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I am a person who produces videos to publish on Youtube, and I want to add a different perspective to this. Here is where we are currently at: - Everyone comp

I am a person who produces videos to publish on Youtube, and I want to add a different perspective to this. Here is where we are currently at: - Everyone complains about the ads, so they install adblock. - Ads become worthless on Youtube for smaller creators, so they start taking sponsorships. - Everyone complains about the sponsors, they call creators shills and sponsorblock is gaining traction to block them. - Smaller creators shift to being dependent on direct support (Patreon, etc.) Here is where we are going: - People complain a video is too long, so they extract the data directly avoiding youtube. - The creators don't get ads, don't get people to understand the effort put in and support directly, and don't get views. The videos just don't get watched. A feedback loop is happening here where every possible method that allows making quality Youtube content sustainable is becoming impossible. The fact that anyone here is willing to pay for this service that will destroy the last shreds of this is extremely disheartening. If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos.

sv123 3y ago
I wouldn't feel too disheartened just yet, if people wanted to read instead of watch videos then we all would've stuck with blogger, or even just go back to usenet. As you can see in the comments here, these services are a dime a dozen. Seems like everybody and their mother have made a youtube summarizer, its like the todo list app of the ChatGPT api.
- jagged-chisel 3y ago
  > … if people wanted to read instead of watch videos … Eh, I think it’s also “if creators wanted to write instead of shoot videos,” but it really is easier to just talk to the camera (with all the nuance of vocal and facial expressions) and put that online than to spend time deliberating on how to write is as a blog post.
  - account42 3y ago
    It's also some degree of Google prioritizing videos in searches over written results.
louison11 3y ago
I'd say that if people spend less time on YouTube, that's probably a good thing. I think people are just getting bored of social media/YouTube now that's it's lost its novelty. It feels super leveraged now, and hard to find the real substance. There is a return to long-form media like Podcasts, audiobooks, or books for this reason. Maybe people are also realizing there is only so much information they can absorb, and they'd rather absorb less, but of higher quality, than consume random videos.
jtbayly 3y ago
That seems very reasonable to me. If I wanted to watch a long video, I wouldn’t use this service. You are complaining that people don’t want what you are selling.
- f0ld 3y ago
  Yeah, I’m just not interested in 1 hour content with 10 minuite information density. I’m just not gonna watch 10 years long video even if it’s about how to bodyswap to Leonardo Dicaprio.
suddenclarity 3y ago
A paid YouTube subscription, short quality videos, and a dislike button to combat clickbait sounds like the solution to most of those issues. A lot better than wasting millions of man hours to fulfill some ad quota. Granted, I understand that it's difficult but bundling it with YouTube Music seems to give it plenty of value.
- Chilko 3y ago
  Indeed, if you're not hung up on another music streaming service like Spotify and watch a lot of YouTubve (especially on mobile) then YouTube Premium is a pretty good offering.
lofaszvanitt 3y ago
Very sad.
jagged-chisel 3y ago
I’m with you. But you have to admit there’s quite a bit of fluff in so many videos just to extend the time and try to keep eyeballs long enough to mention the sponsor or show ads. I am not representative of the wider YT audience, but when I want information, I’m not interested in the fluff. Get to the point. It’s as bad as those recipe sites we’ve all complained about. Most of the information I seek could have been a short 4-bullet text list. Entertainment is different. But I must indeed be entertained. If you (not you specifically - creators in general) can’t begin to pull me in and promise a payoff (that you must deliver on), I’m moving on. Several YT channels that I subscribe can only be done via video. And I enjoy the content. I do get annoyed at the chosen timestamp for the inserted ads, but not enough to stop watching. If you have good, succinct, informative content; or actually entertaining (as opposed to manufactured drama) content, use YT to pull me to your other content hosted elsewhere and I can contribute actual money. The sad reality of the wider audience is that we’ve become accustomed to “free” with unavoidable ads (like broadcast TV.) Then when a technology comes along to avoid the obnoxious, irrelevant ads, we use it. This wider audience isn’t thinking about creators. If they think of anything besides their own gratification, it’s about screwing Big Corporate YouTube. How do we solve that? I think it’s a symptom of a larger societal issue.
- ianai 3y ago
  One thing, we were taught in my math degree that knowing how to explain something many different ways reflected deep understanding. Knowing how to explain something once reflected some base understanding. Two different ways is much better. Three, and you’re starting to see some real understanding. Works for how to solve problems and various things, too. Vanilla repetition works, too, of course. Oral communication involves a lot of repetition in person and is sometimes missed. I’d suggest YTers consider avoiding fluff and looking into “repetition”. Many videos are just poor at communicating. Some will talk so fast I have to play them at 1/2 speed. Things like that. Might be time for some YTers to reconnect with the basics of communication and presenting information. It’s not solely graphics that matter. Edit-key facts like names/places/times etc are prime examples. It kills me when people say someone’s name then forever after use pronouns. It’s easy to forget or just gloss over significance with vagaries.
ChickeNES 3y ago
As someone who subscribes to a whole host of youtubers big and small, I wholeheartedly agree with this. It really annoys me to see people act as if they are entitled to free content, especially from independent creators who depend on the revenue to fund making content.
quickthrower2 3y ago
I am amazed people block sponsors. That is pretty sad, as there is not much reason to, they usually flow as they were picked by the video creator, not just injected by Google. Anyway watching a video, reading the transcript and reading the summary are wildly different things. Can you learn anything meaningful through summaries? Probably only when the information was sparse to begin with.
- alwayslikethis 3y ago
  Sponsors are usually just the same 5 things repeated over and over across many different videos. It's interesting to see how people manage to fit it in the various different styles of videos, but it gets annoying really quickly if you watch more than a few videos with the same sponsors. I block sponsors to save precious time, which is especially important when I am trying to understand something. In the end, sponsors are no different from ads, they are just messages from corporations to get you to buy things you most likely don't need.
  - techdragon 3y ago
    Oh absolutely this… I’m completely sick of hearing about Raid Shadow Legends, NordVPN, and I’ll be completely sick of the next companies that spam sponsorship money around this much in the future. I already have a VPN and I’m not going to switch now I know they’ve managed to rebuff the cops once ( Go Mullvad ) and I’m no at all interested in any of the heavily promoted VPN companies that sponsor so so much YouTube content.
  - bobsmooth 3y ago
    You can press the L key to skip ahead 10 seconds. On mobile, double tap the right side of the screen.
- JellyYelly 3y ago
  Quite regularly I see sponsored content that is targeted at people living in the US. If the product is even available in my country there's a huge shipping cost and exchange rate that makes it not worth purchasing even with a discount code. I try not to spend too much time watching YouTube every day so skipping sponsors for products I cannot buy is a good way to save time.
nullsense 3y ago
I heard one of the guests on a recent Lex Fridman podcast remark that a professor friend of his was involved in some research where they proved that, for any given thing, if you optimize it then things improve up to a point, but if you continue to optimize for that one thing endlessly then it always gets worse in the end. Does anyone know what paper he's referring to??
- jprete 3y ago
  I don’t know the paper, but this sounds like Goodhart’s Law - when you try to optimize a system by optimizing for a proxy for the outcome you want, the proxy measurement will stop being a good proxy because the system will be optimized around the proxy instead of whatever you actually wanted.
  - nullsense 3y ago
    Hmm I think it was a more fundamental result than just an eponymous law. It sounded like they proved it mathematically applied to anything. Was hoping one of the HN crowd might know the actual research that was mentioned.
shostack 3y ago
