I understand why it's like this, but I will never forgive the web for shifting to a form where the two paragraphs of information I need only exist as a ten-minute video.
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One of the things I liked about slow computers with tiny memory and slow connections is that they delivered the information in a hurry with a minimum of fuss.
I prefer the capabilities today, but first a word from our sponsor.
My word, exactly this! Especially as you know damn well that 9:30 of that video will be a lot of, "Just wanna say Hi to my sponsors," or, "So, I was thinking about avocados the other day..."
Especially for how to do something in an app. I do NOT need 2 minutes of someone waffling before slowly clicking through a few menus and ticking a checkbox.
To be clear, video is a perfectly valid form that I very much appreciate! But it is not optimal for fast information delivery, and sometimes I just need to know which sword to use on this boss.
To be clear, you should not use ANY sword on your boss. If you have an issue, please bring it to HR, which can address it in a neutral, professional, and non-stabby environment.
@djangowexler.bsky.social Union-rep here. You absolutely shouldn't take on you boss on your own. Whenever possible summon your union and a rep will come aid you! Don't listen to the anti-union "no summons" crowd!
Let's not even talk about the "come ask in our Discord" style of "support". If I wanted to interact with human beings I wouldn't be playing god damned video games.
"Just put your question to our friendly chat!". No thanks, I'd rather uninstall the game and walk off a bridge
As someone who used to write and format 50-page plaintext GameFAQs that sort of thing is done by enthusiastic fans with no expectation of getting anything in return, so it was harder to find info on less popular games if you assume only x% of a game's fans are dedicated enough to do it.
Commercialization of this kind of thing has probably made information more widely available but also in an obnoxious format where half of it is the provider advertising themselves.
"I know you want to know which sword to use on that boss! Which I'm going to tell you, just after this short message from our sponsor. Now, don't forget to smash that like and subscribe button! And now, about that sword. You know, when I first saw this boss, I thought, man, looks just like my--"
The auto-transcribe function is a godsend. I can just scroll down and find the bit I want, without having to listen to a blathering annecdote about an eldery relative segueing into an advert for the latest crypto scam.
Heartily and emphatically and strenuously and overwhelmingly agree. I wish they would quit it. I suspect it is part fad and part a way of monetizing content
I’m not visual at all and we recently put together a ton of flowcharts/graphics at work and it stressed me out so much that I went through and re-wrote them out for myself to use 🥹
10 minutes is apparently the minimum for monetisation on YouTube.
I hate it. I'm deaf and would like to just read this information please, rather than crank the volume and still have to rely on the inevitable crap auto captions
Provided the info was also available in text, because 9:50 of relaxing chill music is nice but doesn't overcome the issue of not being able to hear the voices without effort
That didn't HELP but the broader culprit is the collapse of non-video advertising rates. Fundamentally banner ads don't work for shit so business models based on them have crumbled to the lowest possible crap.
Like in the old days I'd probably have Googled and found a page on GameFAQs that some fan had uploaded. Now Google gives nothing but AI chum and GameFAQs is a pop-up encrusted shadow of its former self.
Whereas making 10 minute videos explaining stuff in popular games generates enough revenue to at least sustain YouTube and maybe a smidge for the creator, so that's where you find stuff.
The Google chum problem can't be overstated though. It still works ok for very obscure things but any remotely popular question (eg most gaming questions) is stuffed with copy-paste "articles", often growing like fungi out of the corpses of once-popular sites.
Polygon is the latest victim of the "buy a site with high Google trust, fire everyone, churn out low grade AI content and capture ad revenue until the ranking decays" strategy.
Honestly just provide free server space for the people! People WANT to upload weird builds to break games. Someone just has to pay for the bandwidth and disk space.
A Raspberry Pi 5 with an m.2 SSD plus fan, enclosure, and a handful of gubbins costs about £150 and kicks sand in the face of a high-end 2005 mainframe. Home broadband today is ridiculously cheap. Honestly, you could stick £50 storage servers in folks' FTTP boxes and it'd do the job.
Can’t stand it. I know it’s a spectrum thing but I don’t need someone to yell at me for 5 minutes when I just want to know how to replace the coil in my water heater
And search engines make it worse by boosting those results. Some searches with Siri return only video results — if I ask for recipes, for instance, it explicitly limits the results to video only and there seems no way to tell it not to.
You know what I hate, if you have a question like “what’s the coffee to water ratio for cold brew” the first eight graphs are like, you want the ratio? You’re in the right place! But first, what even is cold brew coffee? How are coffee beans even harvested?? Where does water even come from?
It seems to me like advertising money poisons everything. Google used to be useful, but that sweet ad money ruins the incentive to be speedily helpful.
Then there’s the entire surveillance system that’s been built up around tracking us online that’s merged with cell phones and cars.
How to videos without captions/text instructions along side will always be something I hate. Yes sometimes it is easier to see how to do something step by step but being hard of hearing I still need text!
Icing on the cake is video, being more data intensive than text, will result in more green house gas emissions. If the internet was a country it would rank 4th for GHGs, surpassed only by the US, China, and India.
THE MOST INCREDIBLE THING IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZED SOCIETY JUST HAPPENED BUT FIRST I NEED TO PRFACE IT WITH A FIVE MINUTE PREAMBLE PLUS A PAID AD SO GO AHEAD AND HIT THAT LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE BUTTON…
This is specifically the problem. The more quickly a person can find the info they need, the less time-on-page they produce, which hurts the sales team's ability to sell ads.
I universally scroll right past videos unless I specifically need to *see* a thing or EXACTLY what a person is doing (because too many instruction-givers write BADLY). But even that happens only when I've tried multiple text versions and found them all insufficiently clear.
