Problems with YouTube content

Spending some time on YouTube, I find a lot of annoyances. Spending some time looking through my drafts, I find that I had already started to write something on the topic. The below is a slightly polished version of the draft, with the reservation that I do not always remember the exact context of some complaints. The footnotes were all added during polishing, in lieu of editing the main text. The formulation as “do not” was almost certainly an error, but I am not keen on a re-write.

There is a lot of crap on YouTube, which is neither surprising, nor necessarily a problem. What is problematic: Even when the content is good, the presentation is often very poor—and in some cases showing an immense contempt for the viewers. Sadly, the more “professional” the poster or channel tries to be, the worse it tends to perform in these regards. In many ways, it is as if they have taken the worst sins of incompetent TV productions and raised them to virtues.

YouTubers (and TV producers!), please do not:

1. Waste the viewer’s time with long intro sequences without content. There are plenty of five minute videos that start with a thirty second intro, with nothing but logos or generic information about the poster…* This is the worse when viewing several videos by the same poster one after the other.

   *In a parallel, where movies of old might have started with a brief clip for the studio, e.g. MGM’s roaring/yawning lion, many modern movies have half-a-dozen such clips for various entities, which can postpone the start of the actual movie for minutes. Result? I am annoyed and skip forward…

2. Add background music for no good reason—but if you still do, pick something of quality and with a bit of variation. Save us from those endless repetitions of the same ten seconds of unimaginative drum beat or synthesizer cords.* Either the video has dialog and background noise that is of interest and then there should be no music at all; or not and then I would much prefer to listen to the music of my choice. Half the time, I end up having the video on mute…**

   *I have the impression that there is some repository of fairly second-rate free-for-use music provided by YouTube it self, and that many posters just pick something from this repository based on the first hearing sounding “cool”. After five minutes of repetition, it is a different story altogether. Note that this can apply to even far higher quality music: I recall being driven up the wall by the DVD “extras” for “Pirates of the Caribbean”, which all played the same portion of the movie score over-and-over-and-over-again.

   **Here I probably had my eyes on videos that relied mostly on the actual video part, e.g. wild-life scenes, pets doing weird things, or “fails”. The claim does not apply to more talk-centric videos, e.g. skits or discussions of training tips. (If in doubt, because they are less likely to be infested with poor music…) More generally, the original text is often a bit indiscriminate when it comes to type of video.

   Bad music is worse than no music!

3. Prioritize the contents lower than the moderator/narrator/whatnot: The latter should only be seen and heard when they bring value to the content, not use the contents to attempt* to make themselves look good or cool. If you have the content, let the content speak; if you do not, pretending that you do just makes you look like an idiot.

   *They usually fail…

4. Pollute the content with irrelevant animations, over-sized logos, or gaps between e.g. items on a list*: Use animations only when it helps clarify the content, not because you want to “pep up” the video or draw attention to yourself. Keep logos discreet, un-animated, and informative. Let the content flow; in particular, do not make a ten second pause between every item on a list or count-down.

   *A great many videos are of the type “Top-10 X of all times”, “20 ways to Y”, etc. These often take a break between the actual contents of the items to play a sound, show the number of the following item, say the number (“Secret tip number niiiine!”), or similar. The break is often so long as to be boring—and to raise the suspicion that the main purpose is to artificially increase the run-time of the video…

5. Add unnecessary sounds and visual effects.
6. Attempt to sound “cool”, excited or exciting, whatnot when speaking. Ideally, the contents should (metaphorically) speak for themselves, without weird manipulations. (The fact that they might need a literal speaker to help them is not a reason to change this.) A typical sport-reporter is a negative example.
7. Add padding around the video to make it fit a certain format (e.g. 1600×900). By doing so, you prevent offline media players that automatically scale the image to match the display (i.e. virtually all modern players) from doing so, while bringing no benefit whatsoever to online/in-browser players. In fact, the latter can even get into problems because they have too little view space available. In effect, you make the file larger in order to deliver an inferior product…
8. Add replays of what just happened. Users are perfectly capable of re-winding and re-playing, with or without slow-motion.* Avoid multiple replays of the same scene especially.

   *As a minor reservation, there might be rare instances where such a replay can be justified through higher picture quality. This, however, requires both that the scene benefits non-trivially from the higher quality (most do not) and that the result actually has a noticeably higher quality. The latter will often be the case when the video draws on an original source of a higher quality than its own (e.g. through a higher frame-rate, a less lossy encoding, or a higher resolution); however, will not be the case e.g. when the video and the original use the exact same format.

9. Abuse YouTube for non-video content. If you have sound without picture, put it somewhere else—do not add artificial images (usually stills) to make it appear like video content. Ditto photos: There are plenty of services to host photos. Making a “video” out of them just to use YouTube is idiotic and user unfriendly.
10. Pan around a still image. It is annoying and distracting, and makes it harder for those who actually want to study the image.
11. Use the same or similar names for all own movies, or something used by others all the time. “Top-10 fails”, e.g., is a lousy name that makes it very hard to determine what one has already watched and what not. If nothing better can be found, something along the lines of “[your name]’s fail choices for 2016” at least gives the viewer a chance. Similarly, use a name that is actually compatible with the contents: “Fail”, for instance, does not mean* “generic YouTube video”—it means that someone screwed up, usually in an entertaining manner.

    *The word “mean” was not present in the draft and I am not certain that this was my original intention; however, it is the easiest correction that makes the sentence plausible.

12. Re-hash the same fail (or other borrowed content) that ten other compilations already have. Some overlap is unavoidable, but please try to be more original and to pay attention to the competition.
13. Insult the viewers intelligence with demands that he “like”, recommend, subscribe, … Viewers are adult enough to make up their own minds and this type of intrusive commands are more likely to turn him away than to entice him. Explicitly calling the people who do not “like” a video losers, as at least one video did, is almost guaranteed to have a negative effect. You see less subscribers than you want to? Your best bet is to increase the quality or quantity of your contents—not harass your viewers.

    As a general rule, the imperative has no place whatsoever in advertising or material of an advertising character. Most likely the effects are neutral to negative—and in as far as they are positive, this makes the use grossly unethical!

Additionally, I quote a text on naive links written in the interim:

Youtube provides many examples of making too specific assumptions. For instance, a video that asks the users to “comment below” might become misleading even through a minor Youtube redesign. Others, e.g. “please ‘like’ this video” might survive even a drastic redesign, but would still be irrelevant if moved to or viewed in another context, e.g. after a manual download.

Advertisement