Shorter Blogs

Brevity is the soul of wit

So my last blog was way too long, and it took me quite a while to write, but I think it was just cathartic to get out a lot of my thoughts out. I never really journaled before (of which I view differently than blogging) and I rarely leave comments anywhere on the internet. I often rewrite my comment/post over and over and then half the time just discard it thinking “who cares”.

The video I watched today discussed a “problem” with YouTube incentives for longer videos for more watch time to jam in more ads. There are different strategies for making “successful” youtube videos, considering CTR (click through rates), engagement or watch time. I’ll be skipping details but these videos often muck about and could often be much shorter and still get the point across. Often people, like yours truly, just want second monitor content or something to listen to as I get some chores done. So the quality doesn’t necessarily need to be extremely high to do well, as opposed to shorter videos.

Wall of Text

I think we have all be one-shot by a wall of text on a forum or video and had our eyes glaze over and move right on by. How does a person write such a long dissertation and not once think about how they would feel to experience as the reader? Even if properly formatted the length of what I’m willing to read heavily depends on the context if I know you or what the purpose of your wall of text is going to convey.

Does ‘wall of text’ only count for unformatted blocks of text?

When I’m learning certain things about web dev or programming, I’m willing to read quite of lot of text because I am trying to learn a skill and even if the writer isn’t “efficient” with the word count, it’s fine because they parted with useful knowledge!

Probably the most famous of these are the old Stack overflow posts where (presumably) a grey-beard offloads some knowledge onto young (dumb) programmers by answering the question of the post and so much more. Often these answers can become extremely long but worth the time if you are truly trying to get one level deeper with understanding.

This also means if I get around to making any guide posts, such as how to download and use yt-dlp (how to download youtube videos from the command line), then the post will be as long as is required. I did make a video about yt-dlp on my channel and it was removed and my channel got its first strike. Who knew it’s against Youtube terms and service to make videos about how to install yt-dlp! I should’ve realized when I noticed there were no videos about how to install it but plenty on how to use it.

The Point?

I’m going to aim for shorter blog posts, starting right here. Have a good day!