But.
Two weeks ago there was a small video on Discord that crashed the client when you played it. Here's a 8m30s long video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuBNQ6tiNcI
tl;dw: they used ffmpeg to stitch 2 videos with a different aspect ratio together, so it crashes chromium. That's the whole explanation, and this guy spends SIX MINUTES of blowing hot air before getting to the point. It's absolutely infuriating, I genuinely felt robbed of my time.
I could never bring myself to say it at the start of a YouTube video but I added it at the end and saw improvements in the analytics from videos that had the reminder versus not.
My intuition would be that you should use the phrasing that is authentic to your channel and voice. Most of my content was reading quotes from government reports, academic research, and news reports and then explaining what I thought about it in a calm monotone. (My vocal inspiration was Sam Harris). At the end of my videos I said "If you enjoyed this video please let me know by clicking the 'Like' button. If you'd like to see more content in a similar style, please subscribe." Which I felt represented the tone and pace of my videos.
On the other hand, if your channel is faster paced, more energetic, focused on being funny etc, then you probably should come up with a wacky or creative way to say "like and subscribe." I don't think anyone is going to subscribe just for how clever your saying is, but it will be more consistent with the tone of the channel. I think the main benefit of saying "Like and subscribe" is just to remind people to do that. Some people will be watching your video and enjoying it but just need an extra push to think "Oh yeah, I should subscribe, I do like these videos."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sponsorblock/
By the way, with a proper youtube-dl config in place you don't even have to open the browser:
$ mpv 'never gonna give you up'
Not everyone understands those cues, and of the ones that understand them not everyone can process them as quickly.
Honestly? Because I was expecting to hear something interesting at any moment. When I saw the length, I expected to see a technical explanation, a step-by-step how-to, a live example with the ffmpeg CLI. Anything remotely interesting.
What I absolutely did not expect was a 6 minutes long "introduction" out of a 8:30 minutes video. All of that to finally say "it's 2 videos stitched together, like and subscribe"
A friend of mine who has an youtube channel once explained to me that he had to add more content to one of his videos which otherwise would end up being too short, since there's a minimum length before youtube can monetize the video. IIRC, the minimum length was something like 8 minutes.
When it is, skip back a bit to find the start of that segment.
As with others, I make heavy use of mpv to (mostly listen to, occasionally actually watch) video, on YT and elsewhere. It's exceedingly good at pulling media references out of random URLs, though not bulletproof.
Earlier today I had to scan through the downloaded HTML to find, and fix, the audio URL for a This American Life episode covering Reality Winner. Then I rapidly scanned through the downloaded audio looking for the start of the segment I was interested in --- 37 minutes into a 1 hour programme.
Much as you don't have to read an entire book to find the chapter or passage of interest (I'm mostly referring to non-fiction here), you don't need to placidly sit through full audio or video sessions either.
You can, of course, also repeat sections of particular interest.
Honestly, my heart wants it to be true.
That’s why I’m curious if it’s possible for creators to make 1-2 sentence videos that are profitable enough for the platform those videos are on that they can pay the creators well.
Imgur includes a fair bit of video with roughly a 60s cap.
Monetisation seems mostly to be based around branding / influencing.
Now it’s instagram, so why not just use instagram?
By moving away from their market differentiator they made themselves replaceable.
I use Movist Pro (Mac-only) for videos that work with youtube-dl. Once you set it up it's like magic. I can set keys for any speed or jump size I desire.
I have gotten pretty good at watching fast and jumping around to see if this vid is worth a look, or will cover the information I need. When I'm away from my computer and have to wade through vids on another machine it's like torture.
By the way, the modern internet is way better than the 1995- 2005 version. Everything you could want is there, you just have to learn how to get past the fluff and BS. I have fond memories of 1997 internet because for the first time I could access so much information from home, but I would never go back.
Might make a good browser plugin. Binary search, but for video. Tweaking the exact ratios might be an interesting problem. I'm thinking (no evidence!) that 30% for a forward jump and 15% for a backward jump might work better. Large jumps forward until you hit something interesting, then small jumps back to find the start.
The funniest part of that meme is that YouTube implemented a (now obviously removed) "wadsworth" query parameter that skipped the first 30% of a video.
Do you have link to that video? It sounds more (read: at all) interesting than the one you linked.
Plus it sucks trying to copy code to reuse
Which such tools do you recommend?
And - hey! If the only solution was in a video snap off a quick blog post! You can even link the video and maybe it’ll help someone in the future.
