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> I've turned 12 minute videos back into the 5 phrases news it was based on.

Why not read the original news?

Okay, there are many reasons why you might not want to do that, such as ads, tracking, having to pay for a subscription if you only want one article, and just plain boredom. I wasn't trying to call you out, it was more of a question for society at large.

Why has it become more appealing to have a "content creator" turn 5 phrases of news into a 12 minute video and then have an LLM convert it back, rather than reading the 5 phrases?



It's not that it's appealing. For example, I wanted to learn how to bend notes on harmonica, but it wasn't working. That's not something you can really understand without video, yet most tutorials are 5-15 minutes long and only show the actual technique at some random point in ~30 seconds (just search 'how to bend on harmonica' and see). So I take the transcript t check whether it's a method I've already tried or something new worth watching, and I also get an extra explainer of the technique in text.

Also, with videos like "what X said about situation Y in discourse Z". Sometimes you're just curious, and you can't realistically extract that efficiently from a full one-hour speech on a geolocked, untranscribed mass-media website, so it's easier to summarize the transcript of the 12 min video directly.

As for why everything is 12 minutes long, it's most likely because content creation isn't optimized to teach you anything or be useful, it's optimized to maximize watch time so platforms can serve more ads to you. The pattern is: I got you intrigued in something; you want the answer? pay me your time.


Exactly. Those tutorial videos are fine if you are completely new to a topic, but if you are searching for something more advanced, then getting through all those introductory videos or those pretending to be advanced is so frustrating.




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