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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

What I'd really like is a service that edits down YouTube videos by removing all the stock footage and talking head crap, then speeding up the audio to fit over the remaining novel information—whether that's new battlefield footage, electron micrographs, demonstrations of machining techniques, or just elephant toothpaste. The talking head filler seems like it would be easy to recognize, but stock footage recognition presumably would have a significant false negative rate, which is okay.

This would reduce some videos to just a transcription, which would be the ideal outcome, I think. The less of my limited time on Earth I waste watching some dumbshit reading a script at a camera, the better. Summarizing the transcript further like this site does might be occasionally useful, of course.

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I use SponsorBlock (be sure to enable all categories of blocking such as filler content, not just sponsors), DeArrow (de-clickbaits thumbnails and titles) and a video speed changer extension to enable much of your stated functionality, though of course not all. I've saved likely years of watching due to this combination.

How did your viewing experience change after using DeArrow? I'm curious because DeArrow has a great reputation, yet my gut feeling tells me that I should avoid watching clickbait videos altogether.

Then you'd be in luck as it makes me less likely to click on those videos. I only watch them if I'm truly interested in the topic as shown by the revised thumbnail and title, which makes my viewing quality much higher on average.

I love the DeArrow experience. The problem with clickbait on YouTube is that even good creators are compelled to use it because it works. Whether it's due to the algorithm or just human behaviour I don't know.

There's a little blue button next to the video titles to toggle it on and off and it's very interesting to compare the community title and thumbnail with the original. Good original titles are often left largely intact, maybe with some extra context. Betteridge law is no longer relevant. It's nice.

Tom Scott and LTT did research on this and you are absolutely correct. It just “works” for engagement. Even those who are already your top viewers.

DeArrow lets me make an informed decision on whether to watch a video or not. It's true that sometimes the clickbait will extend into the first few seconds of the video, but you can still stop watching then if you think it's not for you. Myself, I enjoy knowing what it's really going to be about.

I tried DeArrow for a bit but I found that for some channels it actually made things worse - I mean it removed the clickbait, but some clickbait gave me a better idea of what the video was actually about than DeArrow's boring titles.

Overall it didn't improve the experience really.

Just looking at their own marketing material, in some cases it's just making the titles longer and more boring without actually making them more descriptive.

If you avoid watching clickbait thumbnailed videos then you will miss out on a lot of good content. Perhaps you are fine with this but if the implication is that a clickbait thumbnail implies the video is not good, this is an indicator that, at this point has almost no correlation with the video quality. This is because content creators, pretty much have to use clickbait thumbnails to get views or traction, largely because of the way YouTube's "algorithm" works.

One of the best things in SponsorBlock is Highlight segments. If the video is 10 minutes of filler building up to a single interesting/exciting moment you can often see exactly on the timeline where to jump to.

That's also present in the regular YouTube video scrubber. Maybe less prominently?

I think that only shows up when a video hits a critical number of views so it knows where people watched and rewatched.

When you need 4 extensions (counting ublock as well) to make a site useable, maybe it is time to reconsider what site you spend your time on?

What a silly point of view. Instead what should they do? Post comments like this on HN?

They clearly enjoy watching and digesting information from YouTube- the biggest platform for this. But people need to make money from it hence the ailment these these plugins remedy

>Instead what should they do?

Read a book, touch grass, etc.

>They clearly enjoy watching and digesting information from YouTube- the biggest platform for this.

I'd probably enjoy heroin but I still choose not do take it because I know it's not good for me. What's your point?

> Read a book

I wanted to say something flippant, but dang with the halo on my shoulder urges me otherwise.

so here goes: books can also full of filler crap and useless and outright wrong material. just because it's a different medium doesn't make it any better for wasting time. in fact, a bad book can waste weeks of your life whereas a bad video on YouTube could waste about 10 minutes.

ultimately I approve of any tools that allow one to extract the information that they are after without paying the cost of giving more attention to somebody than they've earned.

Books at least go through a minimal amount of vetting before they are published, and there are meaningful differences between forms of media. As McLuhan wrote: "The medium is the message".

Lol, no they don't.

If you have a pdf with enough words in it, you can go from that to a published paperback on Amazon in 15 minutes.

Those aren't books. They're printed blogs you pay for.

Every book can be published as a pdf. That doesn't mean that every pdf is a book.

What a textbook (sorry, printed blog) example of a No True Scotsman.

> Those aren't books. They're printed blogs you pay for.

If you are going to make an outlandish claim like this, at least try to post some criteria to defend. Not doing so has led to you not realizing that you can't without also excluding works of classical literature like Sense & Sensibility (which was self-published by Jane Austin).

There's also more direct problems with the arbitary line you are trying to draw, like best-selling book The Martian, which was originally published as a blog, then self-published as an e-book, then officially published as a book by a major publisher.

