Hacker News Reader

Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

Side-note: I watch quite a lot of Youtube videos in this space, and while I quite liked the presenter and the project, I've rarely watched a video with more 'fluff' padding out the content. There were multiple sections of music and irrelevant images that stretched out to 30-40 second each which did nothing but waste my time. At least they're easy to skip.

I get that not everyone wants a dense information-packed how-to video - and indeed, a lot of DIY creators (Colin Furze, for example) seem to have gradually trended away from this style over time. It may therefore be that trying to please the Youtube algorithm ('all hail the algorithm') can drive video producers in counter-intuitive directions, but I really hope that this is an outlier trying to boost their video length, and not the sign of yet more things to come.

View on HN

His about page ( https://www.thomasburns.net/about.html ) says that he worked for 20 years in the motion picture industry. There are some pretty cool pieces in his gallery page: https://www.thomasburns.net

So I'd hazard that he just likes making beautiful and entertaining videos in addition to making beautiful and entertaining devices.

It’s also a rather traditional format outside of YouTube. I didn’t fault him for it, it’s nice to see that kind of presentation sometimes instead of some presenter talking non stop for ten minutes.

"instead of some presenter talking non stop for ten minutes."

Nothing i love more in Youtube videos when the person showing their idea/what they made/ their guide etc opens with "anyway lets get into it"

The "fluff" is really stylish and I don't mind it. What is a pity is that there isn't more of a demo of the robot, operating. It's nice "technopunk", it doesn't have to be practical. He himself points out that the plain old Echo device does the job and the bot just adds personality. So using an actual CRT just as an oscilloscope display is just fine!

good god he built this, it's his channel so he can video it however he wants. i dont understand the point of this comment. why are you questioning the video length and supposedly intention behind it? just skip it or don't watch.

People like to complain, lol. It’s a travesty the grandparent is the top comment. Such entitlement.

The author also has a patreon for any interested

https://www.patreon.com/workshopnation

So let's complain about people that are complaining, that's much better. Surely noone can complain about that.

Why do you feel the need to complain about the people complaining about the people complaining? Just let them complain in peace!

Pretty sure Mark Robar has a rant about this that creators are pretty much forced (mathematically) to make longer videos if they want to be successful.

Wanting to be successful in a field that is driven by capricious technical whimsy and uncorrelated luck is generally a mistake. Do it for yourself, come what may.

Of course he has the right to do whatever he wants (as long as it is legal), but he shared it and even monetized it, so we also have the right to comment, including pointing out the parts we didn't like.

I think it is fair, although personal criticism (I liked this, disliked that). The questioning is also constructive. Just look at the replies. They are interesting, as you can see why people liked or didn't like the "fluff". It also suggests a simple, but not obvious answer to the questioning. Creators do this because people like it.

I know, right? God forbid we should share our opinions of things posted to an internet forum, on an internet forum. Whatever is the world coming to?

To answer your question less sarcastically, I watch quite a lot of 'technical' or project Youtube videos - e.g. Stuff Made Here, Superfast Matt, Colin Furze, Aging Wheels, Bad Obsession Motorsports, Matthias Wendel, Peter Sripol, Tom Stanton... and the video style in this case was such an outlier (even considering the trend I've seen in recent years across multiple channels) that it was mildly noteworthy. I can't remember the last time I skipped such large segments of a video from any of the producers I listed above (apart from sponsor segments, natch).

If it's the quirk of the individual producer, then of course it's his prerogative, no question. But if his goal is to grow his channel, such feedback may actually have value, given it might turn some viewers off.

That’s a great list. I enjoy Superfast Matt, and respect Matthias Wandel, the most out of those.

I can't speak for OP, but I did comment how it also made my feel a bit weird, I get suspicious given the amount of shills/plants large companies will create as 'spontaneous' social media success people. Its used to create a more authentic connection to a person who then shills the brand they've been planted by.

Prevalent or not, the ide gives off creepy vibes to me personally .

Sounds like you people just lack a solid attention span mixed with a little paranoia. There's absolutely nothing "creepy" about that video.

> Sounds like you people just lack a solid attention span

Sorry but that's really not it, I just don't watch a video on a topic I'm interested in for 30 seconds of city skyline views with some light music..

My attention span has nothing to do with it, my patience for wasting my time does however.

Edit : Just to reiterate, I liked the video, cool idea.. Just the balance seemed off to me. It's not worth an argument to be honest. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything.

