
The rise of a visual internet? - coloneltcb
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/09/technology/the-rise-of-a-visual-internet.html
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jandrese
Not only no, but hell no.

This is one thing that drives me crazy about the Minecraft Modding community.
Instead of properly documenting a mod on a Wiki someone will make an hour long
YouTube video that takes forever to get to the point and misses a lot of the
nuance. Not only does it take forever, but going back to find recipes or
specific construction restrictions means scrubbing through the video looking
for those 2 seconds worth of frames that had the relevant information. Even
the old standards of the FTB wikis are now terribly out of date as everybody
moved on to pure video.

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jgh
I'm with you 100% on technical instructional videos in general. It is
absolutely the worst medium for the simple fact that you usually need to go
back over the steps multiple times the first time you do something.

~~~
jandrese
Another place where it came up, but probably on purpose was our annual
security refresher course. In the old days this was basically a slide deck
with a multiple choice quiz at the end. You could breeze through it in 10
minutes because the content was always the same and the questions were
obvious.

That was replaced by an unskippable video system where you have to sit through
a full hour of people not emailing their passwords to phishers and remembering
to lock their screen when they walk away from their desk. It's miserable.

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mattbierner
For me text is perhaps the most liberating means of communicating thought.
Writing requires no investment or specials tools, and anyone can produce
professional, groundbreaking work. And, of all the means of expressing
thought, text is the only medium that truly frees the mind from the body. The
quality of writing does not depend on what the author’s voice sounds like or
what they look like or how fast they can think and react.

The internet promised to give everyone a voice and by moving away from text we
would give up an important part of that ideal. There’s a place for audio and
video sure, but I deeply hope there will also always be a place and an
audience for writing

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YouAreGreat
Western governments have been pushing for internet connection speeds far in
excess of what's needed for text _for exactly this reason_.

The competitive advantage from large capital resources is far greater with
video than with text. As the internet turns into TV 2.0, the little people can
crawl back under whatever rock they live under and the old order of media-
democracy is restored.

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IntronExon
if They’re pushing, it is in a weird and ineffective way which neglects the
last mile issue and supports the like of Comcast and Verizon killing something
like Google Fiber with nonsensical bureaucratic hurdles.

As conspiracy theories go, it’s a particularly shabby one.

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TuringTest
Who is this mythical people who consume video news? I can't stand the slow
pace and lack of details.

I very much prefer text, where I can skip boring or redundant parts, or radio
where I can work in something else while I get updated on recent developments.

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braindongle
Tangential: I follow cnn.com because they matter and I think we need to read
widely these days. I just couldn't deal with the aggressive, auto-play video
all over the place, so last week I wrote a userscript to monitor all of their
pages for video and strip it. My cnn.com experience jut got a lot better.

[https://openuserjs.org/scripts/braindongle/CNN_remove_video/...](https://openuserjs.org/scripts/braindongle/CNN_remove_video/source)

~~~
banku_brougham
I don’t know how to break this to you, so here text only cnn from cnn:

[http://lite.cnn.io/en](http://lite.cnn.io/en)

~~~
braindongle
I was aware. Thanks for mentioning that. Personally, I think that the layout
of the site, the size of things, the number of clicks it takes to get to
particular information are all important when my goal is to understand what
messages they are selling, not just to consume their content.

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jakelazaroff
This idea has been floated so many times, but somehow text is still around.
Jason Kottke wrote a good article about why text will never die:
[https://kottke.org/16/06/facebook-is-wrong-text-is-
deathless](https://kottke.org/16/06/facebook-is-wrong-text-is-deathless)

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ocschwar
I first got on the Internet in 1993.

In the last 23 years, I've seen the Internet evolve from primarily a text
based interface, which encouraged long form writing, and line-by-line-
dissection of long form writing, to a medium that is primarily pictorial, and
increasingly video based, where close reading of long form stuff is
discouraged by code and design.

Postman himself declined even to look at the web in 1999, when I started
reading his books, and he passed away in 2004. In 1999, I thought the Internet
was part of the solution to the problem he was writing about. Today, the
Internet is a bigger problem than television and the movies.

And the shift towards pictorial communication is rapidly approaching levels
where it's a threat to civilization. Fark and Failblog are good amusements,
but even the briefest look at 4chan will show you, we're in deep shit.

The thing is, the Internet isn't just the Internet.

Twitter can be criticized not for how well or how badly the company polices
its users, but also in a medium-is-the-message way. Twitter is a cesspool of
hate because the 140 character limit makes it useless for more than playground
name calling.

Facebook is part of the problem not just because of Facebook's policies but
because it's an interface that pushes blogging into microblogging.

Compare to Livejourbal, Wordpress, or dare I say it, Metafilter, all of which
are better by design. (But don't get too smug. There's room for improvement.
And it's still all stuff you're looking at with a tabbed browser, and it's
always tempting to tab away.)

Or compare to Instapaper. I've removed Facebook and Twitter from my phone, and
now when I;m out and about and being a phone zombie, I'm at least reading
1000-2000 word essays that I loaded onto the Instapaper app previously. It's
made me a lot happier. But I am sad to report that I still have not regained
the long form writing ability I had 15 years ago.

