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I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with

I miss text. It seems now that whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things. A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".

cik 5y ago
As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.
- sneak 5y ago
  There are tools to download the automatic captions of youtube videos as text. I do this with a lot of videos.
  - driscoll42 5y ago
    That's useful, but ultimately you can't search captions in Google/DuckDuckGo if you're trying to find out if the video even has the info you're looking for. Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse
  - mcherm 5y ago
    Sounds useful. Which such tools do you recommend?
    - sneak 5y ago
      youtube-dl https://superuser.com/questions/927523/how-to-download-only-subtitles-of-videos-using-youtube-dl https://superuser.com/questions/927523/how-to-download-only-...
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I don’t understand. Has someone made it so you don’t have access to books anymore? The videos are additive.
  - Jolter 5y ago
    For some reason, search engines are now promoting video results over text results, at least for “how to” type searches.
api 5y ago
Even more annoying: it's now considered necessary to have a bunch of videos about any major new product or project. Video production is either very expensive, very time consuming, or both, so it's a new "tax" that you have to pay to look serious.
- sneak 5y ago
  Watching the videos at 2-2.5x helps a lot. YT supports 2x natively and there is an extension that lets you go even faster.
  - antifa 5y ago
    Sadly, YouTube doesn't offer speeds like 1.1x, 1.2x, I often find some YouTubers talking just slow enough to stress me out but too fast for 1.25x speed. It's worse when 2 people are having a conversation and one of them is 1.5x faster than the other, so any fix for the slow person would break the fast person.
jrootabega 5y ago
It's 8 minutes now.
pixl97 5y ago
Say "thank you Google" for this one. This is how they decided to monetize the internet.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  "They" is a bit unfair here. The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."
  - kwyjobojoe 5y ago
    Google changed YouTube monitisation so that videos had to be over a certain length to make money. Short to the point videos mean that the creator gets zip, so padding with unnecessary crap is the way to big bucks. So it's totally, 100% Google's fault that there is a majority of pointlessly long videos on YouTube
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    > "They" is []a bit[] unfair here. Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it arguably is exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude) unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  It's also opportunistic fact marketers.
grishka 5y ago
Regarding the word from the sponsor, I can't recommend the SponsorBlock extension enough.
scambier 5y ago
I almost never watch videos, unless it's the necessary medium for the context (i.e. music teaching or movie analysis), because I _need_ text to learn. But. Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I genuinely felt robbed of my time.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  Why are you not skipping the bullshit? I feed most of my youtube addiction through mpv and have configured several key combinations which allow me to quickly bisect the video. These videos are always full of comments like "why did I have to spend 20 minutes on this", while they never take more than 15 to 20 seconds from me. By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser: $ mpv 'never gonna give you up' It the best way to watch youtube by any measure that I can think of right now.
  - fuckwarmweather 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on the key combinations thing? Is it just for jumping around in the video or is there more to it than that?
    - flir 5y ago
      I don't know if it's what OP meant, but I'm imaging starting at the 50% mark, then jumping forward or back 25%, then jumping forward or back 12.5% etc, until you've zeroed in on the nugget of content in the sea of noise. Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work better. Large jumps forward until you hit something interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.
ftkftk 5y ago
I agree with this to some degree, I generally digest things better in text. At the same time video can be many times better at teaching skills. Mushroom foraging for example; I have read many books on the subject, but youtube has exponentially improved my skills to a level that just wasn't feasible to reach with books. Home improvement is another example. If you own an older home and come across the DIY jobs that the boomer generation pulled off - you start thanking FSM for how to videos...
mananaysiempre 5y ago
To be fair, the reference documentation for 90s GUI programs was also excessively tedious in how it documented every single element and never quite explained how to actually do what you wanted. As prose, it was rather lacking. Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.
- queuebert 5y ago
  Unix man pages are the pinnacle of documentation, and you'll never convince me otherwise.
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    No, not really. (This is the only way an informative answer to this comment can begin.) If you’re talking about original man pages from volume 1 of the Unix manual (as found on e.g. http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7 http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7), then yes, they indeed make superb reference documentation. However, even their authors recognized that reference documentation alone is not enough, and thus included a collection of (much less streamlined) papers on various parts of the system in volume 2 as a sort of extended introduction and rationale. Reading man pages, even ones as good as the v7 ones, when you want to achieve a specific goal but are not familiar with the system in general, is an absolutely miserable experience. (I imagine it was worse at the time, when OSes were much more diverse.) Man pages are not the be-all and end-all of documentation for the same reason that even the best-written JavaDoc/Doxygen/... reference without standalone prose isn’t. So, my first caveat is that reference ≠ (comprehensive) introduction, you need both. My second caveat is reference ≠ specification ≠ introduction, thus you actually need all three. When people started to create reimplementations of Unix utilities, it turned out that