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Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

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101–110 of 175 posts

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#101

Until now publishing content has had limitations. Now anyone can publish as much content as they want, however irrelevant, and that is becoming a problem: proliferation of irrelevant content (irrelevant from the perspective of the reader). So I think the next challenge is to just be able keep content concise, relevant and affine to your interests. Twitter took a stab at that, but it's not there yet. Having a machine…

> Only exploring stuff related to your interests can trap people within a detached state with respect to reality.

That's something I've been casually interested in in the last few months, simply because I have, rather lately, come to understand that I won't ever be able to read all the books I want to read, or see the movies I want to see, etc.

However, it seems to me the "problem" or the situation is a little more complex than that. The information you consume will always be a subset of "reality", and how detached you are from "reality" based on what information you consume seems like a quantity that will be hard to measure.

For the sake of being somewhat contrarian here, I'm just going to repeat something I've mentioned a couple times: I think that contrary to popular belief, all attempts at giving people a more "balanced" view of reality with a balanced "information diet", all attempts at avoiding the "filter bubble" are completely misguided.

The value is precisely in creating bubbles that are as valuable as possible for individuals, by filtering, curating, optimizing the information they consume to maximize the utility they get from it. That possibility seems to me to be largely unexplored today in places where you would expect to see it (information aggregation platforms, recommender systems that are still quite primitive, etc.).

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#102
While video has the ability to communicate certain things more efficiently than text, it is far inferior in other ways.

For example, video is great at showing the physical relationship between car parts - what they look like, where they go - so if I'm trying to figure out how to get to that sixth spark plug on a 1990 Bronco II, I'm going to look for a video.

Video is also good at pacing the timing of emotional reactions. If it weren't, no one would watch movies.

If, on the other hand, I'm trying to learn or experience something complicated, like how to code in a new language, or an overview of the history of the idea of revolution, or any kind of theology, I'm going to read about it. I'm not going to watch some talking head give me far fewer words in the same amount of time, even if the video has some nice music and pans across a few pictures of cathedrals while the narrator speaks.

Words are the fundamental unit of thinking, and video is piss-poor at communicating words, especially when compared to writing.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#103

While video has the ability to communicate certain things more efficiently than text, it is far inferior in other ways. For example, video is great at showing the physical relationship between car parts - what they look like, where they go - so if I'm trying to figure out how to get to that sixth spark plug on a 1990 Bronco II, I'm going to look for a video. Video is also good at pacing the timing of emotional reacti…

>> Words are the fundamental unit of thinking,

Woa. Biig assumption.

I totally agree that text is "fundamental" indeed to our ability to communicate our mind-state, but text is not our mind state and it's a huge leap from "I can communicate with text" to "I'm thinking in text". You might as well assume video frames are fundamental units of thinking.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#105
I don't think Facebook is wrong.

It just so happens that video works better on Facebook (and probably other social networks), where the stream of information is huge. People, most of them anyway, suck at describing things. Most of them can snap a picture of something nice, exciting, cute, whatever. Not everyone is writer, nor should one be to share some everyday thing.

Text has it's uses. It's just that other mediums usually tend to work better on Facebook.

And that's fine.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#106
post #62

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.

this is profoundly insightful. thank you :)

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#109
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.

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.

> Think of a movie that was impactful to you

I cannot name a single movie that was not dull compared to a book it was based upon.

Re: Facebook is wrong, text is deathless

#110
post #29
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, watching someone do something with his/her hands is (almost always) better than reading about it. But consider another scenario: a video of someone showing you how they type some code while talking about it. This sort of videos are unbearable to me, and I don't understand how some people can enjoy them. I'd rather read the code in text form, at my own pace.

My god, I hate coding videos. There is nothing more frustrating than a command-line Linux video. A.) I cannot copy/paste what you typed into your terminal into mine from a youtube video. Give a decent transcript with the steps enumerated.

I wonder if anyone has tried to build a ttyrec[0]/termrec player with synchronised audio?

Then you have the best of both worlds. Adding some sort of out-of-band overlays (like iTerm2/3 annotation maybe[2]) for extra commentary would make it truly amazing.

..Looks like no, but in teh future plans of [1] at least.

I'm not sure how the production workflow would go - I guess you'd

- record your terminal session, perhaps with live audio recording.

- if tools existed (which they afaik don't really), being able to clean up your ttyrecs to remove typos, speed up slow typing etc, would be amazing)

- Maybe rerecord a commentary/narration audio on the edited visuals, and add any annotations.

- publish, and glory in your multimedia educational creation!

(As I continue to think about it, I'm tempted to try to build this. I wonder if it would get used?)

[0] http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/

[1] http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info/#drop-in-video-replacemen...

[2] https://www.iterm2.com/img/screenshots/v3-screen-shots/iterm...

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