https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?list=WL&index=1&themeRefresh=1&v=gIHi9yH6UB0
It’s a shame that nowadays a lot of potentially interesting subjects come mostly as crappy and time consuming video format. Did people unlearn how to read?
It’s so infuriating with DIY stuff and video game guides. There’s definitely a use for video in those contexts, but a lot of times I have one specific need. I don’t need to know how to completely disassemble my faucet, I just need to know how to get one handle off, and rather than search through a video and then rewind it fifty times I’d much rather have some words and pictures that I can scan through at my own speed.
I love having both, and hate how search engines tend to drown me in video recommendations in the general search to the point that the text versions are hard to find.
It would be great if there was a text results group like there are groups for videos and images.
Video allows them to show you ads. Especially if you’re using google. At least that’s the assumption.
Unless it’s one of those generic crappy ai articles, in which case it’s guaranteed to be on top
Interesting, i feel somewhat the opposite. i do camera repairs on film cameras, and having the exploded diagrams and manufacturers service guide is great, but a video of someone doing a full disassembly and reassembly is generally much more helpful in that context and allows me to scrub through the video to the parts i need for my repair.
For more complex devices, I agree videos can be better.
For simpler repairs, text and stills take me less time to understand than videos, especially with ones that pad a 2 minute video to 10 minutes so it can be monetized, with like 4 minutes of intro, 2 minutes of content stretched to 4, and 2 min of outro.
My largely uninformed opinion has always been that it’s about monetization: you don’t make the kind of money off ads on a blog that you can off a popular YouTube site. That, of course, is all Google’s decision. Presumably advertisers are willing to pay a lot more for video ad placement than for banner ads or something.
I hate YouTube so fucking much. The internet was once a useful place where you could find the instructions for anything you could dream. Now it is a wasteland of SEO laden video. Google is a bloated stinking corpse and its rot is befouling the whole internet. Being “evil” was a distraction, being useless is the bigger crime.
Hey thanks. This is neat and way better than the dumb pipe bot pushing links that never work anyway. Agree completely not everything needs to be a video. Hopefully this shoot themselves in the foot policy will promote more text-based reporting.
So many videos don’t even use the picture for anything useful. You can go for a walk and just listen to the audio part instead, and you won’t miss anything essential. Just leave the phone in your pocket while you walk to the train station or something. It’s really surprising how many videos work perfect well as background content like that.
Probably when other information vectors became ubiquitous. Though this kind of content is probably best consumed while doing something else when reading would be impractical since the graphics largely aren’t necessary for understanding the material.
Also it makes the creator more money than a digital article ever would.
A side note/observation: good videos also take significantly more time to create/edit, along with getting decent equipment, which means a much higher startup cost.
Yes, It’s so convenient to grep through a video for the bit you need.
Sometimes I prefer to read, sometimes I prefer to watch
I find running youtube at 2x speed makes it more tolerable.
This. Half of the videos I watch, I watch at 1.25x or faster.
On the creator end, probably because it is easier to monetize than text.
That’s the problem. Everything has to be monetized. Maybe I’m old and nostalgic, but I remember at the beginning of 2000s (and even before), “creators” were just people wanting to share their hobbies/opinions/passions/whatever. They had their own website (later, blogs), with, as most, contextual banners on them or donations links, whatever… Now it’s just unnecessarily long, time wasting videos full of ads or sponsored segments, clickbaity titles, ridiculous thumbnails on corporate services fulls of ads and tracking… For the life of me, I can’t understand people watching hours and hours of “content” everyday. There’s some kind of addiction going on.I can barely stand 2-3 videos per year, and only skipping to the relevant parts if they’re really interesting tutorials. On the contrary, I could spend literally hours jumping for link to link on, for instance, Wikipedia. Reading is much more convenient and less annoying…
Everything has to be monetized now because the Internet killed a lot of business models and content was heavily subsidized through other means.
We want to go back to the “free as in beer” Internet model, but the underlying economics of what allowed that to happen is gone.
