My Web is Text Based | Hacker News Reader

My Web is Text Based

marksonland.com

83 pointstrs9054 comments

The main problem I have with video over text is that it takes much longer to convey the same information. I can read about 5 times faster (450-500 wpm) than most video (90-100 wpm). So other than special cases where video is crucial, I much prefer text.

On top of that you can't scan, skim, skip, and search it nearly as well. It's thus much harder to assess the value of video/audio content up front.

Sometimes I like watching videos precisely because it's slower: the delivery has nuance; I can ruminate a bit; things stick in my memory. A good speaker can really amplify the meaning and memorability of information.

Really, it depends on the situation. Speed isn't always the most important thing.

"A good speaker can really amplify the meaning and memorability of information." I think a lot of the TED talks prove this point!

(still - i'd love to see transcripts)

My response to video links is to simply ignore them (which is quite ironic, given my background).

If you can't find the time to at least accompany your video with a textual representation then I'm not interested, I think the choice of medium should lie with the recipient, not with the producer.

The choice of medium will lie with the recipient. That's the promise the web holds for us. I hope it fullfills it.

I have the same issue, generally preferring text over video, but I make an exception for espn.com. Usually I want to pick and choose game highlights to watch (such as seeing what kind of freakish dunks LeBron unleashed last night). I don't even get the ESPN cable station, but I find the user experience of watching highlights of any game played whenever I want, and switch back and forth between highlights, write-ups, and box scores, to be a far superior experience than just watching Sports Center.

Now, watching the talking heads instead of just reading a write-up, I do not get at all. It always confuses me to see a lot of the talking head videos near the top of the "most watched" lists.

The problem does not lie with video - the problem is that video today is very linear. Even people who think they prefer text do not actually do so - they just prefer being in control of the reading speed and being able to immediately jump to the information they want.

Imagine video that behaved like a real person sitting opposite you. You type in google - "Where is Tibet", and a video immediately pops up with a person who says "Tibet is in China" and at the bottom of the video a bunch of relevant extra information popup, allowing you to jump up and down in the video. This would work a lot better.

Video has to become searchable, navigable, and you should be able to have an information context in any videos that you watch. Then the web will benefit by becoming video based.

So instead of a 17-byte string, you get some enormous video (not simply audio, but a video with pictures and everything) of someone telling you exactly the same thing that you could have read in a few seconds?

I agree that things like searchable video have their place, but it is not for stuff like that!

Don't let bad implementations constrain your imagination!

I kind of agree here - I much prefer the control over text, until the text gets massive. It's very easy to keep getting lost in one big page of text when trying to follow along a guide of something.

It's also pretty bad trying to follow guides when the text is full of pictures.

Google finance has a fantastic dynamic web application feature - it has a big graph of stock price for the stock you are looking at, and next to it a list of news items relevant to that company and its industry.

As you zoom and scroll the graph, the news items change to only show news for the time period you are looking at.

No, I really just want the text.

What you describe sounds like the Clippy-fication of Google, a terrifying thought.

Also, I often can't watch video content without unplugging my speakers and putting my headphones in so I don't disturb other people. Oh, and my laptop fan starts going like crazy and my CPU goes to 100% with FLV.

God I hate Flash on Mac. Burns up my CPU for watching a 3 minute video...

I use ClickToFlash http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash/tree/master

Video is an effective way to warm the planet, burn nonrenewable fuels, and send more batteries to toxic dump sites.

There is a pet peeve of mine, I usually have my monitors speakers plugged in and active, so if I land on a page that starts playing some silly video I run the risk of waking up the whole house. Ads with video in them are even worse, a surefire way to let me never ever visit that site again (these warrant an entry in my hosts file).

Video is primarily for entertainment, text is for conveying information. At least on the net.

Newspapers don't seem to understand this - a lot of them are starting to have videoclips on their sites, apparently to grab marketshare from TV. It's much more expensive than writing an article, and it doesn't work. There are, of course exceptions: "nipslips", catastrophes and such call for video, but most news don't.

