7 ms·

Side-note: I watch quite a lot of Youtube videos in this space, and while I quite liked the presenter and the project, I've rarely watched a video with more 'fl

by mft_ 3y ago

Side-note: I watch quite a lot of Youtube videos in this space, and while I quite liked the presenter and the project, I've rarely watched a video with more 'fluff' padding out the content. There were multiple sections of music and irrelevant images that stretched out to 30-40 second each which did nothing but waste my time. At least they're easy to skip. I get that not everyone wants a dense information-packed how-to video - and indeed, a lot of DIY creators (Colin Furze, for example) seem to have gradually trended away from this style over time. It may therefore be that trying to please the Youtube algorithm ('all hail the algorithm') can drive video producers in counter-intuitive directions, but I really hope that this is an outlier trying to boost their video length, and not the sign of yet more things to come.

KolmogorovComp 3y ago
I also noticed it but it the end didn’t mind, as it’s clearly an entertainment video and not a how-to and the ‘fluff’ was pleasurable.
iamflimflam1 3y ago
I was going to suggest that this might have been to get the video over the 8 minute limit which triggers mid rolls adverts. But the video is almost 20 minutes long..
Yadayadaaaa 3y ago
He did this for fun and made a video about it. Based on his posting history it doesn't seem that he is playing anything just wanna make sure that his work gets visibility (thumbnail)
rmuratov 3y ago
These were panoramas of Tbilisi, Georgia. I didn’t expect to see them either and thought that the author was somehow connected with Georgia.
- SPACE_LAWYER 3y ago
  He lives in Tbilisi, he talks about it in other videos
boredumb 3y ago
I enjoy some of the fluffier tech content because I can usually trick my wife into watching them with me.
puppymaster 3y ago
good god he built this, it's his channel so he can video it however he wants. i dont understand the point of this comment. why are you questioning the video length and supposedly intention behind it? just skip it or don't watch.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  People like to complain, lol. It’s a travesty the grandparent is the top comment. Such entitlement. The author also has a patreon for any interested https://www.patreon.com/workshopnation https://www.patreon.com/workshopnation
  - thisOtterBeGood 3y ago
    So let's complain about people that are complaining, that's much better. Surely noone can complain about that.
    - nativeit 3y ago
      Why do you feel the need to complain about the people complaining about the people complaining? Just let them complain in peace!
- bilekas 3y ago
  I can't speak for OP, but I did comment how it also made my feel a bit weird, I get suspicious given the amount of shills/plants large companies will create as 'spontaneous' social media success people. Its used to create a more authentic connection to a person who then shills the brand they've been planted by. Prevalent or not, the ide gives off creepy vibes to me personally .
  - flkenosad 3y ago
    Sounds like you people just lack a solid attention span mixed with a little paranoia. There's absolutely nothing "creepy" about that video.
aaronharnly 3y ago
His about page ( https://www.thomasburns.net/about.html https://www.thomasburns.net/about.html ) says that he worked for 20 years in the motion picture industry. There are some pretty cool pieces in his gallery page: https://www.thomasburns.net https://www.thomasburns.net So I'd hazard that he just likes making beautiful and entertaining videos in addition to making beautiful and entertaining devices.
- throwuwu 3y ago
  It’s also a rather traditional format outside of YouTube. I didn’t fault him for it, it’s nice to see that kind of presentation sometimes instead of some presenter talking non stop for ten minutes.
  - lawlessone 3y ago
    "instead of some presenter talking non stop for ten minutes." Nothing i love more in Youtube videos when the person showing their idea/what they made/ their guide etc opens with "anyway lets get into it"
pmx 3y ago
I really enjoyed the "fluff", especially when he first powered up the CRT and went into that montage.
bilekas 3y ago
> I've rarely watched a video with more 'fluff' padding out the content. There were multiple sections of music and irrelevant images that stretched out to 30-40 second each which did nothing but waste my time. At least they're easy to skip. I felt the same way but didn't want to comment as it felt a bit rude, I even want to see his profile because the amount of production 'fluff' seemed excessive for a relatively low 84k subscriber count. A low amount of videos (14 right now) and ~80% of the video views on this one, it feels weird. All in all, interesting video and at least he pointed out the elephant in the room about merging to some GPT model.
- wholinator2 3y ago
  Well, to comment on the 80% thing, that's usually how these algorithms go. Someone makes video after video gaining some to little traction. And then they make their first video that scrapes above the margin, gets posted somewhere, gains traction and becomes vastly more popular than their other videos. What we're witnessing is this person's largest video yet, i mean it got posted here, and we're all discussing it. As for the disproportionally produced nature of it, sometimes smaller creators who have money to spend will pay producers, editors, artists to help them on their video. These people have a portfolio that they advertise and they sell their services with some personality. Either this individual has experience video editing and has created all the fluff themselves for some reason, or the person has enough money to spend they dicided to hire a professional editor, who has made all these sections and spliced them into the video. Possibly the creator gave the editor a minimum length to produce and not enough real footage. Possible this exact thing happened but the creator and editor are the same person. Youtube has changed a lot in the past 5 years. There a huge industry of video editors and artists who support the professionalization of even first time youtube creators, as the bar is raised ever higher and higher to be heard above the noise
