
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless - danso
http://kottke.org/16/06/facebook-is-wrong-text-is-deathless
======
gumby
> 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
bits re-read hard bits, luxuriate in the really wonderful bits...all of which
is hard in video. And in fact because the visual channel is so complex, I find
reading _more_ multimedia than video -- it's hard to feel cold when watching
someone march through the snow, though a well written book can make me shiver
with cold, even on a summer day.

~~~
sandworm101
Those deep structure may be active, but reading was never in their design
documentation. Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading
was a thing. The fact that we read so well is probably a hacked-together
scheme tying together structures meant for pattern recognition and speech.

I see reading much like swimming. None of us can swim without practice, as
none of us can read. The scary thing is that even the best of us can only swim
about as well as the average dog. So pity us on the day we find a creature
actually designed for reading.

~~~
Tharkun
> structures meant for

"Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no
"meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not
adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.

~~~
Johnny555
I think pretty much everything in your body is specialized and is "meant" for
something. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to get your heart to
replace your pancreas or kidneys. And you can't replace your lungs with brain
tissue. Sure, doctors can transplant a toe to replace a thumb or a heart blood
vessel with a vein from a leg with great success, but it's doing pretty much
the same function, just in a different place.

As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body
parts tend to be specialized.

~~~
tremon
_you can 't replace your lungs with brain tissue_

No, but the brain can replace brain tissue for one task with brain tissue for
another task. It's called neuroplasticity:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity#Treatment_of_b...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity#Treatment_of_brain_damage)

I agree with the GP, if there's one characterization that applies to the
brain, it's "versatile".

------
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.

~~~
Hoasi
> Facebook is TV. It wants to be TV.

It's a great comparison. TV, in many ways is an obsolete medium, and yet it is
still efficient and remains popular despite the advent of streaming and other
media offering.

------
terryf
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.

~~~
Spooky23
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.

~~~
mrweasel
>Well produced video is magic.

Most of us don't realise how difficult editing is. There's a camera in our
phones, and uploading to Facebook, Youtube or Snapchat has never been easier,
so now we're all film makers. It just that almost no one realise how hard
their favourite podcast or youtube channel has worked on editing. Or how many
times they redone the exact same bit, to get it absolutely perfect, and
watchable.

It's easier and faster, to re-read a few sentences, edit the worst bit, re-
read and post. There's not really a fast way of editing the worst parts of a
video.

------
shiven
I 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.

~~~
jonsen
(Payload.)

------
Mendenhall
I cant stand videos for most information. By the time the video loads and the
probably slow speaking individual goes over just the introduction of the
information, I could have already read a more informative article/post.

~~~
auganov
Since I started playing all YouTube videos at 2x speed[0] I enjoy
watching/listening to videos much more. Watching videos at 1x is just
unbearable to me now. I wish FB added 2x playback too.

[0] using [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube-
youtu...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube-youtube-
exte/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-
dialog)

~~~
the_af
Interesting! I do the same with video lectures from Coursera. For example,
Odersky's lectures may be interesting, but boy is he a slow speaker. I simply
cannot stand his -- and to be fair, most -- lectures unless I play them at 2X
speed.

And still, I'd rather read the PDF slides.

Video isn't a particularly good way of conveying formal information. Text with
graphics is way better.

~~~
manigandham
Video is a great way to convey formal information - when that info needs the
moving visuals aspect to be clearly presented.

Videos of people just speaking text is terrible and the wrong tool for the
job.

~~~
maus42
Well, the best way to accomplish this would be include an animation in the
material that's mostly in the written form.

Like this: [http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-
fractal/](http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/)

------
notliketherest
This article borrows heavily from an article that Graydon Hoare (founder of
the Rust programming language) posted a couple years ago -
[http://graydon.livejournal.com/196162.html](http://graydon.livejournal.com/196162.html)

~~~
valleyer
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.