Here's another perspective. I want information. The niche thing I want seems like it may only be in a YouTube video. It looks like it's a 10m video (to optimize for ads). I have zero plans to engage or continue watching the creator. I just want my info as quickly and "free." I might use this if it gave useful results. The reality is that creating a 10 fluff video to answer one specific question is bloat. So I feel zero qualms optimizing my experience to mitigate it. The other side of that are the creators I enjoy (James Hoffman is a good example). I watch his content for him, and thus I want to see him continue creating content. The other info video I tl;dr'd? That's the sort of info I hope I can soon access directly via ChatGPT without needing a creator to create a 10m video around it. There's a class of content creation that will simply get valued less as AI adoption grows. It happened with the written word, blogs, and newspapers. It happened with photography, it happened with video, and now video is continuing to be further disrupted as our ability to tailor it to our needs improves. Why waste time complaining and fighting against the current when you can run with it? Find forms of content not likely to be used with this sort of thing, or that an AI generated video can easily replace (we're practically there already). Differentiate. Build your brand.
- Riverheart 3y ago
  “Find forms of content not likely to be used with this sort of thing, or that an AI generated video can easily replace (we're practically there already). Differentiate. Build your brand.” So written word and video are off the table. What alternative forms of content are worth pursuing in your mind?
  - olliecornelia 3y ago
    Most of these dorks have no idea what they want, but boy can they talk about they think they want.
gradstudent 3y ago
I enjoy your content quite a bit and I hope you continue to make it for a long time. But would it be so terrible if we didn't have professional YouTubers anymore? I think I would be happier with a smaller pool of content made by folks that didn't feel compelled to shill for advertisers in order to make a living.
- Riverheart 3y ago
  The problem isn’t that people feel compelled to shill for advertisers the problem is that people need to make a living. The quality of their content has nothing to do whether they pursue it professionally or not.
  - gradstudent 3y ago
    I understand the argument from creators. Blocking ads and sponsors prevents them from doing what they love. But the argument from users is equally compelling, since advertisements prevent them from enjoying what they love. Everybody is acting rationally and I'm not sure I/we/society owes anyone the ability to make a living as a YouTube video producer. I would not be sad to see a return to amateur folks making and uploading stuff just for fun, in their spare time.
    - Riverheart 3y ago
      “But the argument from users is equally compelling, since advertisements prevent them from enjoying what they love. Everybody is acting rationally and I'm not sure I/we/society owes anyone the ability to make a living as a YouTube video producer.” It’s rational for users to undercut the ability of the creators they like to make money and produce more content? Nobody is saying YouTube video producers deserve free money but if users continue consuming their content while blocking their ads/sponsorships/not supporting them on Patreon then they are the entitled ones, not the producers. Ads suck, don’t get me wrong but blocking them on people you like is short term thinking and not fair to the producer.
    - AkBKukU 3y ago
      > would not be sad to see a return to amateur folks making and uploading stuff just for fun, in their spare time. This is where it gets complicated. I could shoot an entire video with my phone, but it would be harder to see some things with the limited camera options. I could make videos with less time spent on them, but they have less to offer and get fewer views. I spend significant amounts of time to produce the videos I make, and I see a direct correlation to videos with more time spent on them returning more back to me. So you are incentivized to do better, spend more time and resources on production. I think some people want youtube to evoke the project blogger experience because it feels more personal. But video is just too hard and takes too much time and equipment to communicate effectively. And current social internet trends have killed the personal blog. So this is what we are left with.
noAnswer 3y ago
Though I more often select 1.25 or 1.5 playback speed, I enjoy well made long form videos*. I don't think people who will use this TLDR service are your voluntary viewer. It will be used in job or homework context. Were it could become dangerous for content creators is when people use it to auto create YT-shorts or TikToks and call it fair use. * In order not to feel bad about AdBlock and SponsorBlock I got YT-Premium**. I'm a YT-member on two channels and pay nearly 50€ a month with Patreon (Funny enough including your channel.) ** I almost rage quitted YT-Premium because these wankers collect Euros from a UK bank! So 2% foreign exchange charge is added! But many creators say the payout from YT-Premium viewers is more than from ad viewers. That is the only reason I stay.
- AkBKukU 3y ago
  YT-Premium is the best answer to this problem so far being completely honest. Being a direct supporter is the most beneficial to the creator (and I do appreciate it!) but does have a poor value proposition to the supporter. YT-premium is, from my experience, something like 5X compared to standard ad revenue per view and gets the user a better viewing experience. It's almost perfect, except that the more popular premium is, the more it lowers the value of ads to the advertisers reducing the other revenue source. So far that doesn't seem to be a problem based the % of YT-Premium users I see on my end though. And personally as a creator, if you pay for YT-Premium I would absolve you of blocking ads and sponsors to just enjoy the subject material you do actually pay for. I don't do sponsors because I rely so much on direct supporters that I feel like they shouldn't have to deal with that. As an aside, and with the note it's more the fault of the creators for making slow paced videos (which I am also guilty of), playing back at higher speeds reduces the watch time that is actually the real time spent watching which in turn reduces ad revenue. The system is full of gotchas.
wholinator2 3y ago
I agree to an extent but i think the relative proportions of people doing any workaround falls off exponentially as you go down that list. Probably lots and lots of people do ad block, because ads are horrible and long and disruptive and just suck. Significantly less people do sponsor block, for one, you can just click through it, there's no unskippable 3 minute sponsor in a youtube video, and the actual sponsors are significantly less adversly psychological, a real human you trust telling you something is wayb easier to listen to than the product of many committees focused on obviously manipulating your emotions. And then for the video summaries, probably some people will do it. But i would literally never, it's crazy. I enjoy the videos because of their creativity, their visuals are usually important, the voice is soothing and interesting, and the nuances of the content are all crafted by a human with your interests in mind. To replace that with some auto closed caption summarizing gpt shit would be ridiculous. I strongly doubt that this will gain significant traction anywhere near where sponsorblock currently is. If someone would rather see a paragraph summary then they probably wouldn't watch much of the video anyway. This strikes me as scared and somewhat defeatist. As media changes, audiences and what they demand changes. We don't listen to radio periodicals anymore because we have better ways to get that information across. I don't see anything other than maybe augmented reality that could possibly usurp the throne that video currently sits upon. Certainly not some llm generated summary crap
- AkBKukU 3y ago
  > This strikes me as scared and somewhat defeatist. You make good points, but this stuck out the most to me. It's less scared, but somewhat defeatist. I make videos that are mostly entertainment (so less likely to be summarized) but are also technical for the subject matter. I can tell you from years of experience that my typical audience is dramatically more likely to use tools available to circumvent things. When I have a video that has broader appeal that gets significantly above average views I can see a nearly exponential increase in ad revenue as I tap into a group of viewers less likely to be using adblock. So for some creators I can see an LLM summary crushing their ability to monetize by having their views eliminated. If people are searching for these things, there is market demand for them to exist. This is introducing a middle man that skims off the top of that market.
Litost 3y ago