Everything has to be monetized now
Well, too bad. I myself don’t use YT a lot (as in: almost never) and frankly I’ll avoid clicking on YT links, if written alternatives are available (and often even in they are). Maybe it’s just a generational thing (I’m oldish)
How many of your generation are on sites like Lemmy.
I think we are a naturally self selecting crowd here.
Very true.
Man, am I glad these video formats exist. When you have ADHD, reading is agony. Any information I need, I look up whether there’s a video about it. Reading is the last resort.
For me it’s the opposite, actually. I can focus much more easily while reading than watching a video.
I can read in 3 to 5 minutes the same amount of info that would take a really well written and edited video at least 30 to 45 mins to present. I sympathize with neurodivergents, but reading is a super power. Sure, videos and pictures are incredibly useful for particular things. And video is amazing for entertainment, or when it’s infotainment and you don’t actually need to learn or retain any of the content. But video could never hope to compete with the data transfer rates of well structure written word.
Same, but the exact opposite. [insert out-of-ass numbers here]
Some people like me just don’t want their face plastered to the screen all the time reading text. Videos take the least amount of focus on-screen to understand the message. If audio is what you want, you can just listen to it while you do other things.
Fast forward, rewind, position seeking thumbnails, speed conteol are a thing. Videos can play in the background on smartphones too.
I already code most of the day. I don’t want more stress to my eyes than I already put them through. I even use Text to Speech for text content to lessen the duration my eyes spend onscreen.
They don’t seem to understand how much effort I’m willing to put in to be unprofitable.
And the time we have to put in that effort. Seeing those messages want me to block them even more and if they block me, then it’s a challenge to unblock it.
Plus the dev-hours spent combating ad blockers are billable. My hours aren’t.
This implies our fine efforts to keep getting ad-free content keeps some YouTube techs employed.
I’m reminded of the egregious copyright defending efforts of Sony, Universal, etc. is not because they’re afraid of dancing babies, but because they outsourced IP policing and their subcontracting firms couldn’t care less about tact or discretion.
In contrast it is totally on brand for Disney and Nintendo to go after day-care murals.
For almost 25 years I’ve stayed at the cutting edge of high seas technology simply to not be a profit center. I’ve probably spent nearly as many hours staying ahead of the attempts to make sure I watch ads as actually having watched the ads themselves. I’ve dropped several social media platforms as soon as they started to enshittify, to the detriment of keeping in touch with friends and family.
But I regret nothing, not only have I been unprofitable, I’ve saved money by not having any subscriptions to cable TV or streaming services for a quarter century. I’ve donated as much as I’ve saved to projects that help me do that and creators that simply ask nicely for me to support their content instead of being conduits for these fucking vampires to suck people dry.
The only one profiting off of me is Western digital
I swore off WD with their SMR on NAS drives bullshit.
I swore off of Seagate after their 1tb drives kept dying
Yeah. It finally pushed me to look for alternatives like FreeTube and also I am going to pay content creators directly from now on. So thanks for the effort I guess ;)
Having so many ads I couldn’t even get to the content or comments was my final straw. I sideloaded uYou through Altstore and now have a great time without all the BS. No, Alphabet, your cesspit app full of ads isn’t going to make me subscribe to Premium. It’s done the opposite.
A pre-roll ad and a banner was obnoxious enough for me to start using ubo on desktop, on mobile I kept using the official app because newpipe is not a very nice user experience.
When they started to play two long pre-roll ads, one mid-roll ad for every couple of minutes of content, and a post-roll ad I switched to NewPipe and Libretube. I felt like the content-to-ad ratio was close to 1 recently. Way worse than it ever was on TV.
It’s insulting to its audience. Apparently that’s the new cool thing in marketing. I can’t wait to see this house of cards collapse completely. I honestly hope it takes half the industry with it. Too many greedy sycophants out there.