Modern web has become less and less “write” and more “read” and that contributes to the downfall imo.
It would be nice if instead of websites being forced to display cookie banners, what if they were forced to support plain HTML/CSS only mode? Not only would it increase privacy and prevent things like Canvas fingerprinting (oh wait, that’s what commercial interests use), it would also put content first.
JavaScript began as a way to add dynamism to HTML which CSS now can handle by itself.
What we need is a web framework that provides good fallback modes.
My challenge to folks: try to use HTML/CSS only to create interesting and dynamic websites which focus on content-first. And give that content good printer-friendly support :)
And for monetization, sell a product on there of some kind. Provide something useful. Don’t hide behind a barrage of ads. There’s always another way!
The worst are the ones that obviously scrape content from StackOverflow and then reword it.
> It's safer to search directly on Q&A sites or specific forums with the `site:` operator than to try to get lucky with random search results.
This indeed, and DuckDuckGo automates it further with their bang shortcuts like !w for Wikipedia, or !reddit, !ebay, etc.
But even though DuckDuckGo has mostly shaped up to be a good alternative to Google (I rarely use !g anymore), it's vulnerable to SEO tricks in its own right. Searching specific sites helps a lot, but it shouldn't have to be that way.
Videos containing the same information still somehow manage to be worse, though, no argument about that.
If you’re talking about original man pages from volume 1 of the Unix manual (as found on e.g. http://man.cat-v.org/unix_v7), then yes, they indeed make superb reference documentation. However, even their authors recognized that reference documentation alone is not enough, and thus included a collection of (much less streamlined) papers on various parts of the system in volume 2 as a sort of extended introduction and rationale. Reading man pages, even ones as good as the v7 ones, when you want to achieve a specific goal but are not familiar with the system in general, is an absolutely miserable experience. (I imagine it was worse at the time, when OSes were much more diverse.) Man pages are not the be-all and end-all of documentation for the same reason that even the best-written JavaDoc/Doxygen/... reference without standalone prose isn’t.
So, my first caveat is that reference ≠ (comprehensive) introduction, you need both. My second caveat is reference ≠ specification ≠ introduction, thus you actually need all three. When people started to create reimplementations of Unix utilities, it turned out that they were massively underspecified by the man pages. The precise specification is more or less what POSIX is, and it’s significantly less readable than the original man pages even if you also format it as man pages and take out all the extensions. It’s not that original Unix userland lacked specification documents, it’s that their role was served by the source code of the libraries and utilities themselves (for all the copyright problems that it eventually caused). The kernel too, presumably, but people famously thought that wasn’t enough, and thus Lions’s commentary was born.
I mentioned above that the papers from volume 2 also served as a rationale and an annotated bibliography, which is also a good document to have, but probably not as essential as the previous three. I’m also not saying that they all be separate documents: Unix merged the introduction and rationale but separated both from the reference; except for the tutorial, Python manages to merge the introduction and reference for its standard library surprisingly well, but lacks a good specification; the TeXbook tries to be everything at once but is in my opinion not that good at any particular task. What I am saying is that they are all different facets that have to be present in the writing.
My third and final caveat is... Not really a caveat for your statement, but still a problem if you’re a documentation writer: The concise style and general structure of the Unix man pages only works well as long as the individual pieces are simple enough and there is not a lot of them. You can’t write man pages for complex programs; or rather you can, but the format starts to show its limits, as aptly demonstrated by bash(1). It’s probably not a coincidence that Stallman wanted to replace the Spartan man page by the hyperlinked info node. You can say that one oughtn’t make things that are that complex, and I agree, but that’s not the point of view of the documentation writer.
The sequence seems to have been something like: (1) Advertisers: "We'll pay you $2 for a video ad, $1 for an image ad, and $0.20 for a text ad." (2) Google: "We should find a way to create more video ad space."
So it's totally, 100% Google's fault that there is a majority of pointlessly long videos on YouTube
Was going to disagree that it's unfair, but I suppose it arguably is exactly one bit (or ~0.3 orders of magnitude) unfair, since the parties at fault are Google and advertisers jointly, and the parent mentions one out of the two. Not sure how to rigorize that measurement, though.
For example: Put in the URL for that vid (or share-sheet it to the app), and it instantly returns “Click on menu > Item, then select size”
You can usually pull the transcript/subtitles, without watching the video.
Videos were super useful for fixing my toilet.
A 10 minutes video with the usual 'subscribe and hit the bell icon', a word from the sponsor, a long winded introduction and then "click on menu, then click on this item, then select the size".