[Meta] I suggest adding a rule to not post videos here.
In my humble opinion, the Technology community should only contain text news/articles or even news pictures.
I simply think that tech videos does not belong to this community, as there is already a videos community which would be more suitable for this.
What does the mods think about this?
A compromise would be to require a text summary of any video post.
My main beef is that I don’t enjoy watching video form content, but having a summary would be more than sufficient to quickly determine whether or not I would be interested in watching anyway.
Strongly agree.
That's what the headlien is for.
It’s a good idea in principle but headlines are often not in the viewer’s interest. The purpose is to get you to watch the video, not to actually tell you what’s in the video.
Unfortunately there’s lots of good videos with Clickbait titles.
There's a lot terrible articles with clickbate titles too. A lot of the articles I'm interested reading are either clickbate/ragebait or way out of context or just completely false.
Absolutely. That's why it's still good practice to include some kind of comment about the article in the post if the content isn't clearly identified by the headline.
Exactly. I don't post often, but when I do, I include a short summary, as well as a couple questions to spark discussion.
Much faster to skim the contents of an article than a video.
The headline here does not need to be the same as the headline in the article. Other communities have rules not to editorialize headlines, this community does not. "Review of tech gadget X by outlet Y" is a perfectly fine headline here.
There is no rule here to copy the video title into the submission headline. The submission here could be titled "PlayStation 5 Pro benchmarks by Digital Foundry", no matter how DF names the video on YouTube. Demanding summaries of videos that can easily be longer than 45 minutes is just not reasonable at all.
That "compromise" would put a lot of work onto the person submitting a video, just because some people don't like videos.
Yup, and requiring a bit of extra work sounds entirely reasonable to keep the quality of content high.
How about you write the summaries in the comments then if it's just a bit of extra work?
That's fine, if the poster really doesn't want to include it in the original post for some reason.
If you're asking me to do it, I absolutely do when I post videos. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect others to do the same.
Yes, it is. For a deep dive video a summary is easily several paragraphs long. Not only takes it time to write the summary, for a deep dive it would include making notes during the video, pausing several times, etc. In such a case of a deep dive, this can be an hour of work. So if you want summaries, you do the work. Don't demand that from others and claim this is somehow a compromise.
You said it, a summary of a deep dive video is a few paragraphs
Don't fucking post a two hour video that contains a few paragraphs of info then
Exactly. And with AI tools, getting a transcript and generating a summary shouldn't be all that hard.
All I'm looking for is a handful of bullet points that give me a reason to watch the video. I'm not watching a random video someone posts just based on the headline, I need a bit more reason to invest my time to contribute to the discussion. And if you provide a basic summary, I'll probably do the legwork and find some articles to add to the discussion while I'm watching the video.
Write a summary bot then.
Then don't.
You're not that important. If you don't contribute to a discussion just because the submission is a video, nobody will notice.
I'm not specifically talking about myself, I'm explaining the sentiment I see here. Me personally not contributing to those posts probably won't impact anything, and that's fine. But there's a lot of pushback from people who prefer text.
All I'm saying is to put in a little effort to link a relevant text article or add a few bullet points that the video covers. That's it. The barrier to posting stuff should be a little higher than just sending links to things that seem somewhat interesting.
The sentiment here is that a loud minority cries about a tiny fraction of submissions when they could just not watch the videos in the first place.
Literally nobody is stopping you from doing that for other submissions. Don't task unpaid community members to do work for you, just because you don't like videos.
I mean, I do that sometimes, and it's honestly not hard. If I post a video, I post a short summary about why I think it's relevant. I expect the same from others.
And no, I'm not paid either.
You clearly don't know what a summary is. I can summarize Lord of the Rings in three sentences. The details are still important.
If you don't want to watch such a video, DON'T WATCH IT! Don't forbid others to like what they like!
A post with nothing in it except a video link is not a post to begin with.
Posts should actually have some content in my opinion, otherwise it's just link dumping which is practically spam.
If I can't determine from the initial post if a article/video is of interest it shouldn't have been posted to begin with.
Maybe you shouldn't be active on a link aggregator platform then.
Ah yes the fabled "link aggregator".
Lemmy might technically also be that, but it's first and foremost a discussion platform, although it has an ongoing problem with rampant bot-posts and link-dumpers.
Personally, I think if it's a video related to technology, it belongs in the technology community more so than the video community.
