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Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

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Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#61

Post by superobserver »

gumby wrote: post #9

> 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…

My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition, but there's practically nothing for me to go on other than look into how the deaf process textual representations independent of the kinesthetic and proprioception encodings of semantic features.

Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather think that we're liable to commit a grievous error by neglecting the primary source of civilization. Text also has added life in code and programming, which clearly shows it is no likely to suffer any kind of demise.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#62

Post by sly010 »

A lot of us here works with information for a living. Of course, we prefer the leaner, more information dense medium.

Facebook is not a platform to communicate interesting ideas succinctly. I apologize for not coming up a better way of saying this, but Facebook is catering for the not-so-sophisticated. The majority of users probably can't scan/process text very fast.

Facebook is TV. It wants to be TV.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#64

Post by oh_sigh »

toomanythings2 wrote: post #4

Well ... uh ... I think ... I think ... uh ... everyone can hear me? ... I'll wait till the guys in the back ... oh and the girls, too, right hahahahahah ... OK ... let's get started... Sure. I know Facebook wouldn't put out videos like that but it seems 80% of all videos linked to do start out like that and that's the quality you're going to get from anyone worth listening to. Even the polished ones, though, blatter…

Protip: set playback speed to 1.5x, it's in the gear menu on youtuba

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#66

Post by Animats »

It's not clear what Facebook is thinking here. Video is useful for showing what you did, but not useful for communicating what you want to do. Maybe this reflects that people don't plan trips on Facebook any more; they use Instagram for that. One could interpret this as Facebook abandoning communication in favor of being a collection of public scrapbooks.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#70

Post by csydas »

fattire wrote: post #60
terryf wrote: post #18

I 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.

Communication is often WAY WAY faster when delivered via text than via a video presentation, particularly because written words come at you at the pace your brain can accept them, as opposed to the static speed at which someone can speak them. Also, writing is SO MUCH EASIER than creating video. Do you really think I would have bothered participating in this conversation if it meant opening up a camera and NLE and cu…

I think that, in part, the article is misleading since I did not take away that Facebook thinks there's no purpose to text or that it will vanish entirely, and likely they share the same opinion as you.

The counterpart line to the "text is dead" idea is the following from Facebook in the article:

>“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”

To me, this says less about "text is dead" and more "our users are choosing to share experiences with video, and they're doing it off-platform." Similarly, they continue with the following:

>"But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech."

I think 'text is dead' is Facebook's segue to bloviate about an upcoming set of features surrounding multimedia, which in turn is pretty much just a "stop uploading videos elsewhere" gambit. Facebook does do a pretty good job at making videos uploaded elsewhere work seamlessly with Facebook. I'd have to imagine that the next natural step is just to get those on Facebook in the first place.

So, I don't get the impression they want youtube-cut videos to replace the textual Facebook arguments; I think they're just trying to build up hype for FacebookVid or whatever they decided to call their next set of multimedia features.

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