they were massively underspecified by the man pages. The precise specification is more or less what POSIX is, and it’s significantly less readable than the original man pages even if you also format it as man pages and take out all the extensions. It’s not that original Unix userland lacked specification documents, it’s that their role was served by the source code of the libraries and utilities themselves (for all the copyright problems that it eventually caused). The kernel too, presumably, but people famously thought that wasn’t enough, and thus Lions’s commentary was born. I mentioned above that the papers from volume 2 also served as a rationale and an annotated bibliography, which is also a good document to have, but probably not as essential as the previous three. I’m also not saying that they all be separate documents: Unix merged the introduction and rationale but separated both from the reference; except for the tutorial, Python manages to merge the introduction and reference for its standard library surprisingly well, but lacks a good specification; the TeXbook tries to be everything at once but is in my opinion not that good at any particular task. What I am saying is that they are all different facets that have to be present in the writing. My third and final caveat is... Not really a caveat for your statement, but still a problem if you’re a documentation writer: The concise style and general structure of the Unix man pages only works well as long as the individual pieces are simple enough and there is not a lot of them. You can’t write man pages for complex programs; or rather you can, but the format starts to show its limits, as aptly demonstrated by bash(1). It’s probably not a coincidence that Stallman wanted to replace the Spartan man page by the hyperlinked info node. You can say that one oughtn’t make things that are that complex, and I agree, but that’s not the point of view of the documentation writer.
sen 5y ago
Spam that right arrow on your keyboard to skip through and find the relevant part. I refuse to listen to all the filler drivel that’s designed purely to pad it out behind 10min for the increased algorithm love. Then we’re supposed to sit through sponsor ads when we already pay for YouTube premium. I’m all for patreon and supporting creators but it’s gotten ridiculous. Multiple “sponsor” sections in a single video and endless meta crap irrelevant to the actual video. Don’t forget to like this comment, subscribe, hit that bell, join our amazing discord community, follow is on Twitter for updates, comment below for a chance to win our giveaway… etc.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Sometimes a quick glance at the comments will have someone timestamping the useful parts. And - hey! If the only solution was in a video snap off a quick blog post! You can even link the video and maybe it’ll help someone in the future. Modern web has become less and less “write” and more “read” and that contributes to the downfall imo.
tomjen3 5y ago
That is really annoying with software. Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.
bjornjajayaja 5y ago
Honestly I think the downfall began with lack of no-script support. JavaScript is a great addition to add interactivity, but it is an obvious win for commercial interests. It would be nice if instead of websites being forced to display cookie banners, what if they were forced to support plain HTML/CSS only mode? Not only would it increase privacy and prevent things like Canvas fingerprinting (oh wait, that’s what commercial interests use), it would also put content first. JavaScript began as a way to add dynamism to HTML which CSS now can handle by itself. What we need is a web framework that provides good fallback modes. My challenge to folks: try to use HTML/CSS only to create interesting and dynamic websites which focus on content-first. And give that content good printer-friendly support :) And for monetization, sell a product on there of some kind. Provide something useful. Don’t hide behind a barrage of ads. There’s always another way!
joshspankit 5y ago
Some days I think about making a service that cuts to the chase. For example: Put in the URL for that vid (or share-sheet it to the app), and it instantly returns “Click on menu > Item, then select size”
- joshspankit 5y ago
  And sometimes when I’m really grumpy I think about just going around and manually doing it by adding comments.
egypturnash 5y ago
That’s where the money is. I fuckin’ hate it.
imiric 5y ago
Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere. It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.
- flyinghamster 5y ago
  > Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere. The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from StackOverflow and then reword it. > It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results. This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc. But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.
trey-jones 5y ago
Worse still, a lot of those videos are simply a content-creator (as opposed to an expert in the subject matter) teaching you how to do something that they learned how to do from another video (possibly by an expert).
- shiftpgdn 5y ago
  Trying to learn how to do household stuff on YouTube is full of comically bad or dangerous advice with millions of views. Thankfully this Old House has uploaded their back catalog and the comment sections of videos usually has rational insight from people claiming to be tradesmen.
emodendroket 5y ago
So you say, but a lot of times the videos are a Godsend. I will never go back to written recipes (at least for an unfamiliar dish), for instance — why struggle to figure out how much a “dash” is supposed to be or get confused over how exactly to do something when I can just watch it performed?
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Or text that is preceded by pages of phony life-stories.
code_duck 5y ago
My issue is that I don’t find it convenient to watch a video at all. For answering simple questions, there are many drawbacks to the format compared to text. I can usually extract necessary information from text in seconds. I might have to turn on a video and wait several minutes to hear the relevant information or spend minutes searching through it. Info in videos is not searchable by keywords or easily copy/pastable, and I may be in an environment where I don’t want to turn the sound up.
axiolite 5y ago
> whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things You can usually pull the transcript/subtitles, without watching the video.
novok 5y ago
That comes from changing economics. Youtube pays, blogs with ads do not