This would seem to be what might be variously called a Tragedy of the Commons [1], a Multi-Polar Trap [2] or similarly the Prisoner's Dilemma, but at scale [3]. Obviously in the original Tragedy of the Commons, farmers with sheep grazing the common land, the tragedy was that if you didn't try to graze as many sheep as possible, someone else would and so you'd lose out, but because everyone was doing that the commons died out and everyone lost out. (Disclaimer Generalisation) but that would seem to be what's happening here, "everyone" trying to maximise their utility just eats the system and it becomes unsustainable (be that content viewers trying to get content for free, Youtube trying to maximise revenue via maximal advertising, advertisers producing shit ads that I hope nobody ever acts on but then how else does money enter the system?, content creators and AI coders trying to make the best living). Though unlike the original Tragedy of the Commons where everyone suffered equally, there's an interesting irony that the (content creators) who produce the most value (without which nothing else exists) have the least (individual?) power in the relationship probably "die" out first. You could equally point to a similar situation in the music industry or any industry for that matter that doesn't have a strong enough or fast enough feedback loop to detect that the system is eating itself, but also have some ability to act on it. As DanielS points out in the video below it's a coordination problem. If enough individuals in any of the groups defect from maximising their utility the system is stable. Be that content providers providing free content, advertisers giving free money without making you watch adverts, content viewers paying for content so no advertising needed, AI coders not producing a mechanism that summarises videos so people don't watch the videos and hence the adverts so no-one gets paid, <Youtube something>). You can extend this to coordination outside the system, you could argue this is why governments exist to provide a meta-framework that makes it illegal to do something that undermines the system, e.g. by having laws that prevent watching content for free. You could also coordinate this at the meta level, if everyone involved in the problem got together and made sure that everyone was being looked after or say the content creators got together and collectively refused to provide any free content... But obviously in the current system none of this is really possible, the more things change the more they stay the same, this would seem to be the price of progress, the same problems arising over and over just at increasing scales (and stakes). Just see the problem of musicians now back to square one because of streaming... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcLXqwZJQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcLXqwZJQw [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma EDIT: The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't the best example here as prisoner's escaping jail despite doing a crime does have a negative societal impact, just I'm not aware of a better example from Game Theory? TODO: Find a better explanation of Multi-Polar Traps that doesn't refer to Israel or Russia...
duxup 3y ago
It’s the whole internet as far as small payments go. Nobody wants to pay, advertisers pay… we become the product and everyone is upset. I wish there was a small transactions system where I could pay or tip quickly for a view and it is worthwhile for everyone.
Xeoncross 3y ago
Perhaps I simply want to know where I'm headed before I spend 20 minutes of my time. Not all videos do a good job explaining the plot in the first 30 seconds. With this I can get a TL;DR instead of skipping 1/3 through the video to see what it is actually about. Also note, youtube is directing producers to make entertainment-only content and that stuff has very little to summarize. It's viral because it's entertaining, you wouldn't TL;DR it. I think the "Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address" is a perfect example of a link someone sends me that I want to preview before I schedule my time watching it.
mathfailure 3y ago
It looks like making videos became your profession, since you expect monetization of your video views. And I, as a viewer, simply don't want... professional content. I want to watch videos made by hobbyists for the sake of fun and to inform/debate/educate. So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests.
- spindle 3y ago
  So much this. And also, in many fields there is lots of professional content that's been fully paid for before it hits YouTube - for example, professors make available to the public work that they've already been paid for, and they have no need at all to get paid twice.
- AkBKukU 3y ago
  > So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests. By not watching the video you would be voting for your interests. By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just "stealing" content and trying to excuse yourself for it by wishing it was something it isn't. The videos aren't put out for free, they are put out with a contract with Youtube to advertise on it. Youtube pays to host and you split the ad revenue when the creator is paid. Your hypothetical successful "hobbiest for the sake of fun" would either not enter the partner program and let Youtube keep all of the ad revenue they will run anyway, or enter the partner program and disable monetization and abuse Youtube for content hosting without delivering anything back to them. Obviously, neither of these happens in practice and if the latter started becoming common the ability to do it would be taken away or other penalties like making the creator pay to host imposed. "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
  - mikae1 3y ago
    > By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just "stealing" content Would you also argue that a TV viewer that goes to the bathroom or the refrigerator in the commercial breaks steals content? Everyone avoids ads if they know how to.
ekianjo 3y ago
Then we can all get back to writing instead. Good.
acyou 3y ago
I am old enough to remember youtube before monetization, like, comment, and subscribe. It was great. Better than it is now. If others remember the dawn of the Internet, it was a similar feel. People definitely did and still do make videos for free, and actually for free in the sense of the improvement of mankind, not "free" but they are still getting some benefit out of it. If you ask me, those videos are much better than the revenue optimized spam videos made by "content creators". Wouldn't be sad to see the current ecosystem go. Yes, people would probably start watching more again if they didn't need to wade through ads and pseudo ads.
kamel3d 3y ago
someone thought TV would kill radio because it has extra dimension but that never happen infact now we have other form of content that share same audio aspect getting more popular like podcasts, what I am trying to say there will always be audience for all kind of content, some people would like to read a summery of the video and there will always be people who want to watch the video instead
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > someone thought TV would kill radio because it has extra dimension but that never happen It mostly did in the US (still growing globally, mostly thanks to the developed world.) Oh, the US radio industry still exists its just experiencing a long decline in total and same-station revenues over time. You can probably still find a company making buggy-whips, but that doesn’t mean that the automobile didn’t practically destroy the industry.
hattmall 3y ago
Good! YouTube and video in general sucks as a format for delivering general information. Finding out how to do things has become far more difficult since the idea of making money on videos has polluted all the content. It use to be very simple to find detailed tutorials with images and then many posts of relevant discussion on how to fix any part of a vehicle or many other tasks. The people doing them weren't doing it for money. When I could make my own or improve an existing tutorial I did so. Now everything is keyword spammed YouTube videos that are challenging to consume and rarely provided the needed granularity to actually complete a task. Then the most you can hope for in discussion is a bunch of unrelated or unreplied to comments. Please bring on the death of micro-monetization.
- shri_krishna 3y ago
  > The people doing them weren't doing it for money Not everyone but plenty were doing it for the money. Using ads on their blogs/sites/forums (heck even Stackoverflow ran on ads only for a long time until they brought in more sources of revenue). But with proliferation of ad blockers, they stopped producing textual content and shifted focus to videos. Now ad blockers have gotten smarter and block ads on video too. So it won't be long until even this format disappears as well. We need to find ways to help creators monetize their knowledge rather than stifling their sources of income to such an extent that they have no other means to earn from it. We did it to books too (piracy). Only music seems to not be affected that much due to streaming rights (though music industry went through a similar phase during Napster Era). > Please bring on the death of micro-monetization. What is the alternative?
- t-writescode 3y ago
  > It use to be very simple to find detailed tutorials with images and then many posts of relevant discussion on how to fix any part of a vehicle ... The people doing them weren't doing it for money Uh, pardon? This was and continues to be a very well-monetized industry for the major players, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilton_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilton_Company
MiguelX413 3y ago
This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35607574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35607574 Maybe videos just aren't the right format for some things
irrational 3y ago
I feel for you, but I hate videos. In an ideal world, content creators would release both a video version and a text version of their content.
f0ld 3y ago
That’s why UBI is plain needed at this point. Same thing was happening in acedemics ages ago. I write an extensive paper about certain subject and then someone else makes huge loads of money from publishing books on that same subject with slighht twist just enough to evade copyright claim.
aeze 3y ago
> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos. I feel for you, but as someone who made online video content before monetization became a real thing - I'm not sure that's true. The issue is our culture forces people to focus on creating for money instead of creating for the simple pleasure itself.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  No. Money is what enables ordinary people to produce creative output and feed themselves while not depending on others. We're living in the first time in human history where producing cultural output is now available to most people, rather than a privilege of a minority sponsored by patrons at a royal court or privileged heirs. This is because, not despite the fact, that culture is now a business.
  - aeze 3y ago
    Do you think culture being a business should be our end goal?
    - Barrin92 3y ago
      No, it's a means and not an end at all. The goal is to produce the best work you can do, but the fact that working people can turn it into a sustainable business greatly expands who can participate. Someone with a Youtube channel with say 200k subscribers today can make about 2k-4k per month. At the inconvenience of a bunch of ads or sponsors people who could have never done creative work can do it full time now and actually be rewarded for their work.
  - account42 3y ago
    > No. Money is what enables ordinary people to produce creative output and feed themselves while not depending on others. Money is the embodiment of being dependent on others. You can't eat money. Money has no use except to exchange for something else. > We're living in the first time in human history where producing cultural output is now available to most people, rather than a privilege of a minority sponsored by patrons at a royal court or privileged heirs. There was some "high art" that wan't available to everyone but saying the majority of cultural output was. Sharing it was just not as efficient as it is today. > This is because, not despite the fact, that culture is now a business. No, it's because copying digital content costs nothing. Also because farming has become efficient enough that we don't actually need everyone to work full time to survive. Not even close to. But we are still stuck in an economic model that is based on trading scarce resources.
dannyw 3y ago
I liked YouTube a lot better when 95% of the channels weren’t trying to make money.
wolfendin 3y ago
Except that I wouldn’t be watching the video in the first place, but google has decide they want to promote videos when I am searching for webpages.
jbverschoor 3y ago
If your video Can be condensed into 20 seconds, you’re just whopping up cream, soo better be funny and/or charismatic. Otherwise you’re just wasting my time. If the Sunday isn’t enough, congrats, people are fine watching your video, including placement/ads. Even if you block them or have YouTube premium, placement will be seen, and should be paid for. I never clicked on Athletic greens, nordvpn, but I know about them
- t-writescode 3y ago
  Ironically, TikTok allows and encourages such incredibly short form content xD
EGreg 3y ago
I’ll go further Soon there will be no demand for human labor at all when it comes to online content. There will be a glut of content and for something custom, people will want to simply ask AI to generate what they want, at scale.
MrPatan 3y ago
> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos. Deal!
kazinator 3y ago
> every possible method that allows making quality Youtube content sustainable is becoming impossible Is it impossible to stop the rambling so that people don't have to make comments like: "actual content matching the title starts at 0:47"? Often, the rambling doesn't have anything to do with sponsors or ads. It's just a very long-winded introduction of the topic, or some video set-up that should have been cut out, or rambling about their channel and previous video (perhaps recapping some previous topic that is not pertinent to this video).
ta8903 3y ago
>Everyone complains about the ads, so they install adblock. - Ads become worthless on Youtube for smaller creators, so they start taking sponsorships. What percentage of youtube watchers use adblock? I doubt it's more than 5. And for sponsorblock, I can't see it being more than 0.1%. Nowhere close to them being "worthless", pretty sure it's just creators wanting more revenue streams, because why not?
gtsop 3y ago
You had me until this: > If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos. Nope! The correct sentence is: If you stop watching videos, there will be no profit into making the videos. The reason to make them still exists: sharing knowledge. You have to ubderstand that all digital products are inherently repulsed by the market economy because of the 0 cost to reproduce. The history of the monetization problems of video, music, software and anything digital reflects the attempt to lure them back into the market. Up to one degree you can do it, but it is inevitable that in the long term you won't be able to make money out of digital products as easily as you do with classic "physical" ones.
Hard_Space 3y ago
A huge number of instructional videos would be far better-served in an illustrated post on Substack. For instance, there are a ton of Stable Diffusion instruction videos that feature essential code and other text-based information which is very hard to make usable with video content. In many cases I have had to download the video and export it raw in AviDemux in order to try and glean the text-based content from the source. But Substack doesn't have the same sweet 'influencer' ecostructure, so many creators and posters would rather put a tute in the wrong medium and get the 'follower' benefit than suit the material to the medium.
- t-writescode 3y ago
  I imagine there are orders of magnitude more: * Minecraft tutorial videos * "how to fix your _____ in your apartment" videos than there are informational/educational/tutorial videos about Stable Diffusion.
  - Hard_Space 3y ago
    Well, I wouldn't necessarily agree with the numbers. But I certainly would rather see a washer being changed in a YT video than explained in Substack, I grant you that.
  - account42 3y ago
    Game tutorials are also almost always better in text + image form.
naraga 3y ago
I did not know about this service. I just used it for bunch of videos i have in my "to watch list" which is basically pile of shame of material i never get to watch for reasons like questionable useful information density or in complexity of the topic. It helped me to select those i really want to watch and i watched them. Imho this is godsend for creators. Unless you are just click-baiting and luring into watching something that could be summed up into 2 sentences just to go over you list of sponsors.
HWR_14 3y ago
It sounds like people don't like videos with ads, sponsors, plugs for patreon or overly long fluff. So those videos will no longer get made and instead other videos will. I'm sorry that your style of video seems to be becoming less popular for you personally, but it sounds like the future videos being made will be better for me.
layer8 3y ago
If a TLDR is an adequate replacement for watching a video, then maybe that video shouldn’t exist in the first place. On the other hand, TLDRs can be useful, and arguably the video description on YouTube should be exactly that.
des1nderlase 3y ago
Part that I dont understand, whenever new tech comes up why affected dont use it at their own advantage. Why don't creators don't use it to create their own (better) summarization (for example as a short video), and work with (new) aggregators? Do you think that AI summarization is better than your own, of your own video? If there is a value in summarized version, create it and leverage it.
listenallyall 3y ago
Just curious how you consume news? Do you pay any subscriptions to NYTimes, WSJ, or any regional or local news sites? Do you have ad blockers on when you browse?
lobocinza 3y ago
Your perspective is valid and this will hurt creators but a bit of "market destruction" can be positive. TLDRs tools aren't silver bullets, they will make dark patterns less viable and creators that make short & informative content more attractive.
BeetleB 3y ago
> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos. I had a happy life pre-Youtube. I don't think the world will be a worse place if 99% of Youtube videos disappear because they are not viable to make.
dzonga 3y ago
people doing dumb shit, because they can instead of asking "why" ? literally short-terminism. next thing you know - all those educational videos on youtube gone. the only other content will be 3 minute garbage snippets on tik tok. read books
cultureswitch 3y ago
I believe this tool can be useful to quickly go through very bad quality tutorial videos. If you really can't find the information in text form somewhere else.
mbrochh 3y ago
I see no way to avoid this. There is simply too much content out there. I have created this summarizer for myself last week and my productivity went through the roof. My Youtube Watchlist shrank from 50 videos, some of them being in there for more than a year, to zero. In all cases, the summary that I got was perfectly fine and satisfied my curiosity about the topic. We have to learn how to deal with this new world. People want raw information, they don't want to look at a talking heads artificially spreading out that information into 30-60 minute videos when the actual facts can be summed up and consumed in 20 seconds.
SergeAx 3y ago
If the creator delivers value to viewers - they will find a way to pay for it. If it is just a time filler to push down audience throat using recommendation algorithms - world will be a better place without it.
account42 3y ago
Good. I'm tired of commercialized content. Feel free to stop creating. There will be others left who do it without financial motive.