~~~
evmar
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.

~~~
mfarris
FYI, the post was written by Tim Carmody, who is guest-blogging on Kottke.org
this week.

------
hanniabu
It'd be great if we could extract subtitles from video and put into a nice
text format that's easy to read so it's skimmable. Then when you get to an
area of interest, you should be able to click the place where you're
interested and a video will pop up and start from there. Then when you've
heard what you wanted to hear you can minimize the video and skim the text for
the next area of interest and so on.

~~~
enobrev
I imagine there could be an interesting means of moving the playhead along
with your skimming, so when you highlight a block of text (as I do,
habitually), the video would play through the selection and pause at the end.
I'd love to use text as a video controller.

~~~
trevyn
This is a great idea -- text is much faster to read, but watching a speaker is
much more information-dense due to body language and intonation.

This would be a fun hack. Looks like the YouTube caption data is available via
API:
[https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions/downl...](https://developers.google.com/youtube/v3/docs/captions/download)

~~~
hanniabu
I can't try this out at the moment, but from looking at the documentation I
don't see it say that it returns the timestamp of the caption anywhere.

------
kalleboo
How much Facebook browsing is done discreetly in school, at work, in meetings,
on public transport, when waiting for someone? Will video work in these
situations? I doubt they'll be able to _replace_ their current text with
video.

It sounds more to me like they're looking at the bigger ad dollars YouTube is
getting and want to absorb their market.

The only way for Facebook to grow now is to get out of the "friends and
family" market and take over Twitter and YouTube's "celebrity/popular people"
market. It seems like this could be a difficult pivot.

~~~
cheez
But they already have Instagram don't they?

------
matchagaucho
The 90 / 9 / 1 rule is finally taking hold on Facebook.

With only 1% of the users generating content, 9% simply liking/commenting, and
90% logging in to just watch.... FB is desperate to satiate the immediate
gratification needs of 1B+ people.

Video is the quick fix.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_\(Internet_culture\))

------
ivv
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.

------
l33tbro
This is anecdotal, but I've still never watched one of those auto-play videos
you see at the top of news articles. It's just so much more efficient to just
skim the text below and find the relevant information you were after.

------
0xCMP
This will force media companies to do something which they should have done a
long time ago.

Think of all the videos you ignore on Forbes, WSJ, Bloomberg, etc. because you
can't view them muted. Think of all the videos from Buzzfeed and others which
aren't of such high caliber but are so easy to consume that you do.

This will force those with real content to publish that content in an
accessible way. I'm fine with videos, especially muted ones, because if the
current trends stay I think they'll be more useful to me and everyone else.

Text IS great. But somethings like a presidential speech or a short interview
need the visual element. Some things don't need the visual part, but a media
company can make it better than without it. The key will be to keeping it
short because as others mention in the comments it's very difficult to skip
around in videos for what you care about. Most of the videos I mentioned are
already pretty short though, so I'm guessing that won't be much of an issue
for them to adapt.

------
heisenbit
Humans are wired to seek validation.

Consumption of media that expresses resonant emotions is to a degree
validating.

However expressing and understanding myself and seeing myself emotionally and
intellectually understood by peers is validation on another deeper level. The
composition and writing of text has been shown to excite other areas of the
brain than simple speech (there is a whole school on writing therapy).

There is always going to be a need for an immediate way to consuming and
reacting. That market is served by twitter and snap-chat. Then there is the
need for longer, carefully considered deeper thought. Thought where emotions
have been deliberately moderated to provide breathing space for facts.

Video may provide more bits per second and via the eyes is more directly wired
to our decision system. But the emotional space is already take by twitter and
snapchat. The deliberation space is taken by text. It is not clear to me video
will grow beyond a extended snapchat.

------
partycoder
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 to filter and produce summarized versions of whatever endless
feed you are reading, as well as remembering seen entries (a bit like
Snapchat) is the next frontier.

Another key issue is selective ignorance, biases and such. Only exploring
stuff related to your interests can trap people within a detached state with
respect to reality.

