Hacker News Reader

Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

Maybe you have it backwards and the audience is actually on YouTube and not looking for blogs. If so, then it would be sad if this were a blog post and not a video.

Maybe somebody who prefers blog posts to video will write an app that converts videos into blog posts. Seems like that should be doable with modern AI systems. Maybe it could even add and annotate images from the video. It would be an interesting feature for something like Instapaper.

View on HN

> Maybe somebody who prefers blog posts to video will write an app that converts videos into blog posts.

They exist, even ones using LLMs. And they're all pretty terrible. I would absolutely use one because I can't stand getting this sort of information as a video (or even just audio). Being able to have an accurate transcript would make such videos useful to me.

But, so far, I haven't seen one that's even close to good enough.

Yes -- while many people don't want to admit it, and I myself kind of resists it, but YouTube has become a major source of content and knowledge (and increasingly TikTok, especially for younger audience). And there are lots and lots of high quality stuff, not any less worthy of a good reporting coming out of nytimes or New Yorker. It's happening, regardless of whether you want it or not.

Funny I was watching an Asmongold video where he was speculating that most people are functionally illiterate and literally can't read blog posts.

So the audience for blog posts might be even smaller than we think. If so, then a converter probably wouldn't get a lot of use.

That's not speculation, that's just talking stupid shit.

So is it that blogs are dead because Google doesn't surface them in search results anymore?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com