I'm trying to teach myself how to do a revolved cut in Solidworks and your video is 15 minutes of jabbering.

I am pretty sure YouTube is not saving any time for these people. Perhaps they should say 900 fewer hours wasted.

NEED MORE CAFFEINE TO PROCESS!

About the only ones I speed up are some of the folks doing political coverage that seem to speak at 1/4th the speed of a normal human. Maybe they started doing it because they knew people were listening/watching at higher speeds, but it's super annoying for a guy that just wants to hear things at normal, conversational speed. Articulation does not require you to speak at 1/4th normal speed. And even if you're doing it to work against the people trying to watch everything at faster speeds, you're creating a feedback loop of dumbassery by slowing yourself down.

That's because videos are terribly efficient. You used to be able to skim an article in 30 seconds and get all of the important information. Now it's a 45 minute video explaining that the bash command you need is du -sh /path/to/folder

to get the folder size.

Do I need to listen to two podcasters ramble for an hour? No I do not. Not only do I want to play it back at 2x speed. I also want an AI to cut out the 90% of fluff.

The reason is simple. They are used to consuming much more of their information in text form, particularly when communicating. You can read much faster than normal speech rate. So listening to someone actually speak the words is like slow motion. Those of us that grew up having to use the telephone (as in, you know, to talk to someone on the phone), or carrying on conversations in person, were conditioned to that speed, so we don't perceive it as slow compared to reading - they are just two different things.

Now... the younger generations can't hardly carry on actual conversations with people because they are so out of practice and barely learned the skill (I'm talking on average - not all are like that). Have you ever had a voice-only phone conversation with someone under 20? It's weird and awkward, because they don't know the subtle communication cues and timings that make that work when you can't see the other person. The rare times our kids call us voice-only they are saying "Hello?" before we can even answer the phone.

I have a similar issue but somewhat backwards from that. I'm a fast typist, and still use an actual keyboard for most of my messaging and text entry (like this comment on Slashdot). So my handwriting absolutely sucks because I want to try to write information as fast as I can type it.

I listen to podcasts on 1.8x generally. I'm so used to it that on the odd occasion I hear them at normal speed they sound weird to me.

For YouTube and other videos I very commonly nudge it up to 1.1 or 1.25 as available.

"Come on! I don't have all minute!"

[1]YouTube incentivizes videos to be over 10 minutes. [splicedonline.com] Consequently, videos are made longer than they have to be. Watching them in high speed just compensates a problem that YouTube created in the first place.

[1] https://splicedonline.com/why-do-youtubers-make-their-videos-10-minutes/

I'm old. I consume all kinds of content at variable speed depending on how interested I am in it and what I need out of it.

Because I'm *reading* it.

More and more young people *only* listen to and watch videos. You skim some articles? They're doing the same thing, but reading less.

The other factor is, especially on YouTube, videos are garbage. The algorithm/ad model rewards length. There's lots of really interesting, informative stuff on YouTube, but dragged out to an hour for five minute content. It's going to make AI summaries seem way more useful than they should be to the same crowd.

Hey, guys! SlashbotAgent here and today where going to talk about the need for accelerated viewing and listening. Is it real? Is it pervasive? Is it what the cool kids do? Well, you're about to find out cause I'm about to start a deep dive and get into the nitty gritty of it all.

But, first, I want to mention our sponsors, Slurm. Not just another drink, Slurm is the best shit you've ever guzzled. I don't drink anythng else and you shouldn't either.

Now, before we start our deep dive into accelerate viewing and listening, please don't forget to hit the linke and Subscribe buttons below. I really count on those likes and subscribes. Thanks. And, if there's anything you'd like me to cover in these videos, let me know in the comments below and I see about covering them as topics in future videos.

So, it seems that Slashdot broke a story that young people are watching videos and listening to podcasts at accelerated speeds. There's lots of speculation as to why. But the truth will blow your mind. Are you ready? I interviewed a bunch of young people and I asked them why they watch and listen at accelerated speeds. Do you know what they said. I'll tell you.

They said that they have to do it because life is too short and these formats suck at conveying information quickly, like printed text. But they went further and lamented that as well as the format being too slow, the presenters talk too much and waste far too much time on stuff not related to the subject matter. It turns out that Poor medium choice, combined with poor scripting and content, further compounded by an uninteresting personality makes people what to get it over with quickly. Shocking! I know. And we'll dig deep into this.

But, first I want to thank our sponsor Planet Express. They'll get you packages there. Maybe. If they feel like it. And, it's not too far. They're the mid-est. I can only recommend them because they pay me.

By the way. If you're liking the show so far, please hit that Like and Subscribe button. I'm counting on you.

Anyway! Who would have guessed that young people would want to consume their media at accelerated speeds? Let me tell you what I think. These kid today, they're different. They just don't realize how much work it is to produce a video of this quality and the amount of time I have to put into research and...

It seems like excessive video length is being incentivized because so many podcasters speak so slowly I have my player default to 1.5. If the player glitches and plays at 1.0 it's like I played a 45 at 33 rpm and they sound like they're on Valium or something.

At 1.5 they sound like my friends and I talk.

I literally lose attention when listening to many people at 1.0 (while doing other tasks).

If it's highly technical or music or a few normal people who make hobby videos I slow it down to 1.0.

Yet so many com

Playing at 2x makes a 30min video 15minutes. Scrubbing reduces it to the 30 seconds of actual content in that video.

The only time I find faster playback useful is for online courses without much filler in them.

depending on the content.

I often use 75% speed when listening to foreign language videos.

However, as other have already said, pointless blathering is a major problem. I find the best solution to that is to skip to the next video. Blathering at 150% speed is still blathering.

There are so many videos that have a fuck ton of padding in them.

Either jumping around or setting to 1.5 speed makes it more bearable.

A recorded lecture (I don't mean something built for a video format) is very slow because it is live. So there is lot of dead space in the video. And accelerating it makes sense.

Many colleges amd universities that go the extra mile to support the military and who also offered video-taped courses were using the large format video tapes (not vhs or beta) and machines that supported variable playback speed. It wasn't special, it was just one of their features.

Tens of thousands of people took those courses. Out of the roughly 30 or so people I ran into at one classroom location or other, no one played tge tapes at 1x.

I'd wager that we were representative of the body of students use vid

They have little sense of time, or of proportion. They're all too busy either making low-quality garbage videos or consuming low-quality garbage videos to actually practice mindfulness, presence, and gratitude. Luke Skywalker had that problem back in 1977 kids, and by 1984 Master Yoda was beating it out of him, figuratively speaking. The current elder generation can't find young workers who can read a pick ticket in a warehouse or a "Notes" box on a customer's pizza order, let alone have the presence to

If I'm listening to music, I'm not speeding it up because I'm trying to enjoy the music, and getting through the song faster doesn't do anything positive for me. Same for a movie, speeding up playback destroys the enjoyment with no compensating advantage.

Now, if I'm trying to distill some content from a talk, then I will speed up the audio. How much I speed up the audio depends on how clearly the speaker is speaking, as well as how well I can understand the person's accent and delivery style. Most of the

Those of us who have to take compliance training videos for hours on end each year, also push the speed up to 2x, when possible. At 59, I'm not young, but I have no problem following the information at 2x speed.

WAY too many words with WAY too little actual content.

This is probably why young people are doing this on YouTube too.