I really don't like the trend of things that should be articles, being videos instead. And I'm very unlikely to watch one of these videos. However, this is a personal preference and I don't necessarily think videos should be banned from this community. Instead upvotes/downvotes could decide that; if no one wants to see videos, no one should upvote them.
If the video is about technology. It's okay to post them here. If you don't like videos don't click them simple as.
So literally all videos should be posted in the videos community?
That sounds awful.
Why?
Because there's absolutely no genre of video. If you want to browse random videos, go on YouTube. Link aggregation is for sharing specific videos of specific subjects.
In that case, you are looking for a flair system for lemmy videos community, which would ease your concern.
Maybe you need flair for the technology community?
Maybe both? Honestly just having flairs in most communities would be nice
Perhaps, but the point was to indicate OP's odd assumptions about this community vs the videos one.
Incorrect.
That's an odd request. I'm not a huge fan of video content but there's legitimately good content in video format.
9 times out of 10 I prefer reading, but there's some videos that are absolutely worth watching over reading. That said, I don't really want to see talking heads. And I think people should include the channel/creator name in the title.
But as a reality check, I'm looking at the first page of this community and only see one YouTube link. Doesn't really seem like a problem worthy of a rule.
Videos are unfortunately the way a LOT of quality content is delivered now and banning any and all videos (relevant or not) is probably not the way to go.
GN, L1T, HUB and so on are super high-quality stuff that're tech related and that's basically how they deliver their content. A blanket ban would kill way too much good shit, imo.
There's lots of technology channels on YouTube and it's competition that do tech news that I feel are pretty relevant (gamerz nexus for sure). I wouldn't want people to lose that just because some of us (myself included) prefer written formats to videos.
I'm almost certainly not going to watch one, but I'm not going to suggest they're banned, unless something changes and the majority of content becomes videos for some reason. I haven't felt that it's a problem.
I'd rather see posts of tech support or someone's shower thoughts be removed, because I see that pretty frequently, and it pushes the relevant content down. At least it's not 80% tangentially-related business news or "Musk tweeted something" any more.
For me, video is rarely the form that I want to consume any content in. It's also very obnoxious if I'm on a slow data link (e.g. on a slower or saturated cell phone link).
However, sometimes it's the only form that something is available in. For major news items, you can usually get a text-form article, but that isn't all content. I submitted a link to a YouTube video of a Michael Kofman interview the other day talking about military aid to a Ukraine community. I also typed up a transcript, but it was something like an hour and a half, and I don't know if that's a reasonable bar to expect people to meet.
I think that some of this isn't that people actually want video, but that YouTube has an easy way to monetize video for content creators. I don't think that there's actually a good equivalent for independent creators of text, sadly-enough.
And there are a few times that I do want video.
And there may be some other people that prefer video.
Video doesn't actually hurt me much at this point, but it would kind of be nice to have a way to filter it out for people who don't want it. Moving all video to another community seems like overkill, though. Think it might be better to have some mechanism added to Threadiverse clients to permit content filtering rules; I think that probably a better way to meet everyone's wants. It'd also be nice if there were some way to clearly indicate that a link is video content, so that I can tell prior to clicking on it.
I think this community needs new rules, I just saw a guy post an unpopular opinion here, I don' think it fits. This is the biggest lemmy community of all
Just don't click on YouTube links if you don't like them. Nobody makes you forces you to. No Lemmy client I know hides the URL and surprises you with video content. Plenty of video creators use that medium to showcase differences in technologies. Digital Foundry videos on topics such as frame generation come to mind.
They still clog the feed and cause accidental clicks.
At a minimum, all video posts' titles should start with [VIDEO]. Making a user scan for some easy to overlook cue that they're clicking on a video isn't great design.
So because you do occasional misclicks, nobody else should be allowed to see any video submissions, even if they are super informative? Buddy, get a grip with reality. You're not the center of the universe. Other people exist. "I don't like something, therefore nobody can have it" is not a proper attitude.
I don't like videos either tbh, but I would be ok with posts that are properly identified, so like [video] [news] [opinion] etc lol
They don't clog the feed, the overwhelming majority of posts here are links to articles. Your lack of motor control is also not our problem.
If you don't like videos, don't watch videos.
How about letting those of us who enjoy video content, to continue to enjoy video content.
This shouldn't be a "I don't like it, so no one else should get it" situation. That's some selfish bullshit.
But guys in a DeCeNtRaLiZeD social network no one is in control of what content gets posted.
Are you high?