sv123 3y ago

I wouldn't feel too disheartened just yet, if people wanted to read instead of watch videos then we all would've stuck with blogger, or even just go back to usenet. As you can see in the comments here, these services are a dime a dozen. Seems like everybody and their mother have made a youtube summarizer, its like the todo list app of the ChatGPT api.

jagged-chisel 3y ago
> … if people wanted to read instead of watch videos … Eh, I think it’s also “if creators wanted to write instead of shoot videos,” but it really is easier to just talk to the camera (with all the nuance of vocal and facial expressions) and put that online than to spend time deliberating on how to write is as a blog post.
- account42 3y ago
  It's also some degree of Google prioritizing videos in searches over written results.

louison11 3y ago

I'd say that if people spend less time on YouTube, that's probably a good thing. I think people are just getting bored of social media/YouTube now that's it's lost its novelty. It feels super leveraged now, and hard to find the real substance. There is a return to long-form media like Podcasts, audiobooks, or books for this reason. Maybe people are also realizing there is only so much information they can absorb, and they'd rather absorb less, but of higher quality, than consume random videos.

jtbayly 3y ago

That seems very reasonable to me. If I wanted to watch a long video, I wouldn’t use this service. You are complaining that people don’t want what you are selling.

f0ld 3y ago
Yeah, I’m just not interested in 1 hour content with 10 minuite information density. I’m just not gonna watch 10 years long video even if it’s about how to bodyswap to Leonardo Dicaprio.

suddenclarity 3y ago

A paid YouTube subscription, short quality videos, and a dislike button to combat clickbait sounds like the solution to most of those issues. A lot better than wasting millions of man hours to fulfill some ad quota. Granted, I understand that it's difficult but bundling it with YouTube Music seems to give it plenty of value.

Chilko 3y ago
Indeed, if you're not hung up on another music streaming service like Spotify and watch a lot of YouTubve (especially on mobile) then YouTube Premium is a pretty good offering.

lofaszvanitt 3y ago

Very sad.

jagged-chisel 3y ago

I’m with you. But you have to admit there’s quite a bit of fluff in so many videos just to extend the time and try to keep eyeballs long enough to mention the sponsor or show ads. I am not representative of the wider YT audience, but when I want information, I’m not interested in the fluff. Get to the point. It’s as bad as those recipe sites we’ve all complained about. Most of the information I seek could have been a short 4-bullet text list. Entertainment is different. But I must indeed be entertained. If you (not you specifically - creators in general) can’t begin to pull me in and promise a payoff (that you must deliver on), I’m moving on. Several YT channels that I subscribe can only be done via video. And I enjoy the content. I do get annoyed at the chosen timestamp for the inserted ads, but not enough to stop watching. If you have good, succinct, informative content; or actually entertaining (as opposed to manufactured drama) content, use YT to pull me to your other content hosted elsewhere and I can contribute actual money. The sad reality of the wider audience is that we’ve become accustomed to “free” with unavoidable ads (like broadcast TV.) Then when a technology comes along to avoid the obnoxious, irrelevant ads, we use it. This wider audience isn’t thinking about creators. If they think of anything besides their own gratification, it’s about screwing Big Corporate YouTube. How do we solve that? I think it’s a symptom of a larger societal issue.

ianai 3y ago
One thing, we were taught in my math degree that knowing how to explain something many different ways reflected deep understanding. Knowing how to explain something once reflected some base understanding. Two different ways is much better. Three, and you’re starting to see some real understanding. Works for how to solve problems and various things, too. Vanilla repetition works, too, of course. Oral communication involves a lot of repetition in person and is sometimes missed. I’d suggest YTers consider avoiding fluff and looking into “repetition”. Many videos are just poor at communicating. Some will talk so fast I have to play them at 1/2 speed. Things like that. Might be time for some YTers to reconnect with the basics of communication and presenting information. It’s not solely graphics that matter. Edit-key facts like names/places/times etc are prime examples. It kills me when people say someone’s name then forever after use pronouns. It’s easy to forget or just gloss over significance with vagaries.

ChickeNES 3y ago

As someone who subscribes to a whole host of youtubers big and small, I wholeheartedly agree with this. It really annoys me to see people act as if they are entitled to free content, especially from independent creators who depend on the revenue to fund making content.

quickthrower2 3y ago

I am amazed people block sponsors. That is pretty sad, as there is not much reason to, they usually flow as they were picked by the video creator, not just injected by Google. Anyway watching a video, reading the transcript and reading the summary are wildly different things. Can you learn anything meaningful through summaries? Probably only when the information was sparse to begin with.

alwayslikethis 3y ago
Sponsors are usually just the same 5 things repeated over and over across many different videos. It's interesting to see how people manage to fit it in the various different styles of videos, but it gets annoying really quickly if you watch more than a few videos with the same sponsors. I block sponsors to save precious time, which is especially important when I am trying to understand something. In the end, sponsors are no different from ads, they are just messages from corporations to get you to buy things you most likely don't need.
- techdragon 3y ago
  Oh absolutely this… I’m completely sick of hearing about Raid Shadow Legends, NordVPN, and I’ll be completely sick of the next companies that spam sponsorship money around this much in the future. I already have a VPN and I’m not going to switch now I know they’ve managed to rebuff the cops once ( Go Mullvad ) and I’m no at all interested in any of the heavily promoted VPN companies that sponsor so so much YouTube content.
- bobsmooth 3y ago
  You can press the L key to skip ahead 10 seconds. On mobile, double tap the right side of the screen.
JellyYelly 3y ago
Quite regularly I see sponsored content that is targeted at people living in the US. If the product is even available in my country there's a huge shipping cost and exchange rate that makes it not worth purchasing even with a discount code. I try not to spend too much time watching YouTube every day so skipping sponsors for products I cannot buy is a good way to save time.

nullsense 3y ago

I heard one of the guests on a recent Lex Fridman podcast remark that a professor friend of his was involved in some research where they proved that, for any given thing, if you optimize it then things improve up to a point, but if you continue to optimize for that one thing endlessly then it always gets worse in the end. Does anyone know what paper he's referring to??

jprete 3y ago
I don’t know the paper, but this sounds like Goodhart’s Law - when you try to optimize a system by optimizing for a proxy for the outcome you want, the proxy measurement will stop being a good proxy because the system will be optimized around the proxy instead of whatever you actually wanted.
- nullsense 3y ago
  Hmm I think it was a more fundamental result than just an eponymous law. It sounded like they proved it mathematically applied to anything. Was hoping one of the HN crowd might know the actual research that was mentioned.

shostack 3y ago

Here's another perspective. I want information. The niche thing I want seems like it may only be in a YouTube video. It looks like it's a 10m video (to optimize for ads). I have zero plans to engage or continue watching the creator. I just want my info as quickly and "free." I might use this if it gave useful results. The reality is that creating a 10 fluff video to answer one specific question is bloat. So I feel zero qualms optimizing my experience to mitigate it. The other side of that are the creators I enjoy (James Hoffman is a good example). I watch his content for him, and thus I want to see him continue creating content. The other info video I tl;dr'd? That's the sort of info I hope I can soon access directly via ChatGPT without needing a creator to create a 10m video around it. There's a class of content creation that will simply get valued less as AI adoption grows. It happened with the written word, blogs, and newspapers. It happened with photography, it happened with video, and now video is continuing to be further disrupted as our ability to tailor it to our needs improves. Why waste time complaining and fighting against the current when you can run with it? Find forms of content not likely to be used with this sort of thing, or that an AI generated video can easily replace (we're practically there already). Differentiate. Build your brand.

