> 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.
I worked in television for a number of years in a technical behind-the-scenes capacity where I would have to flick switches and hit buttons on audio/scripted cues. Sometimes this would take me from the script for what I felt was a long time and I would always struggle to get back to where we were in the script.
'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the page in a large font?'
No
Invariably my guess on 'script progress' would be considerably greater than actual progress made. Even under ideal conditions where this was the nth retake and I knew what was coming up I would still find myself over-estimating how many words had been presented to the cameras. Years of experience did not change this, I always over-estimated how much had been read, trying to take into account the 'slow baud rate' didn't help.
If you do ever have a transcript of a video play the video and start reading. See how far you get through the video when you have finished reading. Don't make it a race, read as you normally might, taking time out to Google stuff etc. and you will be amazed at how much quicker the printed word is.
It's a very strange statement indeed to claim that there's nothing built-in for it. We built it around / within our capabilities. It works so well precisely because we built it for ourselves, for what we are capable of.
It's almost like they're pretending it spontaneously came from nature (or always existed absent of humans and we discovered it) and we weren't evolved for it but somehow adapted to it. You could insert eg a bicycle into the same premise: we ride them absurdly well given there's nothing built into the brain for specifically riding a bicycle (except there is: balance, grasping acceleration, etc. - we designed them for our use just as we did text).
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.
In my case I think I avoid HN video links because I know in advance that they will ask me to commit an exact amount of time to it without knowing whether it will be worth it in the end. With text on the other hand, I can easily start to read an article and begin to skim it once I see that it isn't as interesting as I thought it'd be.
My recent forays into Kanji suggest there's more to visual processing of text than what we permit ourselvesto learn due to phonic constraints associatedwith language acquisition, but there's practically nothing for me to go on other than look into how the deaf process textual representations independent of the kinesthetic and proprioception encodings of semantic features.
Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather think that we're liable to commit a grievous error by neglecting the primary source of civilization. Text also has added life in code and programming, which clearly shows it is no likely to suffer any kind of demise.
Agree with this second part, it's structured like a tree, where a video is linear unless the scrubber has more detail. With text you can gather the shape and skim the start of topic sentences very quickly.
As well, you can quickly copy paste and remix text in a way we can't with video yet.
This comment is a personal anecdote. People respond to text in different ways. But they respond to visual motion more predictably. That has been my observation over the course of a year while experimenting with writing an electronic book. The book began as an Android app; and when shown to an audience the general response was one of disinterest. They'd read a few lines and stop, then comment on the photos. Maybe this was because the book was bad, but to me it seemed people did not want to read a lot of text. Perhaps the content was boring? I don't know. In an attempt to promote the work, I generated an auto-scrolling screencast of the book --- which resulted in (slightly) more interest. Consequently I've shifted to converting the book from an Android app to an autoscrolling mp4. It's a work in progress, and I'm prone to unrealistic optimism, but maybe this is a step toward a format for future written works [0].
Surprisingly, one app that is changing this paradigm for video is snapchat. Publishing content in a short series of clips that are skip-able with one tap is an enjoyable user experience.
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.
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.
Yep. TV was revolutionary for advertisements and marketing. The passive viewing makes us more susceptible to them. TV ad revenue is still 10 times the amount for online ads world wide.
I have always assumed that all social nedia want to be the new TV.
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.
Communication is often WAY WAY faster when delivered via text than via a video presentation, particularly because written words come at you at the pace your brain can accept them, as opposed to the static speed at which someone can speak them.
Also, writing is SO MUCH EASIER than creating video. Do you really think I would have bothered participating in this conversation if it meant opening up a camera and NLE and cutting together a video of my ugly mug yapping away, with the signature youtube jump cuts to remove the "umms" and "uhhss" and other pauses that you're not currently reading?
Cuz this reply wasn't a coherently delivered, smooth stream-of-conscious delivery. I've already gone back and rephrased several thoughts-- easy to do in text, a pain in the ass to do in video.
And I'm certainly not going to FIRST write this, then read it out loud, THEN edit it, and hope you sit back and watch. And the idea of text-to-video-- seems like adding an extra step.
Video is great, but its the wrong medium for quite a bit of communication.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
This is a problem we (accessible.ai) have been working on in the past few months.
We're still tuning and improving but with a multi-modal approach of signal processing, speech recognition and text analysis we were able to come up with a pretty good MVP to solve this issue.
You can take a look at our small demo here: http://accessible.ai/nav
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.
