One way to read it is "people are increasingly preferring video over text, so that's where Facebook is going". I think what it really means is that Facebook sees more ad money in video than in text, so that's where they are steering the ship.
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
41–50 of 175 posts
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#42I guess maybe I'm too old to understand (38) but to me, reading some text is simply way faster than watching someone read that text in a video... but they are saying the exact opposite. This is completely baffling to me.
Well produced video is magic. Think of a movie that was impactful to you -- done well, video can tell a story in an almost magical way.
The reality is that the average video is drivel and not nearly as good as a similar written piece. The FB is either living in a reality distortion field or thinking about high quality ad/infotainment content that produces $ for Facebook.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#43I can't stand video content unless the visual component is absolutely critical to transmission of the idea that is being communicated. I'd take a podcast/audiobook (with playback speed control) over 99% of videos that are shared on HN and a gazillion other sites.
The "information density" to "bandwidth" ratio (is there a term for it?) is seldom justified for the majority of video content.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#44I guess maybe I'm too old to understand (38) but to me, reading some text is simply way faster than watching someone read that text in a video... but they are saying the exact opposite. This is completely baffling to me.
Well produced video is magic. Think of a movie that was impactful to you -- done well, video can tell a story in an almost magical way. The reality is that the average video is drivel and not nearly as good as a similar written piece. The FB is either living in a reality distortion field or thinking about high quality ad/infotainment content that produces $ for Facebook.
Of course, movies can be beautiful and even enjoyable because of their slowness sometimes - but that is completely different from the online experience, where everything moves extremely fast and there is always an overload of information, so to keep up with it, you want to be able to ingest it as quickly as possible.
Exceptions apply of course for long form writing pieces, where the pacing and the wording is as much a part of the content as the content itself.
But on facebook ?
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably didn't mean it this way, but your comment seems to suggest that plagiarism occurred. I think you meant to say simply that the two articles are similar in theme.
It doesn't seem like Kottke's style to plagarize, but it also seems extremely likely he read Graydon's post before writing this one. Even the phrases like "always bet on text" are the same.
FYI, the post was written by Tim Carmody, who is guest-blogging on Kottke.org this week.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#46Maybe you should have made a video of this?
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#47> Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. That's unclear. The sheer bitrate of reading suggests that it might tap into some deep structures -- hacking some parts of the visual and speech systems, if you prefer. I don't click on HN video links because I find video slow and frustrating way to learn almost anything. Text is so random access -- you can skip over boring bi…
I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cues. Sometimes this would take me from the script for what I felt was a long time and I would always struggle to get back to where we were in the script.
'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the page in a large font?'
No
Invariably my guess on 'script progress' would be considerably greater than actual progress made. Even under ideal conditions where this was the nth retake and I knew what was coming up I would still find myself over-estimating how many words had been presented to the cameras. Years of experience did not change this, I always over-estimated how much had been read, trying to take into account the 'slow baud rate' didn't help.
If you do ever have a transcript of a video play the video and start reading. See how far you get through the video when you have finished reading. Don't make it a race, read as you normally might, taking time out to Google stuff etc. and you will be amazed at how much quicker the printed word is.
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#48Is it out of fashion to still want Facebook to die.
I'm not sure that I want FB to die totally...I'd prefer they shrink and shrivel up, but not go away totally...I want the decentralized interweb platforms of the future to have something to look at...and for them to remember what they should not be doing. (Can you tell that I'm absolutely in favor of a non-centralized webternet world!?! ;-)
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#49I can't stand video content unless the visual component is absolutely critical to transmission of the idea that is being communicated. I'd take a podcast/audiobook (with playback speed control) over 99% of videos that are shared on HN and a gazillion other sites. The "information density" to "bandwidth" ratio (is there a term for it?) is seldom justified for the majority of video content.
(Payload.)
Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless
#50So would some sort of animated ascii art be considered video or text?