Riverheart 3y ago
“Find forms of content not likely to be used with this sort of thing, or that an AI generated video can easily replace (we're practically there already). Differentiate. Build your brand.” So written word and video are off the table. What alternative forms of content are worth pursuing in your mind?
- olliecornelia 3y ago
  Most of these dorks have no idea what they want, but boy can they talk about they think they want.

gradstudent 3y ago

I enjoy your content quite a bit and I hope you continue to make it for a long time. But would it be so terrible if we didn't have professional YouTubers anymore? I think I would be happier with a smaller pool of content made by folks that didn't feel compelled to shill for advertisers in order to make a living.

Riverheart 3y ago
The problem isn’t that people feel compelled to shill for advertisers the problem is that people need to make a living. The quality of their content has nothing to do whether they pursue it professionally or not.
- gradstudent 3y ago
  I understand the argument from creators. Blocking ads and sponsors prevents them from doing what they love. But the argument from users is equally compelling, since advertisements prevent them from enjoying what they love. Everybody is acting rationally and I'm not sure I/we/society owes anyone the ability to make a living as a YouTube video producer. I would not be sad to see a return to amateur folks making and uploading stuff just for fun, in their spare time.
  - Riverheart 3y ago
    “But the argument from users is equally compelling, since advertisements prevent them from enjoying what they love. Everybody is acting rationally and I'm not sure I/we/society owes anyone the ability to make a living as a YouTube video producer.” It’s rational for users to undercut the ability of the creators they like to make money and produce more content? Nobody is saying YouTube video producers deserve free money but if users continue consuming their content while blocking their ads/sponsorships/not supporting them on Patreon then they are the entitled ones, not the producers. Ads suck, don’t get me wrong but blocking them on people you like is short term thinking and not fair to the producer.
  - AkBKukU 3y ago
    > would not be sad to see a return to amateur folks making and uploading stuff just for fun, in their spare time. This is where it gets complicated. I could shoot an entire video with my phone, but it would be harder to see some things with the limited camera options. I could make videos with less time spent on them, but they have less to offer and get fewer views. I spend significant amounts of time to produce the videos I make, and I see a direct correlation to videos with more time spent on them returning more back to me. So you are incentivized to do better, spend more time and resources on production. I think some people want youtube to evoke the project blogger experience because it feels more personal. But video is just too hard and takes too much time and equipment to communicate effectively. And current social internet trends have killed the personal blog. So this is what we are left with.

noAnswer 3y ago

Though I more often select 1.25 or 1.5 playback speed, I enjoy well made long form videos*. I don't think people who will use this TLDR service are your voluntary viewer. It will be used in job or homework context. Were it could become dangerous for content creators is when people use it to auto create YT-shorts or TikToks and call it fair use. * In order not to feel bad about AdBlock and SponsorBlock I got YT-Premium**. I'm a YT-member on two channels and pay nearly 50€ a month with Patreon (Funny enough including your channel.) ** I almost rage quitted YT-Premium because these wankers collect Euros from a UK bank! So 2% foreign exchange charge is added! But many creators say the payout from YT-Premium viewers is more than from ad viewers. That is the only reason I stay.

AkBKukU 3y ago
YT-Premium is the best answer to this problem so far being completely honest. Being a direct supporter is the most beneficial to the creator (and I do appreciate it!) but does have a poor value proposition to the supporter. YT-premium is, from my experience, something like 5X compared to standard ad revenue per view and gets the user a better viewing experience. It's almost perfect, except that the more popular premium is, the more it lowers the value of ads to the advertisers reducing the other revenue source. So far that doesn't seem to be a problem based the % of YT-Premium users I see on my end though. And personally as a creator, if you pay for YT-Premium I would absolve you of blocking ads and sponsors to just enjoy the subject material you do actually pay for. I don't do sponsors because I rely so much on direct supporters that I feel like they shouldn't have to deal with that. As an aside, and with the note it's more the fault of the creators for making slow paced videos (which I am also guilty of), playing back at higher speeds reduces the watch time that is actually the real time spent watching which in turn reduces ad revenue. The system is full of gotchas.

wholinator2 3y ago

I agree to an extent but i think the relative proportions of people doing any workaround falls off exponentially as you go down that list. Probably lots and lots of people do ad block, because ads are horrible and long and disruptive and just suck. Significantly less people do sponsor block, for one, you can just click through it, there's no unskippable 3 minute sponsor in a youtube video, and the actual sponsors are significantly less adversly psychological, a real human you trust telling you something is wayb easier to listen to than the product of many committees focused on obviously manipulating your emotions. And then for the video summaries, probably some people will do it. But i would literally never, it's crazy. I enjoy the videos because of their creativity, their visuals are usually important, the voice is soothing and interesting, and the nuances of the content are all crafted by a human with your interests in mind. To replace that with some auto closed caption summarizing gpt shit would be ridiculous. I strongly doubt that this will gain significant traction anywhere near where sponsorblock currently is. If someone would rather see a paragraph summary then they probably wouldn't watch much of the video anyway. This strikes me as scared and somewhat defeatist. As media changes, audiences and what they demand changes. We don't listen to radio periodicals anymore because we have better ways to get that information across. I don't see anything other than maybe augmented reality that could possibly usurp the throne that video currently sits upon. Certainly not some llm generated summary crap

AkBKukU 3y ago
> This strikes me as scared and somewhat defeatist. You make good points, but this stuck out the most to me. It's less scared, but somewhat defeatist. I make videos that are mostly entertainment (so less likely to be summarized) but are also technical for the subject matter. I can tell you from years of experience that my typical audience is dramatically more likely to use tools available to circumvent things. When I have a video that has broader appeal that gets significantly above average views I can see a nearly exponential increase in ad revenue as I tap into a group of viewers less likely to be using adblock. So for some creators I can see an LLM summary crushing their ability to monetize by having their views eliminated. If people are searching for these things, there is market demand for them to exist. This is introducing a middle man that skims off the top of that market.