This is in fact exactly the approach that my lab has been working on for the last several years in developing a media player for language-learning applications (which has actually also been used for teaching linguistics and introductory chemistry, so clearly the pedagogical benefits generalize beyond just language learning).
Being able to switch between text-centric and video-centric views freely has been a goal of my (now-former, because he just retired) boss for a while (and by "a while" I mean he did his dissertation on interactive, text-augmented video technology with applications to education in the 70s), and we're not quite there yet, but we do have the ability to show a transcript that can be synchronized with the playing video (automatically scrolling and with highlighted text to show where the video is), or scrolled freely and searched through to select a specific part of the video to skip to.
You can see an implementation of the technology (including playing around with some of our editing tools) at http://ayamel.byu.edu
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.).
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.
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.
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.
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."
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!?! ;-)
"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
[+] [-] gumby|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Theodores|9 years ago|reply
'Surely we must have gone through two pages of this double spaced script that only uses one half of the page in a large font?'
No
Invariably my guess on 'script progress' would be considerably greater than actual progress made. Even under ideal conditions where this was the nth retake and I knew what was coming up I would still find myself over-estimating how many words had been presented to the cameras. Years of experience did not change this, I always over-estimated how much had been read, trying to take into account the 'slow baud rate' didn't help.
If you do ever have a transcript of a video play the video and start reading. See how far you get through the video when you have finished reading. Don't make it a race, read as you normally might, taking time out to Google stuff etc. and you will be amazed at how much quicker the printed word is.
[+] [-] adventured|9 years ago|reply
It's almost like they're pretending it spontaneously came from nature (or always existed absent of humans and we discovered it) and we weren't evolved for it but somehow adapted to it. You could insert eg a bicycle into the same premise: we ride them absurdly well given there's nothing built into the brain for specifically riding a bicycle (except there is: balance, grasping acceleration, etc. - we designed them for our use just as we did text).
[+] [-] sandworm101|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rpgmaker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superobserver|9 years ago|reply
Text certainly isn't dead, and I would rather think that we're liable to commit a grievous error by neglecting the primary source of civilization. Text also has added life in code and programming, which clearly shows it is no likely to suffer any kind of demise.
[+] [-] aplummer|9 years ago|reply
As well, you can quickly copy paste and remix text in a way we can't with video yet.
[+] [-] abrie|9 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afXzziwURRU
[+] [-] jsloss|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sly010|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] muddi900|9 years ago|reply
I have always assumed that all social nedia want to be the new TV.
[+] [-] instakill|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terryf|9 years ago|reply
This is completely baffling to me.
[+] [-] fattire|9 years ago|reply
Also, writing is SO MUCH EASIER than creating video. Do you really think I would have bothered participating in this conversation if it meant opening up a camera and NLE and cutting together a video of my ugly mug yapping away, with the signature youtube jump cuts to remove the "umms" and "uhhss" and other pauses that you're not currently reading?
Cuz this reply wasn't a coherently delivered, smooth stream-of-conscious delivery. I've already gone back and rephrased several thoughts-- easy to do in text, a pain in the ass to do in video.
And I'm certainly not going to FIRST write this, then read it out loud, THEN edit it, and hope you sit back and watch. And the idea of text-to-video-- seems like adding an extra step.
Video is great, but its the wrong medium for quite a bit of communication.
[+] [-] Spooky23|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aethos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shiven|9 years ago|reply
The "information density" to "bandwidth" ratio (is there a term for it?) is seldom justified for the majority of video content.
[+] [-] Mendenhall|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auganov|9 years ago|reply
[0] using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube-youtu...
[+] [-] notliketherest|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valleyer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] y14|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enobrev|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gliese1337|9 years ago|reply
Being able to switch between text-centric and video-centric views freely has been a goal of my (now-former, because he just retired) boss for a while (and by "a while" I mean he did his dissertation on interactive, text-augmented video technology with applications to education in the 70s), and we're not quite there yet, but we do have the ability to show a transcript that can be synchronized with the playing video (automatically scrolling and with highlighted text to show where the video is), or scrolled freely and searched through to select a specific part of the video to skip to.
You can see an implementation of the technology (including playing around with some of our editing tools) at http://ayamel.byu.edu
[+] [-] kalleboo|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matchagaucho|9 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] ivv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l33tbro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xCMP|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
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.).
[+] [-] rndmind|9 years ago|reply
This is true. And it is exacerbated by confirmation bias.
[+] [-] Bahamut|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tracker1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] combatentropy|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mxuribe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] welanes|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply