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TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

tldw.tube

101–110 of 213 posts

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#101
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a natural evolution of more people watching on their TVs and Mobile. Long slop and short slop with nothing in between. Must adapt to the TV and phone brain rot zombies.

Non-fiction text isn't that different. You have 5 to 10 minute blog/article reads and 250 page books from publishers with not a lot in between. (Yes, you can and I have, self-published books of an intermediate length but publishers don't generally want anything under 250 pages or so.)

You're reading the wrong non-fiction books then. Find books that are closer to academia than whatever you find in the non-fiction shelf of an airport bookstore.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#102
post #84

Seems to use gpt-4o under the hood. I wonder if using Deepseek would make any difference in quality. I used to have nice and detailed summaries with this app lasting many paragraphs. It used to be totally free and you could submit as many links as you wanted. However they started forcing you to wait dozens of hours between summaries or pay for credits. I haven't found a YouTube summarizer as high quality since. https…

[dead]

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#103

What if we summarize all the information in the world into a few hundred volumes of human knowledge, then summarize those into a 10,000 pages book, then that into a 10 long form essays, then those into a 100,000 chars blog post, then that into a pamphlet and finally we summarize one more time into a single tweet.

Tried asking Claude to do that, ended up with something pretty beautiful:

Everything is made of atoms & energy, life evolves, math describes reality, knowledge builds on itself, humans need each other & Earth to survive – test ideas, learn from mistakes, be kind, stay curious.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#104
I use YouTube's transcript feature or 2x speed for slow talkers.

Especially with political commentary many YouTubers stretch their content or talk slowly for more ad deliveries. It is annoying, because often there is an important five minute section hidden in a one hour video.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#105
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the op but the extension I'm using adds 3 very mportant features : * default to my preferred speed (2×) * keyboard shortcuts to change speed on the fly as needed * arbitrary speeds up to 4×

> keyboard shortcuts to change speed on the fly as needed Speed up: > Slow down: <

Undiscoverable, and not configurable.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#106

What if we summarize all the information in the world into a few hundred volumes of human knowledge, then summarize those into a 10,000 pages book, then that into a 10 long form essays, then those into a 100,000 chars blog post, then that into a pamphlet and finally we summarize one more time into a single tweet.

Not a single tweet, but 10 brief sentences, as per the AI overlords: 1. The universe is vast, mostly empty, and runs on fundamental laws that we barely understand but exploit well. 2. Life is a self-replicating, entropy-defying phenomenon that emerged through chemistry, evolved through selection, and adapts through intelligence. 3. Humans are social primates who dominate the planet through cooperation, tool-making, s…

nice lifr tldr

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#108
Interestingly, YouTube also lends itself for this sort of thing for movies. You can watch scenes from movies and get the gist, while only spending ~30min on a movie. It's a great way to watch mediocre movies - they're not so horrible (1), and you do get the entertainment value without being exposed to the shlocky-est parts.

(1) Eg, if you skip the beach scene, Terminator Dark Fate is... palatable! But yeah, the reasons for mediocrity typically still shine through a bit.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#109

The sweet spot of most YouTube videos was supposedly under 10 minutes. What happened? These days, the typical YouTube videos are almost 30 minutes long. I'm fine with documentaries and the like. Is there a way to bring back the idea that under 10-minute videos work the best?

8 minutes is the cutoff for "mid-roll" ads (you can insert ad breaks into the middle of your content, not just the beginning and end).

But people also realized, especially in the past couple years, YouTube seemed to tweak the algorithm to favor watch time more strongly than in the past, so people started "fluffing up" videos to 20, 30+ minutes. As long as they could get a click with a decent thumbnail and title, and enough people to watch for at least a few minutes, the average watch time would go up, which was a very positive signal. Plus, they could insert like 3+ ad breaks (some big creators insert 6+!) and make more money.

However, in the past year it seems like YouTube's tweaked the algorithm again to not favor watch time as strongly over some other metrics, leading to shorter videos being able to get more views sometimes (and not just music videos). (But they're still "less monetizable".

I think this is why podcasting (and especially extremely long podcasts) have gotten so popular. A few thousand viewers watching for 2 hours gives a lot more ad revenue (especially if you fill in that space with read ads) than like 1 million views on a 3 minute clip.

Re: TL;DW: Too Long; Didn't Watch Distill YouTube Videos to the Relevant Information

#110
What is really cool about this is that my attention span is kept after reading the summary.

Like the following video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JBkAKCJJuFQ

I am not getting emotionally invested to the point of losing the end focus of the speaker. Actually now I am looking forward to it.

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