Litost 3y ago

This would seem to be what might be variously called a Tragedy of the Commons [1], a Multi-Polar Trap [2] or similarly the Prisoner's Dilemma, but at scale [3]. Obviously in the original Tragedy of the Commons, farmers with sheep grazing the common land, the tragedy was that if you didn't try to graze as many sheep as possible, someone else would and so you'd lose out, but because everyone was doing that the commons died out and everyone lost out. (Disclaimer Generalisation) but that would seem to be what's happening here, "everyone" trying to maximise their utility just eats the system and it becomes unsustainable (be that content viewers trying to get content for free, Youtube trying to maximise revenue via maximal advertising, advertisers producing shit ads that I hope nobody ever acts on but then how else does money enter the system?, content creators and AI coders trying to make the best living). Though unlike the original Tragedy of the Commons where everyone suffered equally, there's an interesting irony that the (content creators) who produce the most value (without which nothing else exists) have the least (individual?) power in the relationship probably "die" out first. You could equally point to a similar situation in the music industry or any industry for that matter that doesn't have a strong enough or fast enough feedback loop to detect that the system is eating itself, but also have some ability to act on it. As DanielS points out in the video below it's a coordination problem. If enough individuals in any of the groups defect from maximising their utility the system is stable. Be that content providers providing free content, advertisers giving free money without making you watch adverts, content viewers paying for content so no advertising needed, AI coders not producing a mechanism that summarises videos so people don't watch the videos and hence the adverts so no-one gets paid, <Youtube something>). You can extend this to coordination outside the system, you could argue this is why governments exist to provide a meta-framework that makes it illegal to do something that undermines the system, e.g. by having laws that prevent watching content for free. You could also coordinate this at the meta level, if everyone involved in the problem got together and made sure that everyone was being looked after or say the content creators got together and collectively refused to provide any free content... But obviously in the current system none of this is really possible, the more things change the more they stay the same, this would seem to be the price of progress, the same problems arising over and over just at increasing scales (and stakes). Just see the problem of musicians now back to square one because of streaming... [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcLXqwZJQw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEcLXqwZJQw [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma EDIT: The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't the best example here as prisoner's escaping jail despite doing a crime does have a negative societal impact, just I'm not aware of a better example from Game Theory? TODO: Find a better explanation of Multi-Polar Traps that doesn't refer to Israel or Russia...

duxup 3y ago

It’s the whole internet as far as small payments go. Nobody wants to pay, advertisers pay… we become the product and everyone is upset. I wish there was a small transactions system where I could pay or tip quickly for a view and it is worthwhile for everyone.

Xeoncross 3y ago

Perhaps I simply want to know where I'm headed before I spend 20 minutes of my time. Not all videos do a good job explaining the plot in the first 30 seconds. With this I can get a TL;DR instead of skipping 1/3 through the video to see what it is actually about. Also note, youtube is directing producers to make entertainment-only content and that stuff has very little to summarize. It's viral because it's entertaining, you wouldn't TL;DR it. I think the "Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address" is a perfect example of a link someone sends me that I want to preview before I schedule my time watching it.

mathfailure 3y ago

It looks like making videos became your profession, since you expect monetization of your video views. And I, as a viewer, simply don't want... professional content. I want to watch videos made by hobbyists for the sake of fun and to inform/debate/educate. So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests.

spindle 3y ago
So much this. And also, in many fields there is lots of professional content that's been fully paid for before it hits YouTube - for example, professors make available to the public work that they've already been paid for, and they have no need at all to get paid twice.
AkBKukU 3y ago
> So by installing adblockers and shill-skipping scripts I simply vote for my interests. By not watching the video you would be voting for your interests. By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just "stealing" content and trying to excuse yourself for it by wishing it was something it isn't. The videos aren't put out for free, they are put out with a contract with Youtube to advertise on it. Youtube pays to host and you split the ad revenue when the creator is paid. Your hypothetical successful "hobbiest for the sake of fun" would either not enter the partner program and let Youtube keep all of the ad revenue they will run anyway, or enter the partner program and disable monetization and abuse Youtube for content hosting without delivering anything back to them. Obviously, neither of these happens in practice and if the latter started becoming common the ability to do it would be taken away or other penalties like making the creator pay to host imposed. "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
- mikae1 3y ago
  > By watching the video with adblock and etc. you are just "stealing" content Would you also argue that a TV viewer that goes to the bathroom or the refrigerator in the commercial breaks steals content? Everyone avoids ads if they know how to.

ekianjo 3y ago

Then we can all get back to writing instead. Good.

acyou 3y ago

I am old enough to remember youtube before monetization, like, comment, and subscribe. It was great. Better than it is now. If others remember the dawn of the Internet, it was a similar feel. People definitely did and still do make videos for free, and actually for free in the sense of the improvement of mankind, not "free" but they are still getting some benefit out of it. If you ask me, those videos are much better than the revenue optimized spam videos made by "content creators". Wouldn't be sad to see the current ecosystem go. Yes, people would probably start watching more again if they didn't need to wade through ads and pseudo ads.

kamel3d 3y ago

someone thought TV would kill radio because it has extra dimension but that never happen infact now we have other form of content that share same audio aspect getting more popular like podcasts, what I am trying to say there will always be audience for all kind of content, some people would like to read a summery of the video and there will always be people who want to watch the video instead

dragonwriter 3y ago
> someone thought TV would kill radio because it has extra dimension but that never happen It mostly did in the US (still growing globally, mostly thanks to the developed world.) Oh, the US radio industry still exists its just experiencing a long decline in total and same-station revenues over time. You can probably still find a company making buggy-whips, but that doesn’t mean that the automobile didn’t practically destroy the industry.

hattmall 3y ago

Good! YouTube and video in general sucks as a format for delivering general information. Finding out how to do things has become far more difficult since the idea of making money on videos has polluted all the content. It use to be very simple to find detailed tutorials with images and then many posts of relevant discussion on how to fix any part of a vehicle or many other tasks. The people doing them weren't doing it for money. When I could make my own or improve an existing tutorial I did so. Now everything is keyword spammed YouTube videos that are challenging to consume and rarely provided the needed granularity to actually complete a task. Then the most you can hope for in discussion is a bunch of unrelated or unreplied to comments. Please bring on the death of micro-monetization.

shri_krishna 3y ago
> The people doing them weren't doing it for money Not everyone but plenty were doing it for the money. Using ads on their blogs/sites/forums (heck even Stackoverflow ran on ads only for a long time until they brought in more sources of revenue). But with proliferation of ad blockers, they stopped producing textual content and shifted focus to videos. Now ad blockers have gotten smarter and block ads on video too. So it won't be long until even this format disappears as well. We need to find ways to help creators monetize their knowledge rather than stifling their sources of income to such an extent that they have no other means to earn from it. We did it to books too (piracy). Only music seems to not be affected that much due to streaming rights (though music industry went through a similar phase during Napster Era). > Please bring on the death of micro-monetization. What is the alternative?
t-writescode 3y ago
> It use to be very simple to find detailed tutorials with images and then many posts of relevant discussion on how to fix any part of a vehicle ... The people doing them weren't doing it for money Uh, pardon? This was and continues to be a very well-monetized industry for the major players, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilton_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilton_Company

MiguelX413 3y ago

This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35607574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35607574 Maybe videos just aren't the right format for some things

irrational 3y ago

I feel for you, but I hate videos. In an ideal world, content creators would release both a video version and a text version of their content.

f0ld 3y ago

That’s why UBI is plain needed at this point. Same thing was happening in acedemics ages ago. I write an extensive paper about certain subject and then someone else makes huge loads of money from publishing books on that same subject with slighht twist just enough to evade copyright claim.

aeze 3y ago

> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos. I feel for you, but as someone who made online video content before monetization became a real thing - I'm not sure that's true. The issue is our culture forces people to focus on creating for money instead of creating for the simple pleasure itself.

