Hacker News Reader

What does video not be in the future mean? In social media tiktok and reels are everywhere?

There are reports [1] that a bunch of companies like "College Humor" were convinced to switch to producing native video for facebook (instead of directing users to their own sites) on the basis of bullshit metrics from facebook, and had an extremely bad time as a result, with some companies going bankrupt.

Something like counting an autoplaying video that ran for 3 seconds as a 'view' IIRC

[1] https://twitter.com/adamconover/status/1183209875859333120

Thankfully, Dropout (a spin-off of College Humor) is alive and well, and producing some of the best D&D Actual Play series as well as other non-D&D comedy shows. One of the entertainment services that I happily pay for because I want to support what they're doing.

They are referring to Facebook/Meta’s 2015 “pivot to video”, speculating there may be a similar thing happening more recently with AI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video

TIL. Reading up on it a little, I'm surprised the class-action settlement was just $40M: https://www.videoadvertisingsettlement.com/

Interesting thanks!

Feels like in hind sight, maybe they were just to early to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com