No that's fair. I didn't mean to shit on your opinion. I just really enjoyed the slower pace and tbh I'm a little frustrated by how quickly internet people talk these days.

Yea.. like it’s a 20 min video total. it’s shorter then a average 30min tv show episode without commercials

Sure, but it's a 20 minute video, ˜40-50% of which is arguably unnecessary: it could have been a kick-ass 10 minute tightly-edited informative video. It's not about a short attention span - it's about the value of the time spent.

That’s your perspective- I hate tictok videos because they are just so ungodly short and compressed to the point of being in enjoyable - I don’t care how much information they convey. I enjoy longer form videos that indulge, it’s a better production and more enjoyable

Like your argument boils down to why watch planet earth when you could look at a few photos and read the wiki

It’s not just about conveying information here

Those tightly compressed videos are not "kick-ass" at all. They're high-pitched and annoying.

I also noticed it but it the end didn’t mind, as it’s clearly an entertainment video and not a how-to and the ‘fluff’ was pleasurable.

These were panoramas of Tbilisi, Georgia. I didn’t expect to see them either and thought that the author was somehow connected with Georgia.

He lives in Tbilisi, he talks about it in other videos

I completely get where you are coming from on this.

However, I do find it enjoyable when you allow yourself to get lost in, for instance, a great opera song accompanied with cool images.

There is beauty in letting go of this guilt for not being 100% productive all the time.

> I've rarely watched a video with more 'fluff' padding out the content. There were multiple sections of music and irrelevant images that stretched out to 30-40 second each which did nothing but waste my time. At least they're easy to skip.

I felt the same way but didn't want to comment as it felt a bit rude, I even want to see his profile because the amount of production 'fluff' seemed excessive for a relatively low 84k subscriber count.

A low amount of videos (14 right now) and ~80% of the video views on this one, it feels weird.

All in all, interesting video and at least he pointed out the elephant in the room about merging to some GPT model.

Well, to comment on the 80% thing, that's usually how these algorithms go. Someone makes video after video gaining some to little traction. And then they make their first video that scrapes above the margin, gets posted somewhere, gains traction and becomes vastly more popular than their other videos. What we're witnessing is this person's largest video yet, i mean it got posted here, and we're all discussing it.

As for the disproportionally produced nature of it, sometimes smaller creators who have money to spend will pay producers, editors, artists to help them on their video. These people have a portfolio that they advertise and they sell their services with some personality. Either this individual has experience video editing and has created all the fluff themselves for some reason, or the person has enough money to spend they dicided to hire a professional editor, who has made all these sections and spliced them into the video. Possibly the creator gave the editor a minimum length to produce and not enough real footage. Possible this exact thing happened but the creator and editor are the same person.

Youtube has changed a lot in the past 5 years. There a huge industry of video editors and artists who support the professionalization of even first time youtube creators, as the bar is raised ever higher and higher to be heard above the noise

I was going to suggest that this might have been to get the video over the 8 minute limit which triggers mid rolls adverts. But the video is almost 20 minutes long..

I really enjoyed the "fluff", especially when he first powered up the CRT and went into that montage.

He did this for fun and made a video about it. Based on his posting history it doesn't seem that he is playing anything just wanna make sure that his work gets visibility (thumbnail)

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. [...] Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

The trouble with such 'side notes' is they end up eating the thread and are effectively completely unrelated to the thing being presented.

YouTube is insufferable for me without youtube-dl/yt-dlp and watching with a proper player like mpv locally.

Skipping around without a bunch of buffering lag and ability to increase volume up to 300% in poorly recorded/mixed videos alone are game changers.

The signal:noise ratio of the content there is awful, it requires better tools than what they provide for obvious reasons.

I enjoy some of the fluffier tech content because I can usually trick my wife into watching them with me.

Just run SponsorBlock or similar then. If you still want to support creators, you can tune the plugin to only skip filler, or as I do, just prompt with a Skip button and I can choose to jump as needed.

It makes no difference to the creator when you use sponsorblock to skip sponsored segements, unless you intend to buy things they are affiliated with.

We don't talk about this enough but those kinds of techniques are just manipulation techniques, the same way movies and tv are designed to affect our senses and emotion (rising music, etc). They exist to short-circuit our logical minds and appeal to the emotional parts of our minds to create attachment and familiarity and sympathy with the content and creator. Which is fine if that's what you're asking for.