Insulting is right. When I just want to quickly look at a recipe, or how the one guy removes the crank pulley from his Miata I don’t want to have to watch 1 minute worth of ads just to see a still image or 10 seconds of the video. Fuck right off, YouTube!
I knew I liked you. A Miata RF is my mid life crisis dream car. Just want it to be EV powered with a manual stick.
Oh man, that car is so beautiful. And I love the rf mechanic, it just looks so sci-fi to me. Sadly I’m too tall to fit into one. Can just admire them from afar
It’s actually kind of ironic Because I wouldn’t have ad blockers if there wasn’t so many ads
Ya killed the golden chicken google
Yeah this isn’t a chicken or the egg debate. Ads became unbearable and people blocked them. They killed that chicken!
Oh, they certainly will. Once my adblocksr stops working, I’m never using it again.
I’ve already cut back a lot on my youtube usage even though I never see ads. (Thank you sooo much UBO!!) I used to visit nearly every day but now it’s down to maybe a few times a week tops, and even then it’s through invidius or freetube.
I’d really like to know what the level of input creators have over the ads that appear in their videos is. It feels like some videos are just whatever Google throws out there while some videos seem to have no ads and finally some seem to have very limited ads.
Is there some sort of dial that the creator has behind the scenes that determines how shitty the ads for their video are?
Ads on YouTube used to not be so bad, a 5 second ad that was so unintrusive that I’d just let it play, a 15 second with a 3 second skip, and it also didn’t feel like the same quantity of ads.
Before an ad would roll at the beginning of the video and I’d likely quickly skip it. If the video was fairly long there might be an extra ad in the middle. Sometimes the creator might also have an embedded ad, but I generally don’t mind those.
Now it’s a double 15 second ad at the beginning, only the first one is skippable. Then there is another double ad every 15 minutes, plus the embedded creator ad, and if you make it to the end of the video there is an end of video double ad before it auto plays to the start of the next video and next set of double ads.
Make the ads short and unintrusive or make them long, skippable, but rare. I hate having to constantly tab out to go click the skip button every few minutes.
When the YouTube ad blocker ban started I was on chrome with uBlock and it seemed to be refreshing the block even with uBlock. I thought to myself, “Hey let’s try it with the ads, I’ll whitelist YouTube and support the content creators.” After about 3 days I said fuck it, dropped Chrome and updated uBlock again; I haven’t seen an ad since.
On frequency, very little. They can demonetize a video, but that also pulls it out of the recommendation algorithm, so they will only be shown on the subscription tabs of people subscribed to you. No new eyes. I think you used to be able to pick how many mid rolls, but they then changed it to either mid-rolls on or off. Monetization forces a pre-video ad. No say on the number of ads for either. So YouTube can insert as many as they think they can get away with. There’s also stories of people who had their videos demonetized for no reason, or people who had mid-rolls off and YT decided to show them anyways, and people who had monetization off but YT decided to show ads and monetize the video, because they can do anything they want and there’s literally nothing anyone can do to influence them other than whine and threaten to leave the site.
As for the content, almost zero. It’s all an automated bidding algorithm. Ad buyers place bets on how much money they want to spend per month/week/day on their ads, and choose a set of tags of the kind of people they want the ad to be shown to. Then the creators can vet some tags for kinds of ads, it’s a black-list white-list system. But anything not explicitly forbidden by the channel owner is game. They’re also super nebulous and unhelpful labels, you can’t even remotely predict which ads will be shown before your channels. When it’s time to show an ad, the algorithm brings in all the factors together and runs a bidding to determine which ad will be shown and automatically charges ad costs and revenue share.
The cherry on top, you can buy other people’s videos as ads. As in you can pay to YT, to show either your own or someone’s else videos before other people videos. Whole 10+ minute videos! if you wanted to.
Weird, you’d think that Google would give them more options than that and allow them to tailor their ads to their audience. I guess this is how google puts forth the minimum effort for the maximum profit. Thanks for the insight.
This is just like someone famous asking for an unflattering picture of them to be deleted from the internet.
deleted by creator
