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Comment by TMEHpodcast | Hacker News Reader

It is a well-known fact that the moment YouTube goes down, the collective productivity of Earth increases by approximately 4,000%, which is immediately squandered by everyone going to Hacker News to read comments about YouTube being down. I myself have taken to podcasts… an ancient medium in which people simply talk at you for ninety minutes without a single sponsorship for a mobile game, and this is considered a failure

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Well one must also argue the opposite. I myself have gained immense knowledge from YouTube. I have learned things like phone screen replacements or phone battery replacements. I call myself a mechanic from the school of YouTube and have saved myself at minimum $10k in repairs doing the work myself. I have learned to make endless food recipes or create things like giant bubbles or slime for my kids. My point is that I bet sure for some YouTube is a massive time sink waste of time. But I also wonder how much it has improved the knowledge, skills and ability of others. My dad often mentions how had he had YouTube when he was younger how much it would have done for him. He talks about having to go to the library and if lucky there was a book that could show you the knowledge you were looking for. He says but now you can find not just the knowledge but for example specific knowledge like car make model and year and how exactly to do job xyz. Ultimately I just can not imagine life without the wealth of knowledge YouTube has given me.

Congratulations! You’ve successfully avoided YouTube Shorts.

Lol I laughed out loud reading this comment. When shorts first came out they annoyed me to no end. I searched for how to block them through settings or other ways to just make them go away.

But now days I can admit there are a few, very few, content creators who create shorts that are very informative and straight to the point that can cover a topic and give you many facts and let you decide if you want to seek more. Sometimes it is nice to have the 30 seconds Coles notes verses a video stretched out to 10 minutes to be eligible for monetization.

BUT, and this is a big but, the shorts and similar video platform trends scare me as a parent. I can see how my kids find a 1.5 hour movie boring but can scroll endlessly through shorts. It might seem harmless letting your kid just scroll on YouTube from my perspective is like an addiction and kids are getting that dopamine hit watching a clip and seconds later watching something else. I've learned that it is very important to be aware of what your kids are being accustomed to and push them in the right direction.

Personally, I just scroll through them. They break the feed into well defined "chapters" at the end of what I can decide to look into the next one or go somewhere else because there's nothing good there today.

Also there's this woman that makes very funny shorts about software development and good long videos that aren't as good. I look for her shorts too.

I just stay on my subscriptions page. Most of them don’t do Shorts, and the few that do don’t do many so they’re easy to ignore.

YT shorts are up to 3 minutes now.

At this point it is just YT Vertical Videos.

You can avoid the infinite scroll by taking the short video ID and inserting it into the regular player URL.

They've begun injecting obnoxious ads into the downloadable mp3s on a lot of podcasts I've found. Hyperlocal ads for tire shops and bakeries.

I don't want to buy tires, I want to learn about ______. The ads don't even make sense because they're irrelevant.

Welcome to radio 2.0.

Give it another 10-20 years and your 2 hour podcasts will be 30 minutes of morning zoo DJ banter, 10 minutes of guests, and 1.5 hours of ads.

We’ll have reached peak 90s all over again. With any luck we’ll avoid recreating the conditions for another Nickelback and can stay in the weird zone where Trip Hop and pop punk could chart at the same time.

And it will all be AI generated specifically for you live.

> 2 hour podcasts

You have high hopes. Next YT tool will be to split anything long in 30s reels as brains will be completely incapable of focusing for longer.

The 00's podcasts I listened to were often in 2-3 hour episodes, rarely well scripted (or scripted at all?), but a lot of fun and very amateurish. I re-listened to several entire series recently and the episode lengths were the only thing I think was worse than in newer podcasts.

On the other hand, if ads etc gets too annoying, I already have run all my downloaded podcasts through whisper to get transcripts with timestamps. Running some LLM to find ranges to delete would probably be quite easy. As a bonus I would be happy to also cut out all the filler repetitions that seem popular these days ("yes, X, I absolutely agree, [repeats everything X just said]"). Could probably cut 1 hour episodes to 20 minutes without losing any content.

VPN to Sweden to get the IP geolocated ads to retarget. The ads still exist but they're less obnoxious, and they're often in Swedish so you don't have to know what they're on about anyway.

Careful, I enjoyed this bonus (being in Japan and not being able to keep up with the ads)... so much so, that I started ignoring the Japanese. Including my wife. You can imagine how well that went.

And what are we Swedes supposed to do?

VPN to Greece!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_to_me#:~:text=Swedish

At least it is somewhat relevant. Hearing ads about Irish telecom operator ads at the other side of europe is pretty goofy. What's the actual point? Just worsening the podcast experience?

I listen to multi-hour unsponsored content on Youtube almost exclusively.

This comment sponsored by Vivo barefoot. I really do wear them myself. Honest.

I watched a movie, same late night talk show host, something like "welcome night owls".

I "loved" the style but I haven't found any actual radio on the internet of that style or a podcast. Not sure about name of movie but I do remember it being in the last 10-15 years.

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