~~~
davidivadavid
> 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.).

------
Bahamut
There are a lot of people who like communicating through image memes & other
short soundbites - I am not one of them.

I value text. I like reading deeper insights from people much more than cheap
flyby memes or time consuming videos. If communication regresses like that,
I'll probably withdraw from using those features. It's simply what I don't
want in a social network.

~~~
jasonthevillain
Yes! Exactly. My (optimistic) suspicion is the users will get bored of it and
stop looking at the river of crap, forcing them to change directions again.

------
tracker1
As FB has removed and reduced features, including messaging from their mobile
web app, I've been using them ever less... I'm not sure they aren't alienating
as many people as they're actively engaging, and in the effort to keep the new
millenials, they're pushing everyone else away.

~~~
manigandham
> to keep the new millenials, they're pushing everyone else away.

Millennials are the biggest and most active group, and more important to them
compared to "everyone else" \- they know what they're doing.

~~~
ben_jones
In the same vein I don't think it's as much capturing millennials as keeping
up with them. It's impossible to predict every upcoming trend, but if they
keep themselves nimble through acquisitions and trimmed product offerings they
can ride the coattails of instagram/whatsapp type companies into eternity.

~~~
niftich
I disagree with the original premise that video is superior also, but Facebook
is very calculated in their endeavors. They could be:

\- feature-chasing Periscope/Vine/Snapchat/Meerkat/Twitch/Youtube

\- enticed by pre-roll ads

\- planning future Oculus integration, live VR streaming, etc.

------
combatentropy
Yes, for almost everything online, I prefer text: programming tutorials, the
news, discussions like this on Hacker News. Imagine if each reply here had to
be an uploaded video of the member talking.

For some other things, I prefer a video: how to cook something, how to repair
something, how to tie a tie, an interview with a person whom I admire. Even
then it can depend on my mood, and if I'm in a hurry I am like, "Oh, just cut
to the chase, or put it in a one-paragraph article."

------
ape4
Is it out of fashion to still want Facebook to die.

~~~
mxuribe
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!?! ;-)

------
welanes
"stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving
images and speech."

Obsolete would be a stretch however for many the web is all about consumption.
Mobile devices cement this point. And videos are a very efficient way to
consume information:

\- Read the book VS watch the TED talk.

\- Go to the recipe site VS watch this Tastemade video.

\- Read the Foreign Affairs article on the complexities of the Syrian war VS
Watch this cool graphic filled Vox video.

And even with the written word, text is becoming more terse:

\- Read this article vs Read this set of tweets

But people will never stop writing so perhaps all Facebook is saying is that
the written word will become less relevant to their business model as they
slowly turn into something resembling Snapchat

------
andrewfromx
I always sent emails in plain text mode. I hate the idea of sending an entire
html doc for a simple text only job.

------
x4m
I think that interesting topic is "will we create programs as text for a long
time?". Projection IDE seems to stall. Some time ago I was thinking about
visual query language for databases (domain-specific) and composed this list
of text advantages:

1\. Version control systems (VSC) out of the box. Software developers have
been using safe source code tracking for many decades. Since queries are the
main tools for data analysts, they should be treated the same way, but the
development of all VCS features in a custom query editor is not economically
viable.

2\. Portability. Text queries can be written even on a whiteboard and a
notepad. One of the great advantages of text queries is that they are
unambiguous: there are no hidden parts in a text query.

3\. Detachable. Text queries can be run in different warehouses. They should
not depend on identifiers, conditions, and environmental variables.

4\. Fragmentation. An analyst can extract some feature from a query and partly
pass it to his colleagues.

5\. Embedding. Software developers easily can embed queries into autotests,
side subsystems can embed query parts into their code or resources.

6\. Specification. DSQL can be a part of a system’s applied programming
interface (API) for third party systems if DSQL specification is precise
enough.

------
aklemm
They're probably thinking of memes and emojis as well. It can't be argued that
well-structured text is a strong suit among individuals communicating with
Facebook.

------
PhasmaFelis
> _Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word
> becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech. "The best
> way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at
> us, actually is video," Mendelsohn said._

This is going to go down in history alongside the mythical "640K ought to be
enough for anybody" and the guy who thought the internet was just a fad.

------
sverige
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.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> 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.

