Wendy NatherDear YouTubers: please shorten your videos. Most of the time you’re just repeating everything five different ways. You do not have to empty your brain on a topic. Just get to the point and then stop. I am not sitting through a 10-minute video for something that could have been a TikTok. (Hint: if someone posts a comment on your video summarizing it or giving a timestamp so nobody has to sit through the whole thing, I’m not the only one who feels it’s too long.)
LAHosken 🇺🇸👀@wendynather b- but the algorithm
soup@wendynather don’t they have to be 10 minutes long to get monetized or something? I don’t quite recall the exact rules
Encursed@hotsoup @wendynather iirc it is now 8 minutes
Popio@wendynather totally agree. but I'm told algorithm rewards on watch time. Gotta sell those ada. #enshitification
I wish almost all of new videos/creators wasn't slop. Poorly edited phone videos with audio so quiet you had to turn volume to max was the best version of you tube.
Richard "mtfnpy" Harman (he/him)@wendynather what genre/topic of YouTube content do you think suffers from this "a short that was stretched out to 10 minutes" trend the most?
I'm curious if you have any perspective into whether it is genre specific or just YouTube overall. Lately I've seen a *lot* of content creators complain that what used to work on the platform has suddenly stopped getting eyeballs, advertisers pull out, and nobody can make ends meet any more.
That along with something I've noticed -- there appear to be a large number of low-subscriber channels (less than 20k) popping up on my homepage, with videos that sometimes are years old, and many times those videos don't particularly seem to be directly targeting my interests.
Capitalism be weird, yo.
@xabean Most often I see it with listicle videos (“top 6 ways to immanentize your eschaton”), and what’s even more annoying is that I guess in the effort to keep those ad dollars flowing, they post “new” videos with the same rehashed content as their older videos.
@wendynather oh, yeah those all feel sketchy to me and I avoid them for being uninformative thinly veiled advertisements for a product. I'm more into edutainment / "I made a thing" videos, but *very explicitly* not the "life hack" style "I made a spot welder out of six car batteries and jumper cables!" Darwin Awards misfits.
David Schuetz ** looking for work **
400 car batteries wired together!!
DrWhoZee@wendynather Just write it down. It’s way easier to parse and focus on the relevant bits. Sigh.
Bill, organizer of stuff@wendynather Or they could write it with words and let me read it at 800 words per minute and just get what I need and move on. 🤷
@wcbdata Indeed. This is why I usually don’t watch videos even at double speed or whatever.
@wendynather Are we old?
@wcbdata I don’t know about you, but I am definitely ancient. You can tell by my use of punctuation.
@wendynather Same, same.
Doug Levin@wcbdata @wendynather I can't abide by having to learn things via video, 1000% prefer to read and so much faster. Yes, I do think we are old - and that is partly (if not mostly) why.
koehntopp ~ :@wendynather
It's all about the ads.
It's all about the ads.
amlor@wendynather Dear youtubers: if your video is less than 30 minutes long, don't post it to youtube. Keep that shit on tiktok or something.
Or even better, post is as text.
Or even better, post is as text.
Greg Bell@wendynather and like when the first part of the video is an ad for the rest of the video. Imagine sitting through a trailer for the movie you are waiting to watch
@ferrix Lichen subscribe!
Stephan Neuhaus@wendynather I am not sitting through a 10-minute video for something that could have been a (searchable!) text file or PDF.
Scott@wendynather asking AI to summarize a video is surprisingly effective. As soon as it seems overly repetitive, I let the AI take over.
@scottswezey I’ll never ask an LLM to summarize anything. It doesn’t pick up on any of the important meanings that I would; it only gives you a shorter version without any analysis. And I know this because I’ve seen “summaries” of my own writing and talks, and they completely miss the points I make. 😉
@wendynather you must be watching different YouTube videos from me. Most of the ones I see seem to take 30 seconds of content and turn it into 10 minutes. The few I’ve spot checked got the relevant details, but I haven’t used it for anything with deeper knowledge or importance.
Martin Boller 
@wendynather “Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”