cik 5y ago

As someone who cannot process video, agreed this is genuinely insulting. To me, the majority of knowledge distillation is quickly becoming like cheap snacking - you get a bit, it leaves you wanting, but is ultimately bad for you.

sneak 5y ago
There are tools to download the automatic captions of youtube videos as text. I do this with a lot of videos.
- driscoll42 5y ago
  That's useful, but ultimately you can't search captions in Google/DuckDuckGo if you're trying to find out if the video even has the info you're looking for. Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse
- mcherm 5y ago
  Sounds useful. Which such tools do you recommend?
  - sneak 5y ago
    youtube-dl https://superuser.com/questions/927523/how-to-download-only-subtitles-of-videos-using-youtube-dl https://superuser.com/questions/927523/how-to-download-only-...
emodendroket 5y ago
I don’t understand. Has someone made it so you don’t have access to books anymore? The videos are additive.
- Jolter 5y ago
  For some reason, search engines are now promoting video results over text results, at least for “how to” type searches.

api 5y ago

Even more annoying: it's now considered necessary to have a bunch of videos about any major new product or project. Video production is either very expensive, very time consuming, or both, so it's a new "tax" that you have to pay to look serious.

sneak 5y ago
Watching the videos at 2-2.5x helps a lot. YT supports 2x natively and there is an extension that lets you go even faster.
- antifa 5y ago
  Sadly, YouTube doesn't offer speeds like 1.1x, 1.2x, I often find some YouTubers talking just slow enough to stress me out but too fast for 1.25x speed. It's worse when 2 people are having a conversation and one of them is 1.5x faster than the other, so any fix for the slow person would break the fast person.

jrootabega 5y ago

It's 8 minutes now.

pixl97 5y ago

Say "thank you Google" for this one. This is how they decided to monetize the internet.

ethbr0 5y ago
"They" is a bit unfair here. The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."
- kwyjobojoe 5y ago
  Google changed YouTube monitisation so that videos had to be over a certain length to make money. Short to the point videos mean that the creator gets zip, so padding with unnecessary crap is the way to big bucks. So it's totally, 100% Google's fault that there is a majority of pointlessly long videos on YouTube
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > "They" is []a bit[] unfair here. Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it arguably is exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude) unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.
dehrmann 5y ago
It's also opportunistic fact marketers.

grishka 5y ago

Regarding the word from the sponsor, I can't recommend the SponsorBlock extension enough.

scambier 5y ago

I almost never watch videos, unless it's the necessary medium for the context (i.e. music teaching or movie analysis), because I _need_ text to learn. But. Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I genuinely felt robbed of my time.