~~~
sverige
"Words," not "text." Illiterate people have words but can't read text. And
some people "think in pictures" or "feelings" but that kind of thinking isn't
the same as thinking in words.

------
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.

------
mark_l_watson
I don't agree with the article. As others have already said here, text is
random access and easy to process and retain information.

I am going to drift off topic: the future is AI that understands what we say,
recognizes our facial expressions, and generally "gets us." While there are
obvious potential downsides, the upsides involve getting notified of things in
the order of most useful and entertaining first. AIs will use text, still
photos, and videos to show us what we want to know and experience. This whole
idea creeps me out a bit, but it is probably the future. At some point in
time, effective computer to human neural I/O connectors will be invented, and
the effect of civilization will be interesting. So, video -> direct neural
implants.

------
milesf
The folks at Facebook are not stupid. This is likely setting the groundwork to
ream more bandwidth through their Aquila project
[https://info.internet.org](https://info.internet.org)

More bandwidth means more money, which means convincing more of the public to
invest more in Facebook.

------
fuzzfactor
As a consumer/dependent-based institution which benefits from increased
control strives for growth and succeeds, eventually you reach a point where
the most benefit to the institution can best be achieved using less literate
followers/subjects.

------
rathish_g
I work in eLearning and we create a lot of visual content as its easy to
convey ideas in video than through text.

The cost of video production is at least 50X or 100X more than text and hence,
we take extra caution to make sure that it's precise and accurate. What is
said in 1500 words is trimmed down to 250 words to create a video. It goes
through multiple talents like motion graphics team, anchors etc before it hits
the screen and hence it's interesting to watch. Text, caption etc are just
there for SEO. Bandwidth is the only constrain, especially in developing
nations.

And then there are low-quality mugshot videos, which takes less budget than
what it takes to present the same content in text.

The quality ones will replace text forever.

~~~
aaron695
> The quality ones will replace text forever

And this need to be a startup.

------
marxidad
I think that the only thing that will make text obsolete is synthetic,
panpsychic telepathy.

------
foobarbecue
Interesting that the author chose "deathless" over "immortal."

------
chiefalchemist
FB is missing three significant differences. 1 - Consuming video is time
consuming. There is no quick scan for key words etc. If you're locked in on
video X there's no scrolling on, etc. Your experience, in a way, stops. 2 -
Video is passive. Reading takes engagement. Those will effect the brain very
differently. 3 - Video is not conversational. It's traditional top down
broadcasting.

Sure FB might become more video but that doesn't mean it's going to result in
the same attachment to the product, at least for adults.

------
sametmax
Text is an efficient medium to express something complex. But the average
facebook user is not expressing something complex. He shares quick reactions,
emotions, stuff that trigger anger or fun. Not things that requires deep
analysis.

For that, video is perfect.

So in the context of Facebook, it makes sense. In the context of ads, it makes
sense.

Yes, we don't want to believe it because it sounds like hell to people reading
HN religiously, where text is kind, where people debate, where people don't
use smileys, and where ideas get evaluated.

But that's not what Facebook is for. And that's not what the people on
Facebook want.

------
Illniyar
Wasn't there a paper from facebook where it says 80% of videos are watched
without sound?

Doesn't it mean that most of these videos are watched with subtitles?

How is that taken into aaoumt with the "death" of text?

~~~
kalleboo
> Doesn't it mean that most of these videos are watched with subtitles?

No, it means they're not actually watched at all. Facebook autoplays videos
(without sound) when you scroll through your timeline. If you get distracted
and stop scrolling and 10 seconds play, they count that as a "play".

