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> Creating videos might be the best way for Boot.dev to grow, but I don’t want to make videos. Making videos is one thing, but making videos to satisfy the alg

• dymk 5y ago
  I apply a strong mental downrank to videos on YouTube that are between the duration of 10:00 to 10:30, knowing that they're only that long to satisfy the Algorithm (and get a midroll ad). They're all stuffed with filler to get them to exactly that duration. There lies a sharp valley of quality. Especially if surrounding "competing" videos are in the 1-2 minute range (often the case with "How do I do <X> in <Y> software?" kinds of tutorial videos).
• Beldin 5y ago
  > I am disappointed to see creators who don't even really need to, are resorting to click bait titles and thumbnails now. Veritasium has a video on clickbait of itself - basically: it works and is more or less necessary to satisfy The Algorithm(tm). Don't blame your favourite content creators for catering to a wider audience than just you.
  • cube00 5y ago
    Fair point. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
  • dymk 5y ago
    The Veritasium channel itself is clickbait much of the time, so of course it would defend the practice. I follow plenty of content creators that make good videos without artificially padding their runtimes, some long-form in the 20+ minute range, but also many that do low-minutes videos. Their channels are doing just fine.
    • ravenstine 5y ago
      It makes me wonder whether the need to pad videos was ever true, or at least as true to the extent that creators have made it out to be. Maybe it's just a meme? I too have noticed that channels with videos even less than 10 minutes in length do just fine. When it comes to my habits, I tend to skip videos that are < 4 minutes in duration because I feel like that's not enough time to go into detail with a lot of subjects, and I prefer much longer videos because I can put them on in the background and they have the time to sufficiently express ideas. But for a while I began discriminating against videos between 18 and ~25 minutes because I feel that those are usually the videos that are padded. It's a bad metric, but it works enough for me that I think I waste less of my time. Creators may think that the sweet spot is between 18 and 25 minutes because quality content tends to be longer, but don't realize that the length of that content is a necessity because of the subject matter; they see it as a simple metric that is of the desire of the user alone and not based on anything else. They also trick themselves because their content naturally gets attention. As much as I like some of Veritasium's videos, let's face it, his content tends not to be super thorough or heady. They appeal to the masses without necessarily being "IFL Science". He would probably get a ton of views even if his videos were only 8 minutes long because he's charismatic, has good editing, and the subject matter doesn't go way over the heads of the average viewer.
      • dymk 5y ago
        I think channels that want their videos ranked highly on-platform, e.g. the kind of content that tries to make it to the front / trending page of YouTube, do need to play this game. Or in competitive categories, such as Lets Plays of popular games. The McDonald's of videos, basically. There's a different category of channel, the sorts of channels that focus on niche content, and have videos that would be long enough to qualify for midroll ad (which improves ranking) anyways, and/or the channels don't care about getting on the Trending page. It seems these sorts of channels depend more on being shared in external communities. They tend to be run by people who self-fund the operation out of love, and do it as a hobby / side-gig, or have something like a Patreon.
      • yen223 5y ago
        Padding videos to 10 minutes is not done to satisfy The Algorithm, but rather it was the minimum video length required by YouTube to enable mid-roll ads. YouTube has since shortened the minimum video length to 8 minutes.