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
Why are you not skipping the bullshit? I feed most of my youtube addiction through mpv and have configured several key combinations which allow me to quickly bisect the video. These videos are always full of comments like "why did I have to spend 20 minutes on this", while they never take more than 15 to 20 seconds from me. By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser: $ mpv 'never gonna give you up' It the best way to watch youtube by any measure that I can think of right now.
- fuckwarmweather 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on the key combinations thing? Is it just for jumping around in the video or is there more to it than that?
  - flir 5y ago
    I don't know if it's what OP meant, but I'm imaging starting at the 50% mark, then jumping forward or back 25%, then jumping forward or back 12.5% etc, until you've zeroed in on the nugget of content in the sea of noise. Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work better. Large jumps forward until you hit something interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.

ftkftk 5y ago

I agree with this to some degree, I generally digest things better in text. At the same time video can be many times better at teaching skills. Mushroom foraging for example; I have read many books on the subject, but youtube has exponentially improved my skills to a level that just wasn't feasible to reach with books. Home improvement is another example. If you own an older home and come across the DIY jobs that the boomer generation pulled off - you start thanking FSM for how to videos...

mananaysiempre 5y ago

To be fair, the reference documentation for 90s GUI programs was also excessively tedious in how it documented every single element and never quite explained how to actually do what you wanted. As prose, it was rather lacking. Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.

queuebert 5y ago
Unix man pages are the pinnacle of documentation, and you'll never convince me otherwise.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  No, not really. (This is the only way an informative answer to this comment can begin.) If you’re talking about original man pages from volume 1 of the Unix manual (as found on e.g. http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7 http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7), then yes, they indeed make superb reference documentation. However, even their authors recognized that reference documentation alone is not enough, and thus included a collection of (much less streamlined) papers on various parts of the system in volume 2 as a sort of extended introduction and rationale. Reading man pages, even ones as good as the v7 ones, when you want to achieve a specific goal but are not familiar with the system in general, is an absolutely miserable experience. (I imagine it was worse at the time, when OSes were much more diverse.) Man pages are not the be-all and end-all of documentation for the same reason that even the best-written JavaDoc/Doxygen/... reference without standalone prose isn’t. So, my first caveat is that reference ≠ (comprehensive) introduction, you need both. My second caveat is reference ≠ specification ≠ introduction, thus you actually need all three. When people started to create reimplementations of Unix utilities, it turned out that they were massively underspecified by the man pages. The precise specification is more or less what POSIX is, and it’s significantly less readable than the original man pages even if you also format it as man pages and take out all the extensions. It’s not that original Unix userland lacked specification documents, it’s that their role was served by the source code of the libraries and utilities themselves (for all the copyright problems that it eventually caused). The kernel too, presumably, but people famously thought that wasn’t enough, and thus Lions’s commentary was born. I mentioned above that the papers from volume 2 also served as a rationale and an annotated bibliography, which is also a good document to have, but probably not as essential as the previous three. I’m also not saying that they all be separate documents: Unix merged the introduction and rationale but separated both from the reference; except for the tutorial, Python manages to merge the introduction and reference for its standard library surprisingly well, but lacks a good specification; the TeXbook tries to be everything at once but is in my opinion not that good at any particular task. What I am saying is that they are all different facets that have to be present in the writing. My third and final caveat is... Not really a caveat for your statement, but still a problem if you’re a documentation writer: The concise style and general structure of the Unix man pages only works well as long as the individual pieces are simple enough and there is not a lot of them. You can’t write man pages for complex programs; or rather you can, but the format starts to show its limits, as aptly demonstrated by bash(1). It’s probably not a coincidence that Stallman wanted to replace the Spartan man page by the hyperlinked info node. You can say that one oughtn’t make things that are that complex, and I agree, but that’s not the point of view of the documentation writer.

