Why X is so great."

9 - finally... "How to do X"

Fortunately you can skip around, but it's still a bunch of useless fluff and garbage content to get to the maybe 30 seconds of useful information.

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What makes this worse is that there's an increasing trend for how-tos to be only available on video.

As someone who learns best by reading, I'm already at a disadvantage with video to begin with. To make it worse, instructional videos tend to omit a great deal of detail in the interest of time. Then when you add nonsense like you're pointing out, it makes the whole thing a frustrating and pointless activity.

The nonvideo content is still there but shitty search is prioritizing video. Obviously video ads pay better.

As someone who is Deaf, many of these videos are not accessible. They rely on shitty Google auto captions which aren't accurate at least 25% of the time.

Notice how Google frequently offers YouTube recommendations at the top of things like mobile results, or those little expandable text drop downs? My guess is it is because clicking that let's them serve a high intent video ad at a higher CPM than a search text ad.

It gets even better when you subscribe to YouTube Premium.

You get no random ad content which just cut into the feed at will, which makes for a somewhat better experience. But there's the inevitable "NordVPN will guarantee your privacy", "<some service here which has no ads and was made by content creators so you don't have to look at ads if you subscribe but hey all our content is on YT but with ads and here is an ad>" ad.

There is no escape. I actually pay for YT premium and it's SO much better than being interrupted by ads for probiotic yoghurt or whatever. I know there are a couple of plugins out there which I have not tried (I think nosponsors is one of them) but I really don't think there is any escape from this stuff.

uBlock Origin and Sponsor Block provide a better experience than YouTube Premium.

... on desktop. My kingdom for Youtube ad blocking on my TV.

SmartTubeNext, if it's an Android smart TV.

That is explicitly encouraged by YouTube, if your video is at least 8 minutes (I think) you're allowed to add more ads.

I've noticed that any video that is 10:XX minutes long almost always is useless

They're probably reaching some YT threshold to have more ads show on it

I can only tolerate modern YouTube at 1.5 or 2x playback speed. Principally because speaking slower to stretch video length has become endemic.

Same. I think it's a mix of that and this "presenter voice" everyone thinks they have to use. My ADHD brain doesn't focus on it well because it's too slow so it's useless to me but all my life I've been told when presenting I should speak slowly and articulately while the reality is that watching anyone speak that way drives me nuts

What's great about writing is that readers can go at their own pace. When speaking, you have to optimize for your audience and you probably lose more people by being too fast vs. the people you lose by talking too slow. I have to say I appreciate YouTubers that go a million miles an hour (hi EEVBlog). As a native speaker of English, I can keep up. But you have to realize, most people in the world are not native speakers of English.

(The converse is; whenever I turn on a Hololive stream I'd say that I pick up 20% of what they're saying. If they talked slower, I would probably watch more than every 3 months. But, they rightfully don't feel the need to optimize for non-native speakers of Japanese.)

> What's great about writing is that readers can go at their own pace.

100%, and you can skim it so that your pace subconsciously varies depending on how relevant or complex that section is.

This is why I hate the trend of EVERYTHING being made into a video. Simple things that mean I have to watch 4-5min of video and have my eardrums blasted by some dubstep intro so some small quiet voice can say "Hi guys, have you ever wanted to do _x_ or _y_ more easily?" before finally just giving me the nugget of information I came for.

I wish more stuff were available in just text + screenshots..

Some of those people seem to be speaking so slow that it is excruciating to listen to them. When I find someone who speaks at a normal speed and I have to slow the video down, they usually have more interesting things to say.

That said, tinkering before and after youtube has been two different worlds. I really like having video to learn hands-on activities. I just wrapped up some mods to a Rancilio Silvia, and I noticed my workflow was videos, how-to guides and blog posts, broader electrical information documentation, part specific manuals / schematics, and my own past knowledge. I felt very efficient having been through the process before, and knowing when to lean on which resource. But the videos are by far the best resource to orient myself when first jumping in to the project, and thus save me a lot of time.