------
dandare
Video is good for showing falling people (or naked). When I look for
information - news, tutorials, knowledge - I avoid video like a plague. Three
words: Low Information Density.

------
gedrap
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.

------
spazzpp2
First, FB assimilated Wikipedia (just text, few images). FB also assimilated
IMDB. Then, they discovered that most links aren't Wikipedia anymore but it's
youtube. So they assimilate a video service so that they will be quoted when
another hyped video comes up and not youtube again. Aaand facebook will
continue to assimilate. Google's AI features should be at their next aim.

Facebook is Borg. Faceborg.

------
Clubber
I just read most of the comments, but I didn't read the article. I was much
more interested in the comments.

Having said that, if these comments were an audiobook, or a word for word
movie script, I'd probably only be through about 5 of them.

Words rule!

On the other hand, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, a movie must be worth
billions! Unfortunately it takes a lot of study of a picture to get 1,000 word
out of it. That's a lot of pausing.

------
petra
Just today we had a "children illustrated guide to kubernetes" receiving lots
of upvotes(243), and some comments saying it's a much better way to learn
stuff.

So i'd say text isn't the ideal, it's just a matter of economics that we are
surrounded by text all the time, and maybe facebook can shift that.

On a sidenote, i'm curious why aren't there aggregators for well illustrated
content ?

------
sbmassey
To devils advocate, though, what if automatic transcripting of text from video
actually worked reliably? You might then get many of the advantages of text in
video form: ability to search, copy-paste, fast forward and backward while
still seeing what is going on. You would still see the presenters ugly mouth
flapping up and down, however, which might be thought a negative.

------
pixelmonkey
It's interesting to consider how painful a "video-only Wikipedia" would be to
use. If the point is to distract, then video is certainly at an advantage. If
the point is to communicate or inform, then certainly text is the winner.

I guess that explains FB's hope for a rise of video content.

------
fuzzywalrus
I'm guessing this a pivot that actually is moving away from everyday user
generated content as facebook already has become increasingly a news and
image-macro aggregator/sharer. Why not video I suppose? I imagine forcing
video advertisements pays significantly better.

~~~
dredmorbius
Video ads are _slightly_ harder to block. Particularly on mobile.

------
enobrev
I was first employee and lead engineer at a startup that was primarily focused
on video, which eventually got aquired by a very well known video sharing
platform. If there's one thing I learned in that 5 years, it's that I don't
care much about video. I had every opportunity to find a way to care. I
enjoyed creating the technologies that we created. I enjoyed managing the
systems we built and meshed. I enjoyed inventing ways to store and retrieve
Terabytes of short videos for thousands of people. I even enjoyed building a
prototype video renderer in Javascript (which was eventually ported to C). But
as far as consumption is concerned, I couldn't be bothered with the vast
majority of it.

The applications that we built were an attempt to resolve some of this. We
were building editing / curation tools to help improve video, and some of the
people using our software created incredible things, that I absolutely loved.

I especially dislike the trend in the past (5?) years toward programming
tutorials in video. Give me a written tutorial. Give me a blog post. Give me a
well-commented repo, or at least a poorly commented one with a decent README
file. When teaching anything involving a textual artform / profession, give me
Anything but a visual / audial medium. I write and read code for a living, and
otherwise I write and read about problems solved with code all day. When it
comes to programming, video is a square peg in a knife fight.

That said, I have an enormous collection of TV shows and Movies, and I have a
great deal of appreciation for the medium, in general. One of my close friends
is an Editor in Hollywood and I have such an absolute respect for him and the
creative sides of his industry. I love to see his work and hear about the
intricacies therein. When edited and curated, video is splended. I can dive in
and forget the world exists and appreciate nuance and symmetry of visuals,
sounds, and ideas. And despite my feelings about programming videos, I know
it's possible to learn from video, depending on the subject.

I don't want to watch videos of everyone I know doing every day things. I
don't want to watch unedited, uncurated crap in real time. Every time a "Live"
video link shows up on my FB notifications, I skip it. I don't want to see you
live. If I did, I'd video chat with you, or I'd call you up to hang out. But
if you want me to take some time out to watch your broadcast, then I expect
some planning, editing, and and overall respect for my time. This is video,
after all. It's all-consuming. I have to watch AND listen in real time, which
means I'm not doing anything else. Asking that much of me requires respect.

Of course another benefit of text is that it's so easy to edit. I don't know
if you've actually enjoyed reading this post, but I assure you the first
version was much, much worse.

And if you just skimmed it and ended up here, at this sentence, well there it
is: my favorite part about text over video.

------
arkj
Temporal disillusions caused by a feeling of being in control. A desire to
rush to novel/radical claims with a cloak of pretentious knowledge. Sometimes
its such a strain to wade through. And yes, go ahead, downvote.

------
jacquesm
This suggests that video lectures such as offered by coursera could be
improved on by providing a transcript for every video lecture. Has this been
done by any of the other online teaching institutions?