Barrin92 3y ago
No. Money is what enables ordinary people to produce creative output and feed themselves while not depending on others. We're living in the first time in human history where producing cultural output is now available to most people, rather than a privilege of a minority sponsored by patrons at a royal court or privileged heirs. This is because, not despite the fact, that culture is now a business.
- aeze 3y ago
  Do you think culture being a business should be our end goal?
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    No, it's a means and not an end at all. The goal is to produce the best work you can do, but the fact that working people can turn it into a sustainable business greatly expands who can participate. Someone with a Youtube channel with say 200k subscribers today can make about 2k-4k per month. At the inconvenience of a bunch of ads or sponsors people who could have never done creative work can do it full time now and actually be rewarded for their work.
- account42 3y ago
  > No. Money is what enables ordinary people to produce creative output and feed themselves while not depending on others. Money is the embodiment of being dependent on others. You can't eat money. Money has no use except to exchange for something else. > We're living in the first time in human history where producing cultural output is now available to most people, rather than a privilege of a minority sponsored by patrons at a royal court or privileged heirs. There was some "high art" that wan't available to everyone but saying the majority of cultural output was. Sharing it was just not as efficient as it is today. > This is because, not despite the fact, that culture is now a business. No, it's because copying digital content costs nothing. Also because farming has become efficient enough that we don't actually need everyone to work full time to survive. Not even close to. But we are still stuck in an economic model that is based on trading scarce resources.

dannyw 3y ago

I liked YouTube a lot better when 95% of the channels weren’t trying to make money.

wolfendin 3y ago

Except that I wouldn’t be watching the video in the first place, but google has decide they want to promote videos when I am searching for webpages.

jbverschoor 3y ago

If your video Can be condensed into 20 seconds, you’re just whopping up cream, soo better be funny and/or charismatic. Otherwise you’re just wasting my time. If the Sunday isn’t enough, congrats, people are fine watching your video, including placement/ads. Even if you block them or have YouTube premium, placement will be seen, and should be paid for. I never clicked on Athletic greens, nordvpn, but I know about them

t-writescode 3y ago
Ironically, TikTok allows and encourages such incredibly short form content xD

EGreg 3y ago

I’ll go further Soon there will be no demand for human labor at all when it comes to online content. There will be a glut of content and for something custom, people will want to simply ask AI to generate what they want, at scale.

MrPatan 3y ago

> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos. Deal!

kazinator 3y ago

> every possible method that allows making quality Youtube content sustainable is becoming impossible Is it impossible to stop the rambling so that people don't have to make comments like: "actual content matching the title starts at 0:47"? Often, the rambling doesn't have anything to do with sponsors or ads. It's just a very long-winded introduction of the topic, or some video set-up that should have been cut out, or rambling about their channel and previous video (perhaps recapping some previous topic that is not pertinent to this video).

ta8903 3y ago

>Everyone complains about the ads, so they install adblock. - Ads become worthless on Youtube for smaller creators, so they start taking sponsorships. What percentage of youtube watchers use adblock? I doubt it's more than 5. And for sponsorblock, I can't see it being more than 0.1%. Nowhere close to them being "worthless", pretty sure it's just creators wanting more revenue streams, because why not?

gtsop 3y ago

You had me until this: > If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos. Nope! The correct sentence is: If you stop watching videos, there will be no profit into making the videos. The reason to make them still exists: sharing knowledge. You have to ubderstand that all digital products are inherently repulsed by the market economy because of the 0 cost to reproduce. The history of the monetization problems of video, music, software and anything digital reflects the attempt to lure them back into the market. Up to one degree you can do it, but it is inevitable that in the long term you won't be able to make money out of digital products as easily as you do with classic "physical" ones.

Hard_Space 3y ago

A huge number of instructional videos would be far better-served in an illustrated post on Substack. For instance, there are a ton of Stable Diffusion instruction videos that feature essential code and other text-based information which is very hard to make usable with video content. In many cases I have had to download the video and export it raw in AviDemux in order to try and glean the text-based content from the source. But Substack doesn't have the same sweet 'influencer' ecostructure, so many creators and posters would rather put a tute in the wrong medium and get the 'follower' benefit than suit the material to the medium.

t-writescode 3y ago
I imagine there are orders of magnitude more: * Minecraft tutorial videos * "how to fix your _____ in your apartment" videos than there are informational/educational/tutorial videos about Stable Diffusion.
- Hard_Space 3y ago
  Well, I wouldn't necessarily agree with the numbers. But I certainly would rather see a washer being changed in a YT video than explained in Substack, I grant you that.
- account42 3y ago
  Game tutorials are also almost always better in text + image form.

naraga 3y ago

I did not know about this service. I just used it for bunch of videos i have in my "to watch list" which is basically pile of shame of material i never get to watch for reasons like questionable useful information density or in complexity of the topic. It helped me to select those i really want to watch and i watched them. Imho this is godsend for creators. Unless you are just click-baiting and luring into watching something that could be summed up into 2 sentences just to go over you list of sponsors.

HWR_14 3y ago

It sounds like people don't like videos with ads, sponsors, plugs for patreon or overly long fluff. So those videos will no longer get made and instead other videos will. I'm sorry that your style of video seems to be becoming less popular for you personally, but it sounds like the future videos being made will be better for me.

layer8 3y ago

If a TLDR is an adequate replacement for watching a video, then maybe that video shouldn’t exist in the first place. On the other hand, TLDRs can be useful, and arguably the video description on YouTube should be exactly that.

des1nderlase 3y ago

Part that I dont understand, whenever new tech comes up why affected dont use it at their own advantage. Why don't creators don't use it to create their own (better) summarization (for example as a short video), and work with (new) aggregators? Do you think that AI summarization is better than your own, of your own video? If there is a value in summarized version, create it and leverage it.

listenallyall 3y ago

Just curious how you consume news? Do you pay any subscriptions to NYTimes, WSJ, or any regional or local news sites? Do you have ad blockers on when you browse?

lobocinza 3y ago

Your perspective is valid and this will hurt creators but a bit of "market destruction" can be positive. TLDRs tools aren't silver bullets, they will make dark patterns less viable and creators that make short & informative content more attractive.

BeetleB 3y ago

> If you stop watching videos, there will be no reason to make the videos. I had a happy life pre-Youtube. I don't think the world will be a worse place if 99% of Youtube videos disappear because they are not viable to make.

dzonga 3y ago

people doing dumb shit, because they can instead of asking "why" ? literally short-terminism. next thing you know - all those educational videos on youtube gone. the only other content will be 3 minute garbage snippets on tik tok. read books

cultureswitch 3y ago

I believe this tool can be useful to quickly go through very bad quality tutorial videos. If you really can't find the information in text form somewhere else.

mbrochh 3y ago

I see no way to avoid this. There is simply too much content out there. I have created this summarizer for myself last week and my productivity went through the roof. My Youtube Watchlist shrank from 50 videos, some of them being in there for more than a year, to zero. In all cases, the summary that I got was perfectly fine and satisfied my curiosity about the topic. We have to learn how to deal with this new world. People want raw information, they don't want to look at a talking heads artificially spreading out that information into 30-60 minute videos when the actual facts can be summed up and consumed in 20 seconds.

SergeAx 3y ago

If the creator delivers value to viewers - they will find a way to pay for it. If it is just a time filler to push down audience throat using recommendation algorithms - world will be a better place without it.

account42 3y ago

Good. I'm tired of commercialized content. Feel free to stop creating. There will be others left who do it without financial motive.