I often hear that banner ads don't work and yet I have personally clicked and made purchases through them and also every time I sit on the tube and stare at the overhead adverts, which are paid for, I think about how they kind of look like banner ads.
Which is not to say you're wrong, I have no idea, but if they don't work I don't understand why and I wonder if it's really just because early online ad salespeople vastly oversold internet advertising relative to print advertising, which people still pay for.
*load page*
*video pop up covering 90% of the screen about something unrelated*
*close video*
*33% of the screen is covered with static banner ads*
*reading article, scroll down*
*FULL SCREEN INTERSTITIAL*
*scroll past interstitial*
*video pop up in lower left corner* https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/brs07y/loading/#lightbox
and the other clickbait at the bottom starts out looking like other articles by the newspaper or zine, and then turns into an ad for some garbage drop shipper
I reviewed a few job candidates this week and half of them sent videos. On the one hand, these certainly convey more than a resume tailored to an HR department's opaque criteria. On the other hand, I'm very good at reading text quickly and not so much with video.
I prefer video for exactly one type of guidance: how to perform a physical action properly. Cooking? Crochet? Exercises? Great! Adjusting my display settings? Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.
There's lots of good uses for video! It's even good if you're like "how do I play this game" because it can show you where the menus ARE. (Looking at you, Paradox.)
It's just never what I want to find some specific piece of info.
The current emerging "literacy crisis" doesn't help. There are a lot of younger people who have been failed by the system and struggle to read and comprehend writing.
I've noticed this. Idk if it's my autism that lets me follow instructions as written but a lot of people seem to take instructions as suggestions. Then wonder what happened and blame the instructions. Like you didn't follow them bruh
One method being taught is literally guessing. They'll show kids a sentence in a book with a word hidden, then have them guess what that word might be based on a picture or context. Like "Bill went to the ____" Bank? Playground?
That this is being taught as a foundation for reading is just wild.
The problem is it flies in the face of decades of research showing methods like phonics being vastly superior. This other method has been pushed by - you guessed it - a group of companies making bank selling these materials to schools.
This thread would have been a ten minute video on YouTube complete with a lengthy intro, multiple teasers, two minutes of you talking up NordVPN, and then the SHOCKING ANSWER.
LOL... right? I was watching video which supposedly explained the ending of the Raised by Wolves series, but then he launches into 20 min rant about the show in detail from the beginning, not the end. Gave up on that.
Hard same. I love a deep-dive YouTube video as much as the next person, but sometimes I just want a goddamn text document that I can scan through for the ONE thing I needed to confirm.
The other thing I don’t like about videos is for games with lots of story it is almost impossible to not spoil story things that I could avoid in a text based walkthrough.
I ran into this yesterday with an 11 minute training video for my new part time job that was just a tour of how to use the company website. eleven fucking minutes, and there was no narration, and distracting music played the whole time
That's one of the big draws of the LLMs for me. They might return garbage sometimes, but they return it in plain text, which I can then paste into Google in order to get more plain text.
I just finished Persona 3 reload and would google a particular monsters weakness every so often and googles llm was completely wrong about 60% of the time, which is impressively bad considering the top link was usually a text based page with the answer on it.
Agreed. Please just let me read the two paragraphs. Also, the transition to ai search results have totally ruined individual websites and sources of info. Just to pile on.
i miss the plaintext game guides that were sent via email back in my day
i remember an uncle once sent me one for super mario 64 that covered eeeeeverything and it felt like finding a treasure trove
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I prefer the capabilities today, but first a word from our sponsor.
What's the difference? ;)
Or kodachi for in-office slashing due to space restrictions.
https://bsky.app/profile/djangowexler.bsky.social/post/3lp7wecscis2i
"Just put your question to our friendly chat!". No thanks, I'd rather uninstall the game and walk off a bridge
Discord is a black hole for information
I hate it. I'm deaf and would like to just read this information please, rather than crank the volume and still have to rely on the inevitable crap auto captions
Fundamentally, advertising is a crap way to fund content when run on an industrial scale.
The real problem is advertising.
We need to exterminate the consumer advertising industry. Criminalize advertising of all types, aside from very restricted product data sheets.
(Fully automated luxury gay space communism has no room in it for Mad Men!)
This is why we can't have recipes without a short story attached.
Then there’s the entire surveillance system that’s been built up around tracking us online that’s merged with cell phones and cars.
It’s gross.
An old rant on the same theme:
https://bjkeefe.blogspot.com/2018/10/i-pretty-much-never-watch-videos.html
No, everyone does NOT learn better from videos.
And if your video doesn't even have captioning, which isn't uncommon...
I read faster than I watch, dammit!
I want to read it, not sit down with a 10 minute video of something that I can read, process, and apply in a fraction of that time.
But yeah pop ups are defo annoying
*video pop up covering 90% of the screen about something unrelated*
*close video*
*33% of the screen is covered with static banner ads*
*reading article, scroll down*
*FULL SCREEN INTERSTITIAL*
*scroll past interstitial*
*video pop up in lower left corner*
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/brs07y/loading/#lightbox
It's just never what I want to find some specific piece of info.
That this is being taught as a foundation for reading is just wild.
0:01 to 6:37 | Intro and background
6:38 to 7:20 | Sponsor spot
7:21 to 8:57 | Setup
8:58 to 9:23 | INFO NEEDED
9:24 to 10:00 | Retread + Outro
Yes please just give me a big notepad document with ASCII banners that I can Ctrl + F to find answers.
We invented email for a bunch of reasons; letting people know about important things quickly was one of them.
https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html
https://bsky.app/profile/djangowexler.bsky.social/post/3lp7wecscis2i
i remember an uncle once sent me one for super mario 64 that covered eeeeeverything and it felt like finding a treasure trove