~~~
Elvewyn
EdX does that, I just started a course on it.

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hacksonx
Am I the only one who stops reading an informative English article when the
word "because" is used to begin a sentence? Maybe text does deserve to die.

~~~
nathan_long
Because of your insightful commentary, the site has decided to close.

------
salmonet
Videos can be made to be extremely entertaining and take very little effort to
consume. It makes sense that video will be increasingly important for
Facebook.

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bikamonki
I am the kind that reads thrice before hitting send. It would be too slow/too
weird to do that with video or voice notes. Text is deathless.

------
erikb
Maybe a reason for declining text on FB is that people who like to talk to
other people don't use FB anymore.

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potlee
Maybe you should have made a video of this?

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threepipeproblm
I would say the information _density_ of text is much higher than that of
video, at least for my purposes.

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aout
"Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language"
That's a joke right ?

~~~
almost
Deaf people are an obvious example. As are people dealing with content not in
their native language. Accents can also be an issue.

And then there are many people who would simply prefer to read something over
heating it. Is that really so hard to understand?

------
aaron695
This is why it makes me laugh when idiots think the Minority Report interface
could ever work.

Text will rule for a long while yet.

------
mxuribe
So would some sort of animated ascii art be considered video or text?

------
nelmaven
You don't need sound for text.

------
known
Irrational exuberance by FB

------
toomanythings2
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 on about things I don't care about but I can't skim ahead in the video
without worrying I'm skipping something I really do want to hear.

Thus, the advantage of text. To the point. Skimmable, both forward and
backward with the ability to understand what you are skipping over.

Have you ever read transcripts from talks given? Don't you wish someone would
have edited out all the garbage talk beforehand? And doesn't your mouse wheel
finger hurt scrolling down the page, only to be told "to hear the rest of the
video, click here".

Now let's talk about the weight of video files ....

~~~
kofejnik
At first, I thought 'Yeah me too, text is so much more efficient', but then I
realized something. Maybe it's only me, but for learning more complex things
video lectures work wonders for me, probably because they force me to slow
down and process information calmly and in order; while with text, I tend to
hastily jump all over the place, skipping the more boring bits and missing
important things.

~~~
jsemrau
Opposite anecdotal evidence. I am terrible in following video lectures. But
listening to audio books works wonders.

~~~
kofejnik
not really opposite imho, the point is 'explained slowly and methodically',
seeing professor's face is completely optional

------
sklogic
> _" It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period."_

What a pathetic load of hogwash. Video is the slowest possible way of
conveying any meaningful information.

~~~
nathan_long
Came here to comment on same. It depends. No amount of text can give you the
feel of an event like a short video. On the other hand, imagine TV news as
"read the entire NY Times" \- it would take all night. Print has way more
information, AND it's easy to skim.