sen 5y ago

Spam that right arrow on your keyboard to skip through and find the relevant part. I refuse to listen to all the filler drivel that’s designed purely to pad it out behind 10min for the increased algorithm love. Then we’re supposed to sit through sponsor ads when we already pay for YouTube premium. I’m all for patreon and supporting creators but it’s gotten ridiculous. Multiple “sponsor” sections in a single video and endless meta crap irrelevant to the actual video. Don’t forget to like this comment, subscribe, hit that bell, join our amazing discord community, follow is on Twitter for updates, comment below for a chance to win our giveaway… etc.

bombcar 5y ago
Sometimes a quick glance at the comments will have someone timestamping the useful parts. And - hey! If the only solution was in a video snap off a quick blog post! You can even link the video and maybe it’ll help someone in the future. Modern web has become less and less “write” and more “read” and that contributes to the downfall imo.

tomjen3 5y ago

That is really annoying with software. Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.

bjornjajayaja 5y ago

Honestly I think the downfall began with lack of no-script support. JavaScript is a great addition to add interactivity, but it is an obvious win for commercial interests. It would be nice if instead of websites being forced to display cookie banners, what if they were forced to support plain HTML/CSS only mode? Not only would it increase privacy and prevent things like Canvas fingerprinting (oh wait, that’s what commercial interests use), it would also put content first. JavaScript began as a way to add dynamism to HTML which CSS now can handle by itself. What we need is a web framework that provides good fallback modes. My challenge to folks: try to use HTML/CSS only to create interesting and dynamic websites which focus on content-first. And give that content good printer-friendly support :) And for monetization, sell a product on there of some kind. Provide something useful. Don’t hide behind a barrage of ads. There’s always another way!

joshspankit 5y ago

Some days I think about making a service that cuts to the chase. For example: Put in the URL for that vid (or share-sheet it to the app), and it instantly returns “Click on menu > Item, then select size”

joshspankit 5y ago
And sometimes when I’m really grumpy I think about just going around and manually doing it by adding comments.

egypturnash 5y ago

That’s where the money is. I fuckin’ hate it.

imiric 5y ago

Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere. It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.

flyinghamster 5y ago
> Or even if there is a text article, it's obscured by cookie consent forms, ads, "subscribe to my newsletter" popups, padded intros and outros, and most likely scraped instructions from elsewhere. The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from StackOverflow and then reword it. > It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results. This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc. But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.

trey-jones 5y ago

Worse still, a lot of those videos are simply a content-creator (as opposed to an expert in the subject matter) teaching you how to do something that they learned how to do from another video (possibly by an expert).

shiftpgdn 5y ago
Trying to learn how to do household stuff on YouTube is full of comically bad or dangerous advice with millions of views. Thankfully this Old House has uploaded their back catalog and the comment sections of videos usually has rational insight from people claiming to be tradesmen.

emodendroket 5y ago

So you say, but a lot of times the videos are a Godsend. I will never go back to written recipes (at least for an unfamiliar dish), for instance — why struggle to figure out how much a “dash” is supposed to be or get confused over how exactly to do something when I can just watch it performed?

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Or text that is preceded by pages of phony life-stories.

code_duck 5y ago

My issue is that I don’t find it convenient to watch a video at all. For answering simple questions, there are many drawbacks to the format compared to text. I can usually extract necessary information from text in seconds. I might have to turn on a video and wait several minutes to hear the relevant information or spend minutes searching through it. Info in videos is not searchable by keywords or easily copy/pastable, and I may be in an environment where I don’t want to turn the sound up.

axiolite 5y ago

> whenever I search for 'how to do X?' there is a lot of video results for sometimes very trivial things You can usually pull the transcript/subtitles, without watching the video.

novok 5y ago

That comes from changing economics. Youtube pays, blogs with ads do not