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The algorithm wanted these "educational" videos to be 10 minutes at first and now it seems to want them to be 20 minutes.

Once I saw that I realised just how padded the content really was and started looking elsewhere.

Other good tells the content is low quality or a bad fit for video are excessive amounts of talking head (should have been a podcast) or stock video clips (it's video, show me something).

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Listening to YouTube on 2x makes it slightly bearable.

But this was also the joke about TED Talks: everyone came away smugly confident they were part of an amazing tide of progress, ignoring any engineering or scaling challenges.

Ten minutes used to be the cutoff where you could provide an interstitial advertisement. This sort of turned into a sort of wive's tale, where people thought the algorithm would push such videos. It's not the case today.

The reason that 20 minute videos are more popular these days is that more people are watching youtube on larger screens, like on their TV on the couch, and so more reliably watch longer videos than in the past.

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