Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I mean, people are bad at editing. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I've written a long letter instead." I don't think it's a conspiracy.

I definitely write super long things when I consciously make the decision to not spend much time on something. Meanwhile, I've been working on a blog post for the better part of 2 years because it's too long, but doesn't cover everything I want to discuss. If you want people to retain the content, you have to pare it down to the essentials! This is hard work.

View on HN

> I mean, people are bad at editing. "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I've written a long letter instead." I don't think it's a conspiracy.

Making a long video isn't like writing a rambling letter. It takes work to make 10 minutes of talk out of a 1-minute subject. And mega-popular influencers do this, not just newbs who haven't learned how to edit properly yet.

"Tell me everything you know about Javascript in 1 minute." Figuring out what not to say is the hard part of that question. Rambling into the camera for an hour is easy.

But we're not talking about people taking 10 minutes to summarize a complex topic. We're talking about people taking 10 minutes to deliver 30 seconds of simple, well-delineated info.

This is something that happens a lot. I'll Google a narrow technical question that can be answered in three lines of text--there's literally nothing more of value to say about it--and all the top hits are 5+ minute videos. That doesn't happen by accident.

There's certainly a wide gamut of creators out there, and the handymen I've seen have videos like you mentioned. I imagine the complaints above are about the far more commercialized channels that do in fact model their videos after YT's algorithm.

It doesn't have to be a literal conspiracy. Why do you reject the possibility that people and organizations are reacting to very real and concrete financial incentives which clearly exist?

Certainly there are a lot of people that stretch their videos out to put in more ads, but not everyone with a long video is playing some metrics optimization game. They're just bad at editing.

I think the situation that people run into is something like "how do I install a faucet" and they are getting someone who does it for a living explaining it for the first time. Explaining it for the first time is what makes it tough to make a good video. Then there are other things like "top 10 AskReddit threads that I feel like stealing from this week" and those are too long because they are just trying to get as much ad revenue as possible. The original comment was about howtos specifically, and I think you are likely to run into a lot of one-off channels in those cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com