201–210 of 531 posts
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It's easier to make money from videos than from text, and that's why websites would prefer that. There's not much else to it.
Maybe it’s easier to make money from videos because they people actually like them?
Writing an article takes a lot of time
Writing a good one, is not for everybody
But making a video is really easy
"For many of us in the early 2000s, the web was magical. You connected a phone line to your computer, let it make a funny noise and suddenly you had access to a seemingly-unending repository of thoughts and ideas from people around the world. "It might not seem like much now, but what that noise represented was the stuff of science fiction at the time: near-instantaneous communication at a planetary scale. It was a b…
Indeed, the Web became a juggernaut bandwagon, and got all the attention. Not for nothing. But I always felt the potential of the Internet was neglected as a result. There are other apps, notably MMOs, BitTorrent, blockchain and other P2P things. I sincerely hope that the “re-decentralization” movement is able to attract hackers and gain steam.
>If you use Chrome as your main browser, consider switching to Chromium, the open-source version of the browser. Consider minimalist browsers like Min (and choose to block all ads, trackers and scripts) to browser news websites. no love for firefox? or for that matter, any non webkit browsers? >HERE WeGo for maps (free) i'm not sure that's any better in terms of privacy
It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.
Mozilla seems to have become infected with the same ulterior-motive laden evil though. :(
Example happening at the moment:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/09/mozilla_tests_cliqz...
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Microsoft is the worst for providing content in video only form (Channel 9). There have been tons of potentially interesting content posted to HN from Microsoft but I'm not going to sit through an hour long video at work. And they almost never provide any alternative text content (an article) for what's in the video.
Unity is terrible too. The text documentation is terse and barely complete. All the details and workflow information is in video form.
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You can always use a screen reader to automatically have it read the text to you, and it works well enough. I can’t have an OCR system automatically translate a video into text.
While you make a good point about screen readers, there actually are tools that automatically translate a video into text. In fact, doesn't YouTube's "CC" button do that? The translation isn't great, but it's usually good enough and will probably get better over time.
The only time YouTube’s CC button works even slightly okay is if the uploader manually transscribed everything.
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It always astonishes me how many people who are ostensibly against the webkit derivative hegemony won't even consider recommending Firefox. It's certainly a competitive browser, and personally my favourite, and Mozilla does fantastically important work balancing out an otherwise entirely corporate, ulterior-motive laden browser market.
My experience has been that Firefox was unusably slow on OS X and Linux for a long time and they lost a lot of users because of it. Now it is faster but it is difficult to woo people back. And even if it is faster, there track record shows that they found doing a release that slows down a large portion of users was acceptable. Granted I doubt they still have that attitude, and i think they are more performance based…
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If video content would be so "hostile", it would have failed on its own already. People would flock to other places where they can read instead. I don't buy this idea where everything is always imposed on us by evil corporations. More and more websites using video to me seems more like a proof that people prefer videos over written content. That's why videos usually autoplay, also on YouTube and Facebook: if a person…
IMHO how-to's of manual activities are better in video form. Other than that, text form is way better.
but when you have to actually cook something, having something in writing with some illustration is much easier
you don't have to start/pause/skip/rewind the video with your greasy hands, you can just skim with your eyes
that's why in a lot of cooking books from the past the recipes take one or at maximum two pages that can be read side by side
This is a good an informative essay. However, there's another element of "user-hostile" that I didn't see addressed (maybe I missed it in my haste?) -- that is the websites trying to control exactly how the content is consumed by the user. It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). But many of t…
Microsoft is the worst for providing content in video only form (Channel 9). There have been tons of potentially interesting content posted to HN from Microsoft but I'm not going to sit through an hour long video at work. And they almost never provide any alternative text content (an article) for what's in the video.
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> It seems increasingly that web content is being delivered in video form. That itself is hostile to some people. Some of us want the freedom to read (or scan quickly). And what if some of us want the freedom to watch? Maybe I'm illiterate? Just like you, I could say that putting something in writing instead of a video is 'hostile' if it doesn't meet my preferences. Talking about 'hostile' is hysterical.
It's fine to make a video, but if your work is serious at all, it should also be in written text. It's much quicker to read than listen to someone talk. I'm sure there are exceptions where video format makes more sense, but, as a rule, it's incredibly stupid.
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I love the fact that IRC is still alive and kicking. The #django channel on freenode is still pretty active as opposed other communities that flock to slack or gitter.
Technical chat on IRC is still alive and well on Freenode, but non-technical chat has mostly moved on from IRC to other media.
I still recall watching this change firsthand.
When i got my first modem, i was informed of a regional IRC channel on one of the big networks. And from that day onwards i would have my client set to connect to that channel, and fire it up alongside the email client right after the handshake completed.
But at one point the channel died, and the cause of death was twofold.
one part was the creation first generation social media services, and their web based chat rooms.
Another part, and perhaps a bigger part, was that Microsoft made a strong push of MSN Messenger with Windows XP.
This resulted in a more clique style communications form online, as you had to know people and get their account info before being able to contact them. With IRC you joined the channel and that was it.