~~~
striking
4chan is a threat to human civilization because of its use of images? I think
you'll be happy to hear that one of the most common forms of 4chan post is
"greentext", a specific kind of long form story. Some of these break the
character count cap by many, many posts. And many of these get sizable
reactions from the userbase.

4chan, like life, is what you make of it.

If you want to regain your long form writing ability, you could try taking a
Moleskine or small pad with you when you travel. You can use it as a way to
help create content while you're out and about, as a replacement for your
phone.

Additionally, if you're tech inclined, setting up a blog has become easier
than ever before.

~~~
ocschwar
"4chan, like life, is what you make of it."

4chan is what I make of it.

But it's also what the rest of society makes of it.

That's why we're in deep shit.

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tahw
This has nothing to do with the "reach" and "power" of video, and everything
to do with the fact that video ads are more valuable. Source: I work in online
advertising.

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dredmorbius
Thanks, yes, I was going to say the same thing.

Video is a supply- rather than demand-side phenomenon. Or rather, it's an
interaction between publishers and advertisers rather than publishers and
readers.

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k6hkUZtLUM
Plain text is the only format that has survived from the beginning of
computing. It will probably survive for the next 80 years of computing too.
I'll stick with it :-)

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maxxxxx
I am pretty sure quality content will be in text form for quite a while.

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hawktheslayer
The obvious irony here is that this story was told via text instead of a video
or set of images. Each medium has it's own place.

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banku_brougham
Before getting up in arms wait for the NYT ‘Text actually dominates’ article.
I’ll reserve my comments for that one.

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Macha
Frankly I find a lot of publishers would rather people consume their video
content as video ads pay more, rather than users preferring the video content.
This occasionally leads to that most awful of abominations, news videos that
are just text and a slideshow (or just text!) with no text option to view it.

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megaman22
I met someone recently who had a huge learning disability with reading, to the
point that they are functionally illiterate. It really underscored just how
essential textual communication has become in our world. Even menial jobs
require literacy.

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jeffinpdx
What these "[insert communication medium] is dead!" proclamations don't take
into account is that everyone learns differently. Even with developers. Some
will wade through detailed documentation, others want a quick GIF showing how
the API does something, some just want some screenshots, and so on.

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teilo
What a bunch of BS. This is pretty much lauding a return to the days of the
cave man, where the only way to communicate information is to draw pictures or
pass on an oral history. No, no, and hell no.

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m00g00
And yet I still instinctively skip over links I see to video/audio content as
it generally takes much more time, concentration, and attention to get
value/information out of them.

~~~
mannykannot
Same here - video and audio runs at its own pace. That's not good for
understanding moderately complex topics.

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AndrewOMartin
Text is going to die for exactly the same reasons that audio-video killed pure
audio. That's why radio is now obsolete, and podcasts never took off.

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micah94
I couldn't get through that mess. Did they eventually realize the irony of
describing the post-text future using text?

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xapata
Everything old is new again. Socrates thought writing was of lower value than
speaking.

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dang
Not ever here, at least.

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JasonFruit
I read as much text as ever, and semiliterate lowbrows read as little as ever.
None of the numbers that article presents suggest otherwise. Sure, there's a
lot of consumption of non-text media, too, but we're a long way from post-text
yet.

~~~
dalbasal
I dunno. I read less books and less news, but a lot more email, WhatsApp,
HN...

I definitely write more. I probably write more on my phone than in total, pre-
internet. Maybe I'm one of the Philistines.

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52-6F-62
Nah, us Philistines use _cursive_ still.

That said, I read just as much as ever. Though I read far more non-fiction and
news than I used to. I used to read more fiction and poetry. The easy access
to content gives me _too much_ to read, in fact!

My reading list grows daily. I simply can't keep up. And don't get me started
on going down the Wiki-hole

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sushisource
This rendered as a blank page on FF, worked on Chrome. Anyone else?

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incognito82246
There's a great white emptiness on top, but when you scroll down there's some
text. No media though. But I'm using private browsing mode which has tracking
protection enabled and disables local storage among other things. I guess they
don't feature-detect those things.

