YouTube Time Saving Pro-Tip

[Kavik]

Set the playback speed to 1.5x or 1.75x (or even 2x if you can still understand it). Unless the topic is extremely dense, the speakers are usually perfectly understandable, and now that 25 minute video is only 16, 14, or 12 minutes respectively. After trying this for the past few weeks, I find it weird listening to normal speed speech and amazing how slowly people talk and how long it takes them to get to the point. YouTube also incentivizes long videos because of ads (Remember when YT had a 10 minute limit on video length? Pepperidge Farm remembers).

Perfect for the following:
-Product reviews
-Podcasts and other conversational style videos
-News

Bad for the following:
-Comedy (requires timing and cadence)
-Dense topics, like philosophy or science
-Music (although can be fun to play around with)
-Videos in foreign languages (depending on your proficiency)

[tp4tissue]

If it's a TV, just make post on Gekha. Tp4 will tell you how trash it is, and direct you to buy dat TCL 635 instead.

Unless it's an LG CX,  in which case just buy it, you don't need to watch a review.

[Findecanor]

-Dense topics, like philosophy or science

I often watch science/tech conference presentations in 1.25× to 1.75× speed. It greatly depends on the speaker: some are really slow, knowing their topic but not having practised public speaking very much.

When viewing videos from Youtubers, I often multitask, doing other things at the same time. I prefer to skip over less interesting segments if need be over watching fast.

[Sniping]

i 2x most of my videos after i got into a habit of it in college for cranking through lectures before an exam. there are extensions that can get you up to 4x speed but that's pretty extreme for me, although i know several people who watch their videos on 4x. any videos of sports or stream highlights i'll still watch at 1x

[Leslieann]

Bad for the following:
-Comedy (requires timing and cadence)

Comedy can work, however you need to already have watched a few things at that speed first so your own timing and cadence is in tune first.

On the same token, going from fast other things to normal speed comedy will also screw you up.

[jamster]

I find that for most things that require information (rather than entertainment), it's vastly preferable to have written text to read. It's just so much more efficient to get information across- the reader controls the pacing, and it's easy to re-read a sentence, or glance up a paragraph to check a previous point.

I find Youtube massively frustrating- the delivery is totally linear, usually too slow (the playback speed thing helps!), and most presenters spend inordinate amounts of time just waffling in order to pad the videos out to whatever the revenue-optimised time length is.

It's good for some things, where seeing something happen is key (machining/woodwork would be an example), but otherwise I find that it's only really good for 'light' information conveyed at the beginner level.

But Youtube is where it's at these days, probably because it's so accessible to novices in whatever the discipline is. It's a concept I am having to explain to my young kids these days, that if they want to progress beyond the 'total novice' stage, that they will have to move on to more more information-dense forms of media.

I'll get off my soapbox now

[tp4tissue]

The box is a lie

[nopunchespulled]

I cant watch yt anymore if its not at 2x speed.  between videos having to be a certain length for monetization and it seems like youtubers talk slower to stretch them out.   2x just feels normal to me now

[tp4tissue]

Also avoid youtube as much as possible. saves sooooo much time