No true Scottsman!

Actually its implication: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implication

1. Some blogs are better than most books.

2. Some carefully-written ebooks now are self-published, and I don't care if their cover design and promotion campaign aren't as professional.

Maybe in the 1900s. Not any more

so if they're good, they're books. if not, they're not _really_ books.

Being a different medium does in fact make it much better for wasting time. Skipping a paragraph in a book takes 100 milliseconds. Referring back to a previous paragraph to understand a seeming contradiction does too. Pausing a book requires no effort, and no effort to return to the place where you were. Books can be excerpted and quoted, not just in other books, but also in conversation or in videos, in a way that videos just can't. (Talking-head filler scripts can be quoted that way, but the video can only be quoted in video or still images.) Errata sheets, errata websites, and later editions of books can correct errors in earlier editions. Books are much smaller and therefore easier to archive than videos, making them less likely to get lost.

Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death is an extended and very persuasive reflection on precisely this difference in the tendencies of these two media, although particularly attuned to the form of video that was popular at the time, TV, which had commercials and didn't even have pause and rewind.

somehow I doubt that the person I was replying to would consider ebooks as a book.

videos can be viewed in double speed, and they can be rewound. they can be watched over and over if needed. they can describe/demonstrate information in ways that books can only project into 2 dimensions. a picture is worth a thousand words - well imagine 24 of those per second.

certainly with STEM subjects, nothing beats a good animation.

even for things like history/geography, I find animations and progressive disclosure to be much more engaging and easier to remember than dry words on a page.

“Touch grass”

This turn of phrase says everything to be honest.

>Read a book, touch grass, etc.

There's a ton of useful information that's only available in Youtube videos and not books such as DIY tutorials, repairs, etc.

Unfortunately, many helpful videos also include useless fluff. E.g. a "good" 10 minute video on how to disassemble a Samsung dryer to replace the heating element also has 2 extra minutes of "click my link to Nord VPN" and "please smash that Like button and subscribe". Therefore, tools using AI to remove the extra time-wasting fluff can help. There is no book in the public library or Amazon that will show the tricky steps to repair a Samsung dryer. It's Youtube videos uploaded by random people that has information like that.

My friend learned how to use her new Apple Watch by watching Youtube videos. Yes, there's official Apple documentation but it's hard to learn from a wall of text with static screen shots. In contrast, watching youtubers do live demonstrations with their fingers manipulating the screen accompanied by voiceover narration is easier to understand.

EDIT reply to: >When you've saved "years of watching" by using sponsorblock and 2x speed, that's not how you use YT. Sponsorblock saves 25% at most.

Your math is incomplete in your characterization of the gp you replied to because he also mentioned "DeArrow (de-clickbaits thumbnails and titles). That tool saves 100% of the watch time when the re-titled videos instantly informs him he can totally skip it.

When you've saved "years of watching" by using sponsorblock and 2x speed, that's not how you use YT. Sponsorblock saves 25% at most.

To be clear, I am not saying that youtube has no use, but the commenter I originally responded to is clearly in excess of whatever that reasonable level is.

How exactly does one "use YouTube," in your opinion then? You also forgot the effects of the other extensions than just SponsorBlock, even 2x speed (I watch at higher than that usually) saves 50% immediately. You presume I don't also do those things you listed, I now have more time to do them because of the time saved, not less.

You watch and enjoy the content that you like, find useful or otherwise enjoy instead of min-maxing your way to not supporting the platform or creators that are spending their time creating that content.

If the platform and creators are incentivized to waste my time, then why would I support that? I watch and enjoy the content even more knowing that I am not wasting my time.

This is where the snide touch grass comment above was awkwardly pointing. If you feel like you're wasting your time and can't be bothered to do so in a holistically responsible way (supporting the creators at the very least) then perhaps your time would be better spent doing something else.

i.e. you may be wasting your time already.

I probably shouldn't have wandered into a thread that's ostensibly about ripping off content creators to begin with. I'll take my moral high horse elsewhere lol.

Why would I care about responsibility when I waste my time, much less "holistic responsibility?" Sounds like your moral systems are different from others' in this thread.

I totally agree, you're absolutely right about that. have a good one.

They shared a list of plugins that might be useful to other people, so the comment has value. I recently found out about the "press to 2X speed" and I love it. Does that mean I should go touch grass because I use it in a non-stock way? Or are you the ultimate decider on the maximum limit of plugins or hacks?

It’s the seventh commandment, don’t you know?

