What do you miss from the old internet?

_number8_@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 260 points –

i think we need Cracked-style articles back. desperately. or like, a guy doing a weird thing and writing a piece on it. sites like those are declining faster than the glaciers.

233

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

A lot of informational content is now in video format instead of text/photos. I can barely understand their poor English in those videos.

I can read and skim documents for salient details at 500 - 800 words per minute.

And then someone links me to a twelve minute video on YouTube where 800 words are spoken in total , 300 of those words are "um,so", and all we're looking at is either the narrator , or possibly a static slide with a few paragraphs on it... and also an inset of the narrator, narrating.

You also can't ctrl-f a video. It's by far the worst format for information.

And in terms of actual information per kilobyte, itโ€™s often absolutely laughable compared to text.

Everyoneโ€™s using video for everything these days because thatโ€™s where the ad money is. Hooray, the tyranny of capitalism.

Exactly this! My hearing problems don't help the matter at all. Also they're painfully slow - I read really fast and I rarely need a full intro to something, I usually hunt for a single piece of information in a whole article. Videos are stupid.

whats up guys in todays video I'll show you how to tie a shoe. First, remember to like and subscribe

So today we're going to learn how to tie a shoe. I like tying shoes, I tie a lot of shoes and I think other people tie shoes too, so I'm doing a video on tying shoes.

Without further ado, let's jump right in.

So tying shoes is really important. Lots of people tie shoes every day and so it's something that you need to know. So in this video we're going to talk about tying shoes. If you want to learn how tie shoes you're in the right place! We're talking about tying shoes.

So without further ado, let's jump right in.

So in this video we're going to talk about tying shoes .... [5 more minutes of talking without actually giving any information whatsoever]

This is so accurate. I end up hitting the 1-9 numbers keys to see at what chunk of the video they get to the real meat.

I guess the catch is that I'd prefer to watch a video for information because the experience is better than the absolutely ad riddled text news sites.

It's very easy to process an actual article and evaluate whether it actually does what I'm looking for enough to read it properly.

Video doesn't provide that. It's a bad format unless what you're doing is actually visual in nature. Reviewing a video game? Sure, provided you're spending meaningful examples of the actual mechanics. Reviewing a video camera? Absolutely.

If your video is just you talking at a camera, it almost definitely shouldn't be a video.

Googling so many "how do I do X?" type of questions have top-results of 10-minute videos where someone has their cluttered Desktop in full 1920x1080 and then they open the tiny command prompt in a small window (it's clear they have no idea how to record a video), where they clumsily type commands they clearly don't understand, and fumble through the entire process.

I just needed a single command. It should have been a 1-second result at the top of search, not shitty videos or SEO dynamically-generated shit site that are trying to sell me something.

I never thought I'd be one to watch videos at 2x but there's so much "content" out there that it helps to get through it plus lots of videos are padded anyway.