I dislike that you're being criticized. In a technical forum we should be demanding more efficient uses of our time and less manipulation and more facts-based presentation. I feel a little sorry for people who grew up in the youtube influencer age. These techniques are totally normalized for them and I don't think they realize how deeply manipulative your average popular youtuber is.

A lot of us just want a fact-sheet kind of thing that is neurodiverse and "busy technical person" friendly. The marketing-style media is really meant for executives and potential customers. I always shy away from those kind of presentations, find them hard to focus on, get impatient, and just google for a fact sheet, credible review, or technical reddit posting or other text-based info. And if there is video, it should be justified. Like a short clip illustrating something that is hard to explain or appreciate otherwise.

The other big bonus is how easily I can copy and paste these text items, make a bulleted list, etc to share with other busy people. "Hey Boss, check out this robot project, I think we can try that here," is going to be an easier sell with a page of text and some photos than "Hey Boss, here's a 40 minute video of a robot project."

I can't stress how badly the move from a text based internet to a video-based one has badly hurt people like me. I'm autistic with adhd and the constant demands to "hey just watch this video if you want to learn this technology," is just too much. I seek out text tutorials with screenshots or code snippets or whatever. I think we're becoming what happened to the boomers. That is to say the rise of TV, TV news, etc moved them way from books and newspapers that were far less centralized and had more potential for merit, variety, and lower barriers to entry. For someone like me, I could never be a slick youtube video producer, but I could write a good hack-a-day article. Why should the former have more merit? Why should we be applauding slick production techniques outside the ability of nearly all technical people?

I'm sorry if this rant is going odd places, but honestly, the mass videofication of all things has incredible downsides, but is incredibly profitable hence we're stuck with it, but we should be able to call it out if we are displeased with it.

I agree with you in general but you might have missed that this particular video is about an art project. The robot doesn't really have any practical purpose at all. The technical details are not the focus. The robot isn't that interesting from a purely technical side of things.

The video is really about the sense of nostalgia for a past where we had a more optimistic idea of a future. The emotional level is the point of the video.

So please call out the mass videofication of things but this is not an good example of it.

They’re also just techniques in art where the artist wants you to feel something specific rather than just dumping their creation on you without comment.

This is art, and entertainment. A guy made a cool project and he wanted to create an artistic and engaging video to show it off, not a fact sheet documenting how to reproduce his efforts.

If you don’t want to consume videos for entertainment, then don’t watch it.

Thanks; and I'm totally with you. Most informational topics (except perhaps obviously mechanical topics - e.g. changing an inner tube on a bike) are by far better dealt with in written/pictoral form. Funny you mention boomers - I remember my Dad, many years ago, complaining vociferously about how much TV documentaries were padded out with extraneous content versus those on radio. What goes around, etc. :)

---

Even more of a tangent, but regarding the march of videos on the internet, I have been surprised by how much I've enjoyed (and even derived value from) TikTok, which I would have expected be the worst of the worst. But thanks to its nature, it's both far more efficient at enabling discovery, and almost always far more concise, than Youtube. And oddly, TikTok has done a lot to drive off-internet pastimes, thanks to discovery of new books to read, recipes to shop for and cook, films to watch, exercise routines to try, etc. It's so weird so write this, but I find (my little slice of?) TikTok unbelievably wholesome.

Great comment! Totally agree here!

A lot of boomers didn't like the TV-ization of the world. For a long time Neil Postman's "Amusing ourselves to death," was a top rated academic commentary on how TV is ruining society by moving us more towards sensationalized news, easy manipulation, centralization, etc. Its sad to think that war is long over and TV has won. And now that same war has been lost on the internet with things like youtube.

I'd argue tik-tok is a new artform and not TV or youtube like at all, and works pretty well for what it does. It doesn't ever, at least for me, take the place of written materials or photo tutorials or technical articles, but youtube is doing its best to replace those items. Tik-tok is more a unique media that wants to create a new space in your life and badly constrained by its short video focus, but youtube trying to eat the internet by eating up traditional spaces like written media.

if you install SponsorBlock and enable "skip to Highlight", you'll see a button that skips you right to the 'meat' of the video

i use this to see if the rest of the fluff is worth it :)

> all hail the algorithm

Superfast Matt reference?

Yep :)

(For me, a wonderful example of a channel that almost perfectly balances information and entertainment. One of only ˜2-3 channels that make me want to drop what I'm doing, whenever I see a new video has been posted.)

Superfast matt also has a way of squeezing in a tiny joke in the last 0.5 seconds of a sentence.

All hail Matt, and his Matt's linkage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com