I mean, people are bad at editing. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I've written a long letter instead." I don't think it's a conspiracy.

I definitely write super long things when I consciously make the decision to not spend much time on something. Meanwhile, I've been working on a blog post for the better part of 2 years because it's too long, but doesn't cover everything I want to discuss. If you want people to retain the content, you have to pare it down to the essentials! This is hard work.

It doesn't have to be a literal conspiracy. Why do you reject the possibility that people and organizations are reacting to very real and concrete financial incentives which clearly exist?

Certainly there are a lot of people that stretch their videos out to put in more ads, but not everyone with a long video is playing some metrics optimization game. They're just bad at editing.

I think the situation that people run into is something like "how do I install a faucet" and they are getting someone who does it for a living explaining it for the first time. Explaining it for the first time is what makes it tough to make a good video. Then there are other things like "top 10 AskReddit threads that I feel like stealing from this week" and those are too long because they are just trying to get as much ad revenue as possible. The original comment was about howtos specifically, and I think you are likely to run into a lot of one-off channels in those cases.

> I mean, people are bad at editing. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I've written a long letter instead." I don't think it's a conspiracy.

Making a long video isn't like writing a rambling letter. It takes work to make 10 minutes of talk out of a 1-minute subject. And mega-popular influencers do this, not just newbs who haven't learned how to edit properly yet.

"Tell me everything you know about Javascript in 1 minute." Figuring out what not to say is the hard part of that question. Rambling into the camera for an hour is easy.

But we're not talking about people taking 10 minutes to summarize a complex topic. We're talking about people taking 10 minutes to deliver 30 seconds of simple, well-delineated info.

This is something that happens a lot. I'll Google a narrow technical question that can be answered in three lines of text--there's literally nothing more of value to say about it--and all the top hits are 5+ minute videos. That doesn't happen by accident.

There's certainly a wide gamut of creators out there, and the handymen I've seen have videos like you mentioned. I imagine the complaints above are about the far more commercialized channels that do in fact model their videos after YT's algorithm.

Sponsorblock is great for cleaning this crap up. Besides skipping sponsor segments, I have it set to autoskip unpaid/self promotion, interaction reminders, intermissions/intros, endcards/credits, and filler tangent/jokes set to manual skip.

SponsorBlock is basically mandatory to watch YouTube now. I can’t even imagine what it would be like without Premium.

One thing I really wish sponsorblock would add is the ability to mask off some part of the screen with an option to mute. More and more channels are embedding on-screen ads, animations, and interaction "reminders" that are, at best, distracting.

uBlock Origin is my extension of choice for this. It makes it really easy to block those distractions, and there are quite a few pre-existing filters to choose from.

I think you missed what the poster is asking for. They want to block a portion of the video itself. For example when you watch the news on TV, there is constant scrolling text on the bottom of the screen with the latest headlines. They want to block stuff like that.

I believe you're right! I can't think of any extension that would be able to modify the picture of a stream itself in real-time. What came to my mind was the kind of 'picture-in-picture' video that some questionable news sites display as you scroll down an article, usually a distracting broadcast which is barely related to the news itself.

> More and more channels are embedding on-screen ads, animations, and interaction "reminders" that are, at best, distracting.

Do you have an example of a video that does this? Seems like an interesting problem to solve.

There’s a channel that explains how to pronounce words that is a particularly bad offender. They talk about the history of the word up front, but without ever actually saying the word. They only pronounce it in the last few seconds, right as the thumbnail overlay appears.

You forgot the sponsor stuff that's 20% of the video's length.

Yeah, I usually skip up to a half of a typical video until they get to the point, sometimes more. People feel like just getting down to business is somehow wrong, they need first to tell the story of their life and how they came to the decision of making this video and why I may want to watch it. Dude, I am already watching it, stop selling it and start doing it!

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