moffkalast 3y ago
> all hail the algorithm Superfast Matt reference?
- mft_ 3y ago
  Yep :) (For me, a wonderful example of a channel that almost perfectly balances information and entertainment. One of only ˜2-3 channels that make me want to drop what I'm doing, whenever I see a new video has been posted.)
  - sgt 3y ago
    Superfast matt also has a way of squeezing in a tiny joke in the last 0.5 seconds of a sentence.
    - moffkalast 3y ago
      All hail Matt, and his Matt's linkage.
zzzcsgo 3y ago
[flagged]
zoeysmithe 3y ago
We don't talk about this enough but those kinds of techniques are just manipulation techniques, the same way movies and tv are designed to affect our senses and emotion (rising music, etc). They exist to short-circuit our logical minds and appeal to the emotional parts of our minds to create attachment and familiarity and sympathy with the content and creator. Which is fine if that's what you're asking for. I dislike that you're being criticized. In a technical forum we should be demanding more efficient uses of our time and less manipulation and more facts-based presentation. I feel a little sorry for people who grew up in the youtube influencer age. These techniques are totally normalized for them and I don't think they realize how deeply manipulative your average popular youtuber is. A lot of us just want a fact-sheet kind of thing that is neurodiverse and "busy technical person" friendly. The marketing-style media is really meant for executives and potential customers. I always shy away from those kind of presentations, find them hard to focus on, get impatient, and just google for a fact sheet, credible review, or technical reddit posting or other text-based info. And if there is video, it should be justified. Like a short clip illustrating something that is hard to explain or appreciate otherwise. The other big bonus is how easily I can copy and paste these text items, make a bulleted list, etc to share with other busy people. "Hey Boss, check out this robot project, I think we can try that here," is going to be an easier sell with a page of text and some photos than "Hey Boss, here's a 40 minute video of a robot project." I can't stress how badly the move from a text based internet to a video-based one has badly hurt people like me. I'm autistic with adhd and the constant demands to "hey just watch this video if you want to learn this technology," is just too much. I seek out text tutorials with screenshots or code snippets or whatever. I think we're becoming what happened to the boomers. That is to say the rise of TV, TV news, etc moved them way from books and newspapers that were far less centralized and had more potential for merit, variety, and lower barriers to entry. For someone like me, I could never be a slick youtube video producer, but I could write a good hack-a-day article. Why should the former have more merit? Why should we be applauding slick production techniques outside the ability of nearly all technical people? I'm sorry if this rant is going odd places, but honestly, the mass videofication of all things has incredible downsides, but is incredibly profitable hence we're stuck with it, but we should be able to call it out if we are displeased with it.
- throwuwu 3y ago
kortex 3y ago
Just run SponsorBlock or similar then. If you still want to support creators, you can tune the plugin to only skip filler, or as I do, just prompt with a Skip button and I can choose to jump as needed.
- dtx1 3y ago
  It makes no difference to the creator when you use sponsorblock to skip sponsored segements, unless you intend to buy things they are affiliated with.
MarkusWandel 3y ago
The "fluff" is really stylish and I don't mind it. What is a pity is that there isn't more of a demo of the robot, operating. It's nice "technopunk", it doesn't have to be practical. He himself points out that the plain old Echo device does the job and the bot just adds personality. So using an actual CRT just as an oscilloscope display is just fine!
squirrel23 3y ago
I completely get where you are coming from on this. However, I do find it enjoyable when you allow yourself to get lost in, for instance, a great opera song accompanied with cool images. There is beauty in letting go of this guilt for not being 100% productive all the time.
jareklupinski 3y ago
if you install SponsorBlock and enable "skip to Highlight", you'll see a button that skips you right to the 'meat' of the video i use this to see if the rest of the fluff is worth it :)
pengaru 3y ago
YouTube is insufferable for me without youtube-dl/yt-dlp and watching with a proper player like mpv locally. Skipping around without a bunch of buffering lag and ability to increase volume up to 300% in poorly recorded/mixed videos alone are game changers. The signal:noise ratio of the content there is awful, it requires better tools than what they provide for obvious reasons.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pvg 3y ago
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. [...] Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. The trouble with such 'side notes' is they end up eating the thread and are effectively completely unrelated to the thing being presented.