7. Thou shalt not use more than two browser plugins.

I agree with you about there not being anything wrong with watching YT videos (no virtue signaling about "grass" here) but at the same time, couldn't you just watch the video on 1.5x - 2x? You can easily skip the VPN ad reads, I don't know, how valuable is your time, really, at the level of minutes? I know that there will be people on here that have autistic levels of min-max optimization of their entire lives like some kind of techno-vampires or something but if you're watching a couple dozen videos, plus or minus, a day is this really enough time to be worth a bunch of micro-optimization?

Ya we are sick and addicted.

Not only do I need the above 4, I need a separate browser because YouTube breaks with Firefox, private tabs to not taint my preferences when I watch one-ofs, and other addons such as a channel and video blocker.

Interesting, I'm using Firefox, what breaks with YouTube for you? I also like PocketTube for subscription management as I find that much better than trying to trawl through the mountains of BS on the homepage.

It’s two things on YouTube. Certain videos (seems to not occur for super popular videos) dont load. Just a white browser screen and black area for the video, but no video, suggested videos, or text at all. The second is searching. Certain terms that seem unremarkable and unrelated will leave out the channels I’m after. Eg. “Cop body cam videos” will only suggest videos from 1-3 channels, or “Hardcore WoW clips” won’t include the channel I’m after (the most obvious and largest for this search). Using Brave or Chrome produces the expected/desired behavior (but isn’t fixed with some other browsers or local YouTube clients).

There's an unsolved problem of some content only existing in youtube. Until that's solved, using 4 extensions is one of the best workarounds to making it usable.

YouTube has a speed changer built in. I'm curious what your extension would add.

SponsorBlock specifically blocks sponsor segments in YT videos.

Not the op but the extension I'm using adds 3 very mportant features :

* default to my preferred speed (2×)

* keyboard shortcuts to change speed on the fly as needed

* arbitrary speeds up to 4×

> keyboard shortcuts to change speed on the fly as needed

Speed up: >

Slow down: <

Undiscoverable, and not configurable.

with youtube enhancer (there's also an open source one i wanted to check out but haven't yet) f.e. one can add a speed icon in interface on which the scroll wheel works, allowing dynamic speed adjuistment which, accompanied with [cursor left] to jump back a bit and [number keys] to jump to 0-90% position is amazing for extracting info. Also, muting videos, turning on captions and rushing through them without the mindfsck is a soul saver often times. Our current attention economy with its commercialization incentives hopefully is just a toxic glitch in history..

Higher speeds than 2x. I usually watch at 3x and sometimes more (sometimes with captions turned on). Keyboard shortcuts as well, as others have mentioned.

the built in one has keyboard shortcuts too: < and >

There are more advanced keyboard shortcuts than just that when using an extension like YouTube Enhancer which includes the aforementioned higher speeds.

RIP the Ad Accelerator, which would up the speed upon detection of an ad. Youtube has found a way around it and it no longer works.

https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator

I don't watch YouTube but if I would / I would if I'd cut out anything with faces or speech & use an LLM to summarize what's technically relevant from the transcript in a way that fits length of what remains.

Pipeline such content, but use weighted random videos, with low weights for types of content with clickbait headings & perhaps blacklist for words like meme or lol in transcript to cut out things with stock footage. I am not sure of exact best way to remove it, actually, other than "using the transcript for some computational technique of probabilitistic stock footage prediction" which I bet would be most effective.

You described SponsorBlock, really a game changer. Also works on mobile!

how would you remove stock footage? B-roll has voice over it, it's kind of a necessity.

By "speeding up the audio to fit over the remaining novel information", as I said. "B-roll" doesn't necessarily imply worthless stock-footage filler; in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woj4vfMLpao or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdF_nzMW_i8 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eu_crbcBdNM, for example, the B-roll is the remaining novel information. The third of these also includes the kind of talking-head filler I'd like to remove.

Or ask the original creator if he can publish the script used.

If that's what you want then why would you want a service like this? Surely there would be a non-video news sources of electron micrographs or elephant toothpaste for which there would probably be hundreds or thousands of LLM TL;DR things.

I think you don't have a very clear idea of what I am talking about. You cannot present electron micrographs as text. You can present individual electron micrographs as still images, but not animation. Similarly, video of elephant toothpaste can only be presented as video, even if still images can be arresting. There is no sense in which a textual description of machining techniques or a Ukrainian battlefield is a substitute for video footage of them. In 5 seconds they can convey information that no amount of linguistic description can. Sometimes that information is even true.

What I hate is when I'm trying to find such irreplaceable information and instead my search results are full of vapid stock footage and hubristic talking heads overconfidently reading a script out loud as they gaze at a video camera. It's like AI slop without the creativity.

Cool.

What's stopping you from doing it?

Watching too many YouTube videos, probably.

Wow, I'm really surprised that my comment describing 95% of YouTubers as "some dumbshit" got voted up to +19. I guess I'm not the only old man shaking his fist at the surveillance capitalism incompetent confident shouty bullshitter cloud?

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