I also don't care for writing that could have been made a lot more concise. It's a lot of work to make things shorter, but I think it's worthwhile.
Just randoms "um" inbetween because your struggling to build sentences can get annoying both in person and online
But hearing them from an interviewee drives me crazy, along with "sort of", "kind of", etc. I once counted all of the "sorta"s in an NPR interview, it was brutal.
The first one indicates something along the lines of "thinking, please stand by". The second one is a struggle.
To me they just indicate lack of confidence on the part of the speaker.
it's... exact opposite?
the main (attempted) use for ummms is to keep continuation of speech despite the pause. And the main complaint is exactly that it ruins the focus and doesn't give respite
Although that is probably the less common use.
The problem is that people are producing longer videos because that earns them more advertising revenue. Many creators now speak so mind-numbingly slowly, that even at 2x speed it feels like it's about a normal presentation speed.
In almost all cases, even at 2x speed, it would be quicker to just read a transcript (if that was available). The problem is really that people are incentivised to make everything into at least a 10 minute youtube video, when a short blog post that could have taken only a minute to read would have been sufficient to convey all the same information, and probably more useful as you could easily refer back to specific sections if you wanted.
Instead we use audio for info, text for stories and video for dialogues.
I do not belong to the younger generation. I refused to watch videos because it takes too long comparing with reading. But now I'm watching them at 2x. You can watch a 40 min video in 20 minutes. I'd like to compress it further to 10 min or so, but 3x is a paid option on youtube and I'm not sure I could digest English (which is a foreign language to me) at 3x.
> Meanwhile, book reading is at an all time low seemingly because no one has a preference or patience for careful study and reflection.
Oh, I read books too. But the content is different. You can't read some books at 2x. You can't listen to it on such a speed. In any book I think there are stretches of text you can consume at any speed, but sometimes you hit a dense packed information you need to think through. It happens with videos too. Like, try to watch Veritasium at 2x, you'll be forced to slow things down at least sometimes, because to get the message you need to learn how to think at 2x speed too, not just to listen.
In any case the most of videos dilute their message over tens of minutes and you can speed up things and have plenty of time to think things through while watching.
The democratization of media created a lot of folks who've no idea how to disseminate information in a structured format and at an optimal rate.
arguably clickbait is the reason: i'm not here to listen to the video or all of the other fluff, i'm here to get the point as quickly as possible. it's a 'meeting could have been an email' sort of thing where lots of videos could really just be several bulletpoints.
AI youtubue summarizers are great in that regard.
For audiobooks I usually want to have time to hear and process every word, so I still speed it up but usually more like 1.5x, it depends on the narrator and the book. For podcasts I'm not there to appreciate the prose, so I go as fast as I can while still understanding them. I don't think it's about dopamine, I just find I don't gain anything by getting the same amount of information slower.
If you speak with disfluencies, you probably didn't sufficiently rehearse your speech. If you didn't rehearse enough, you probably didn't put much effort into writing it either, so why should I put much effort into listening? It's the same principle as AI slop.
Many people can speak off the cuff fluently and confidently, avoiding "like", "um", and other filler words. And even if you're not speaking fluently, leaving silences as punctuation is more effective, IMO.
Many impressive speakers I've met actually cite Toastmasters! So their obsessive zeal actually does work.
More rehearsal does work too sometimes, but it does sometimes lead to speeches "sounding too rehearsed".
I don't think that's true, we usually just don't notice filler words in the same way we are surprised that people usually don't even talk in whole sentences, in contrast to written text or movies (which also use written text).