141–150 of 222 posts
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Sadly, some of the best contents aer 5-10 minutes, I pick up some investing tips from those, although some longer ones can be 2x-ed or seeked to only view a chunk.
Can you share some of these YouTube investing tips?
This post popped up a blocking window before I was even 3 sentences in, so maybe unsurprising that I clicked away in less than 60 seconds. If the author wants people to read whatever it is they have to say, maybe they should not put distractions in front of their writing?
To be fair, you can just ignore TicToc. Okay... maybe you can't. Maybe there are people in your life that won't let you forget it exists. Maybe your job is in communications and you have to get on TicToc (or YouTube or InstaGram or whatever.) 170 million people is about half the U.S. population. And I can't say this without sounding like an elitist pr*k, but it's always seemed like about half the population is below…
> I know it's en vogue to bash new media dealers and clutch our collective pearls. But if traditional media could get these engagement numbers, I can't imagine they wouldn't. At least legacy media wasn’t directly promoting and rewarding antisocial behavior and crimes.
But to your point... yes... gate-keepers can keep out the riffraff. (And I'm not trying to be snarky with that last statement.) Taste-makers can steer the listening public towards some competent art. As a society we tend to swing back and forth between freedom and conformity. We're in a pretty "free" feeling era and the word "conformity" is almost a pejorative. Monoculture is dangerous, but sure, so is letting the moral equivalent of the Manson Family loose on your child's phone. (not implying TikTok is the modern Manson equivalent, just hypothesizing the existence of a really bad player in the digital realm.)
Is there a middle ground? Would we recognize it when we see it?
Do societal leaders and taste makers have a duty or right to discourage the use of media platforms? I always got the impression the reason TikTok was singled out was 'cause it's from China (and Singapore as well somehow.) I would love it if the people who are singling out TikTok for playing fast and loose with our dopamine regulatory system explained how western companies (Facebook, YouTube, Hacker News) aren't.
Feel free to stop reading at this point, if you haven't already. I'm well beyond replying (and mostly agreeing) to (with) your comment. Now I'm just rambling.
I have this memory of a picture of soviet workers sitting in an auditorium listening to classical music. It was around the 40s or 50s so I'm sure it was Tchaikovsky or Shostakovich or Rachmaninoff or Khachaturian. And they had completely blank looks on their faces like "okay. my boss says I have to be here, so I'm here." Me? I can't get enough of these guys and would definitely have a smile on my face if I got to get off work early to listen to them.
But... as taste-makers and culture gate-keepers, would we prefer to force people to consume "high culture" when all they want is TikTok? I mean, I would much rather read Louise Glück than watch Housewives of Some Random Town. (Sorry Glück folks, I'm just not a fan.) But if someone doesn't care for Henry Miller (any one of his books I could read over and over again), I would much rather they not be coerced into reading them. I love W. H. Auden and my spouse loves Bukowski. It's okay to enjoy what you enjoy.
I dunno. I think the article mentioned above seems a little gate-keepery. And I get it that we're worried about how people are being manipulated by media controlled by a foreign political power, but if we're gonna ban TikTok, maybe we should spend at least as much thought about what we're going to replace it with.
Too simple of a narrative. At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradadgate/2025/02/12/launched-... So I think we're seeing more of a bifurcation: in-depth longform videos are becoming 30, 40, 60, even 90 minutes long, whereas anything shorter than 10 minutes is being compressed to 30-60 seconds. The…
Worth mentioning that literally any video under 60 seconds is forced to be a short, which is that stupid type of YouTube video where they remove a bunch of controls and make the overall experience miserable. So maybe that’s pushing longer-form content as well. Some people making 30 second videos moves to 90 second ones to avoid the bad format, this crowds the format and pushes others up as well? Totally talking out o…
I m more annoyed that everything is in portrait. But yeah, there's a dehumanization going on. Speeding up videos to deliver the maximum words per second to the viewer is inhuman. It started as an appeal to ADHD children, but i that meme is overdone, people actually do have attention and still interested in humans, not just what they say.
Somehow the breathless speech pattern they all adopt is really irritating to me. Thats saying something coming from an ADHD person.
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I watched a 2 hour video on the history of computer RPGs, I think it was specific to DND, and found it captivating. Would also like to hear your recs.
I hate this bifurcation. I almost never want 2-hour documentary style videos, yet 1-minute teasers leave me even more dissatisfied. I want 5-minute to 15-minute videos. They can be either overviews or summaries that cover broad stretches or super focused essays that go deeply in depth on just a singular hyper-focused point. Long-form typically means opinionated and written for a lay audience. Filled with unnecessary…
There is no sweet spot. Different people have different preferences. Not every Youtuber needs to make 10 minute videos. Not every Youtuber needs to make hour long videos. It depends on their audience.
If you don't like hour long videos, that's fine. You're not the intended audience. Stop trying to make every content creator abide by your preferences and just look for those who already cater to your preferences.
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They put reading a book and watching slow paced television in the same category, which to me seems like a category error entirely. I see nothing wrong with avoiding slow-paced video… life is short, time is precious. If slow video is not your thing, that’s fine . However, books are a different matter entirely. Not all books are worth reading, but being unable to read any book is definitely a sign that your attention s…
I don't know. I have a hard time reading most books because they are indeed slow-paced. And by "books" I mean novels and fantasy books. But I can read an HN/Reddit discussion of several pages without a problem. Heck, sometimes I spend hours reading a specific subreddit. I like to think that books (novels and fantasy) are low-resolution prose, so the crux of the matter is distributed — mostly useless info — across sev…
For me, the worst part is that it is so hard to go back to previous forms of media. I often delete these short form content apps in an effort to quit them, but it is now so difficult to get engaged with "slower" forms of media. The thing with Tiktok isn't the length of the media, it's just how fast-paced and "catchy" it is. I could watch an hour long fast paced video just fine, but watching a slow paced show, or read…
Try the video speed adjustments. Most sites offer 2x now. Up to 4x is getting around, and that's generally going to be past what most people can understand for speech, even with practice. I do a lot of YouTube long-form content but I do a lot of it at 2x or even 2.5x. There's also a lot of such things that are effectively podcasts with irrelevant video backgrounds, or only rarely relevant video, so you can do somethi…