by mft_ 3y ago

KolmogorovComp 3y ago

I also noticed it but it the end didn’t mind, as it’s clearly an entertainment video and not a how-to and the ‘fluff’ was pleasurable.

iamflimflam1 3y ago

I was going to suggest that this might have been to get the video over the 8 minute limit which triggers mid rolls adverts. But the video is almost 20 minutes long..

Yadayadaaaa 3y ago

He did this for fun and made a video about it. Based on his posting history it doesn't seem that he is playing anything just wanna make sure that his work gets visibility (thumbnail)

rmuratov 3y ago

These were panoramas of Tbilisi, Georgia. I didn’t expect to see them either and thought that the author was somehow connected with Georgia.

SPACE_LAWYER 3y ago
He lives in Tbilisi, he talks about it in other videos

boredumb 3y ago

I enjoy some of the fluffier tech content because I can usually trick my wife into watching them with me.

puppymaster 3y ago

good god he built this, it's his channel so he can video it however he wants. i dont understand the point of this comment. why are you questioning the video length and supposedly intention behind it? just skip it or don't watch.

endisneigh 3y ago
People like to complain, lol. It’s a travesty the grandparent is the top comment. Such entitlement. The author also has a patreon for any interested https://www.patreon.com/workshopnation https://www.patreon.com/workshopnation
- thisOtterBeGood 3y ago
  So let's complain about people that are complaining, that's much better. Surely noone can complain about that.
  - nativeit 3y ago
    Why do you feel the need to complain about the people complaining about the people complaining? Just let them complain in peace!
bilekas 3y ago
I can't speak for OP, but I did comment how it also made my feel a bit weird, I get suspicious given the amount of shills/plants large companies will create as 'spontaneous' social media success people. Its used to create a more authentic connection to a person who then shills the brand they've been planted by. Prevalent or not, the ide gives off creepy vibes to me personally .
- flkenosad 3y ago
  Sounds like you people just lack a solid attention span mixed with a little paranoia. There's absolutely nothing "creepy" about that video.

aaronharnly 3y ago

His about page ( https://www.thomasburns.net/about.html https://www.thomasburns.net/about.html ) says that he worked for 20 years in the motion picture industry. There are some pretty cool pieces in his gallery page: https://www.thomasburns.net https://www.thomasburns.net So I'd hazard that he just likes making beautiful and entertaining videos in addition to making beautiful and entertaining devices.

throwuwu 3y ago
It’s also a rather traditional format outside of YouTube. I didn’t fault him for it, it’s nice to see that kind of presentation sometimes instead of some presenter talking non stop for ten minutes.
- lawlessone 3y ago
  "instead of some presenter talking non stop for ten minutes." Nothing i love more in Youtube videos when the person showing their idea/what they made/ their guide etc opens with "anyway lets get into it"

pmx 3y ago

I really enjoyed the "fluff", especially when he first powered up the CRT and went into that montage.

bilekas 3y ago

> I've rarely watched a video with more 'fluff' padding out the content. There were multiple sections of music and irrelevant images that stretched out to 30-40 second each which did nothing but waste my time. At least they're easy to skip. I felt the same way but didn't want to comment as it felt a bit rude, I even want to see his profile because the amount of production 'fluff' seemed excessive for a relatively low 84k subscriber count. A low amount of videos (14 right now) and ~80% of the video views on this one, it feels weird. All in all, interesting video and at least he pointed out the elephant in the room about merging to some GPT model.

wholinator2 3y ago
Well, to comment on the 80% thing, that's usually how these algorithms go. Someone makes video after video gaining some to little traction. And then they make their first video that scrapes above the margin, gets posted somewhere, gains traction and becomes vastly more popular than their other videos. What we're witnessing is this person's largest video yet, i mean it got posted here, and we're all discussing it. As for the disproportionally produced nature of it, sometimes smaller creators who have money to spend will pay producers, editors, artists to help them on their video. These people have a portfolio that they advertise and they sell their services with some personality. Either this individual has experience video editing and has created all the fluff themselves for some reason, or the person has enough money to spend they dicided to hire a professional editor, who has made all these sections and spliced them into the video. Possibly the creator gave the editor a minimum length to produce and not enough real footage. Possible this exact thing happened but the creator and editor are the same person. Youtube has changed a lot in the past 5 years. There a huge industry of video editors and artists who support the professionalization of even first time youtube creators, as the bar is raised ever higher and higher to be heard above the noise

moffkalast 3y ago

> all hail the algorithm Superfast Matt reference?

mft_ 3y ago
Yep :) (For me, a wonderful example of a channel that almost perfectly balances information and entertainment. One of only ˜2-3 channels that make me want to drop what I'm doing, whenever I see a new video has been posted.)
- sgt 3y ago
  Superfast matt also has a way of squeezing in a tiny joke in the last 0.5 seconds of a sentence.
  - moffkalast 3y ago
    All hail Matt, and his Matt's linkage.

zzzcsgo 3y ago

[flagged]

zoeysmithe 3y ago

We don't talk about this enough but those kinds of techniques are just manipulation techniques, the same way movies and tv are designed to affect our senses and emotion (rising music, etc). They exist to short-circuit our logical minds and appeal to the emotional parts of our minds to create attachment and familiarity and sympathy with the content and creator. Which is fine if that's what you're asking for. I dislike that you're being criticized. In a technical forum we should be demanding more efficient uses of our time and less manipulation and more facts-based presentation. I feel a little sorry for people who grew up in the youtube influencer age. These techniques are totally normalized for them and I don't think they realize how deeply manipulative your average popular youtuber is. A lot of us just want a fact-sheet kind of thing that is neurodiverse and "busy technical person" friendly. The marketing-style media is really meant for executives and potential customers. I always shy away from those kind of presentations, find them hard to focus on, get impatient, and just google for a fact sheet, credible review, or technical reddit posting or other text-based info. And if there is video, it should be justified. Like a short clip illustrating something that is hard to explain or appreciate otherwise. The other big bonus is how easily I can copy and paste these text items, make a bulleted list, etc to share with other busy people. "Hey Boss, check out this robot project, I think we can try that here," is going to be an easier sell with a page of text and some photos than "Hey Boss, here's a 40 minute video of a robot project." I can't stress how badly the move from a text based internet to a video-based one has badly hurt people like me. I'm autistic with adhd and the constant demands to "hey just watch this video if you want to learn this technology," is just too much. I seek out text tutorials with screenshots or code snippets or whatever. I think we're becoming what happened to the boomers. That is to say the rise of TV, TV news, etc moved them way from books and newspapers that were far less centralized and had more potential for merit, variety, and lower barriers to entry. For someone like me, I could never be a slick youtube video producer, but I could write a good hack-a-day article. Why should the former have more merit? Why should we be applauding slick production techniques outside the ability of nearly all technical people? I'm sorry if this rant is going odd places, but honestly, the mass videofication of all things has incredible downsides, but is incredibly profitable hence we're stuck with it, but we should be able to call it out if we are displeased with it.

throwuwu 3y ago

kortex 3y ago

Just run SponsorBlock or similar then. If you still want to support creators, you can tune the plugin to only skip filler, or as I do, just prompt with a Skip button and I can choose to jump as needed.

dtx1 3y ago
It makes no difference to the creator when you use sponsorblock to skip sponsored segements, unless you intend to buy things they are affiliated with.

MarkusWandel 3y ago

The "fluff" is really stylish and I don't mind it. What is a pity is that there isn't more of a demo of the robot, operating. It's nice "technopunk", it doesn't have to be practical. He himself points out that the plain old Echo device does the job and the bot just adds personality. So using an actual CRT just as an oscilloscope display is just fine!

squirrel23 3y ago

I completely get where you are coming from on this. However, I do find it enjoyable when you allow yourself to get lost in, for instance, a great opera song accompanied with cool images. There is beauty in letting go of this guilt for not being 100% productive all the time.

jareklupinski 3y ago

if you install SponsorBlock and enable "skip to Highlight", you'll see a button that skips you right to the 'meat' of the video i use this to see if the rest of the fluff is worth it :)

pengaru 3y ago

YouTube is insufferable for me without youtube-dl/yt-dlp and watching with a proper player like mpv locally. Skipping around without a bunch of buffering lag and ability to increase volume up to 300% in poorly recorded/mixed videos alone are game changers. The signal:noise ratio of the content there is awful, it requires better tools than what they provide for obvious reasons.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pvg 3y ago

Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead. [...] Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. The trouble with such 'side notes' is they end up eating the thread and are effectively completely unrelated to the thing being presented.