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Comment by trustfundbaby | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to know how many people like this trend of having to watch a video when you get to a landing page. Its showing up in more and more places, and I personally dislike it (I don't want to load a video and watch a clip, if I can quickly scan text and images and figure out if I should continue), but I wanted to know what other people thought.

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I rarely watch the videos. Life is too short. If I can learn about the service/product by reading, that's fine, if not — I'll just abandon the page. If the service/product is any good, it will come back to me sooner or later via friends' recommendations.

Same here, rarely watch videos, but not because life is too short, because video are very intrusive. I need to put headphones, it may download slowly, I have to focus on somebody talking to me, often with a very weird accent, in a language that is not my mother tongue. Moreover I am in China and may have to fire my VPN, switch on the proxy, all this because some guys decided videos were more than text.

It's a 1 minute video so it probably took you longer to post this comment than to watch the thing.

I like both, personally.

Ideally, I want to see a few images to get an idea of what the product is. If I'm interested, I'll watch the video to actually see how it works.

There are things you notice in a video you'd never grasp just from a few pictures, just like how a few pictures can sometimes explain things much better than a lot of words.

I am fully with you. As a general rule, I process text much faster (and more selectively) than I can process a video.

The only time I prefer video is when it is something that truly benefits from being demonstrated in a way that is cumbersome to describe in words. Working with software is almost always best described in words with some pictures, but I found videos extremely helpful in origami.

Text is high bandwidth, but videos are much better for communicating emotion.

I normally go to wikipedia for a description of a service or product rather than sift through all the marketing BS that's normally plastered over a website.

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