A-men! U.S. j-schools are obsessed with turning everyone into multimedia reporters...when people still just want great text stories.

The original post is great. I'm sending it to all my journalism buddies.

Agree. It's especially annoying when the video link is not marked as such on the newspaper site. I immediately bounce back. If I wanted video I'd be elshewhere.

This shift over to primarily video content irritates me: I like reading text, and video is difficult with my college's slow Internet.

I think the main reason why we're seeing such a shift is that in the long run it is easier to ram advertising down people's throats over a video link than it is to get them to click on ads in textual content. The CPM's paid for delivered video ads reflect that, they count those much higher than delivered (but not clicked) text or graphics (even flash) ads.

Yes, and in the case of espn: you didn't think Joe Intosports likes to read (espicially at the evening, it's too much like work).

True enough :) Another big factor is that television / video by default are passive, in other words your brain is in a different mode than when you are reading. A person that is reading is far more likely to see an advertisement for what it is, an interruption of their day and a waste of bandwidth. Television / video consumers are more in the mood for wasting time and will pay attention to almost everything as long as it moves.

I don't know... there are also a lot of 'screencasts' coming out from developers. Personally I can't really stand them, for most of the reasons mentioned elsewhere in this thread. The only excuse for them that I could see would be that they'd be easier to put together than a well-written article with appropriate code clippings and images, but I'm skeptical of that.

I completely agree and my visits to such sites have gone down as well. Other sites that I have stopped visiting less include sports.yahoo.com and movies.yahoo.com. And don't even get me started with tv.yahoo.com.

I totally agree. Why would I watch a video if I'm looking to navigate somewhere?

However, big brands might find creative ways to use them on search results. Check out the one for Pedigree (http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=pedigree) This commercial first ran during the Super Bowl and is pretty funny. I'll bet certain campaigns could do well in search, prodding the user to dive into the ad experience more (i.e. hangintherejack.com)

If you don't like video, maybe you shouldn't be going to the web site of a cable channel?

I feel the same way about ESPN. I like reading interesting articles about sports but it is actually not that easy to find good content - there is no hacker news for sports (yet!).

I was throwing together a Techmeme for sports, and while compiling a list of sources, I ran into this same problem. As far as I know, there isn't enough sports content out there, which makes sense if you think about it.

You're insane. The TrueHoop network alone has enough good content to fill eight hours a day, and that's just U.S. NBA basketball.

The issue with sports is that there's a ton of re-blogged information, so the issue is finding the original source algorithmically.

What you should do, if you're serious, is rank articles by the length. It's a brute force measure, and it won't be accurate, but it's a good place to start.

Then, figure out a way for people do isolate it to their teams. The Southern Illinoisan newspaper is probably going to be the best source for news about the SIU Salukis, but I never remember to go there, so I get excited when I see a snippet on ESPN.com. You find a way to get me the best news about my Cubs, Salukis, White Sox, Bulls, Illini, Bears, Fire, Arsenal, Blackhawks, and so forth down my ladder and you'll mint money.

True. I had something small deployed for a while but it ran into that same issue.

I've been feeling this way about CNN for a while. Many of the video links have "teaser" headlines as well. Definitely not worth watching a commercial. Fortunately, there are plenty of alternatives for news.

I find Bill Simmons writing on sports excellent. He kind of disguises the quality of his writing with the references to crappy pop culture and the sophomoric behavior of him and his buddies. But in doing so I think he reveals a lot about who sports fans really are, not some idealized version. He often talks about whether or not he has wasted his life by devoting so much time and effort to following sports and making jokes about how pathetic his wife thinks he is for agonizing over his fantasy teams (she calls his fantasy league "The League of Dorks").

I find it hard to get into other sports writers now, partly because Simmons does such a good job skewering them. When they try to make sports into something epic or sacred, Simmons is quick to point out all the frailties of both the competitors and the poor saps who devote too much time to something that doesn't really mean all that much to their lives.

And then he dives right back into reveling in the joy of being passionate about something that is ultimately meaningless, capturing the essence of being a sports fan.

(I have no idea why I just wrote three paragraphs about this. Must be infected by whatever gets into Simmons when he does one of those day long live chats.)

I've never been one for team sports, preferring running, swimming and the like.

But I have read and will read anything written by Bill Simmons. The man is one of the great writers of our time. He's the Stephen King of sports writers, a guy who keeps pumping out solid, often great stuff that transcends his genre.

I don't follow football, but I read Simmons' picks during the season. I don't follow basketball, but I read his trade value column every year. Why? Because

-the guy explains it in an interesting way -puts it in the proper perspective like you said -links me out to great, great stuff I never would have found otherwise (like the greatest YouTube video ever: http://sports.espn.go.com/espnmag/story?section=magazine&...) -is now living a bit of a glamorous, interesting life that's fun to experience vicariously -can write like the devil

This is a guy who took a week to review the Karate Kid trilogy in detail instead of filing regular columns one summer. http://espn.go.com/page2/movies/s/simmons/020830.html

And yet he attended a funeral for a young athlete who died senselessly, and wrote a "serious" piece that was moving, humble and very honest: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/0803...

There are writers who excel at structure, writers who are idea guys, writers who can nail little details, and then there are writers who simply have more firepower than the average man. They can write more, faster, and with more panache than 99% of the folks out there. It won't all be good, but it'll all be interesting. Simmons has a lot of firepower.

Which, to get back on topic, is why it's INFURIATING, that he's cranking out 3-4 podcasts a month and only 1-2 columns at this point. I simply can't listen to the podcasts. They don't fit into my schedule at all, in any way. I don't have an hour to stare at my computer while it plays an audio stream. Bring back the columns.

Clicking through to the Karate Kid link, I re-read this:

"1. Randee Heller as Mrs. LaRusso, one of my favorite Hollywood Moms of the '80s (right up there with Mrs. Keaton and Mrs. Bueller). You know, in a five-year span, Randee played Gabe Kaplan's wife in "Fast Break," Ken Reeves' stripper girlfriend in "The White Shadow," and Daniel-San's Mom in "The Karate Kid," and then she was never seen again ... and I guess my point is this: You don't need to work anymore with a résumé like that."

Is there anyone else whose pop culture knowledge is more encylopedic than this guy? Who else has a list of favorite 80s Hollywood Moms and can rattle off their roles on queue? He probably double checked IMDB, but still...

I used to be into Bill Simmons but lately not so much. I think once his wife (who knows nothing about football) beat him in NFL weekly predictions is when I made the switch from Simmons to Gregg Easterbrook.

There was a reason to reading the sports section!

It seems to be what keeps a large puportion of the american population reading! However, it does not make business sense.

For me, videos on the web should be no longer than a minute. A funny cat, a plane crashing, a meteor shower, etc. concise and to the point.

I can't stand long conversations in video that can be resumed in ten lines of text.

What I find interesting that with espn.com in the first paragrpahs, he describes one of the futures of television (Future? end game.).

people don't like reading. most people read @ an 8th grade level because of the brain damage inflicted by mandatory government education.

most people probably would be illiterate without a mandatory government education

please don't upvote such ahistorical nonsense. Even the most casual examination of historical records reveals this to be false.

In the early 1800s, Pierre Samuel Dupont, an influential French citizen who helped Thomas Jefferson negotiate for the Louisiana Purchase, came to America and surveyed education here. He found that most young Americans could read, write, and "cipher" (do arithmetic), and that Americans of all ages could and did read the Bible. He estimated that fewer than four Americans in a thousand were unable to write neatly and legibly.

people were fine before the advent of the nanny state in 1933.

Certainly we had public education in the 1800s(?) What is the difference between public education (like we had then) and "nanny state" education? (I'm asking this seriously...) What particular legislation would you point to as causing a change?

At the time he visited, public education was rare and voluntary. The first US law mandating attendance at school was introduced in 1852 by Massachusetts, sometime after the reported 90%+ literacy rates were achieved. (I have significant skepticism that it was actually 99.96%, but 90% sufficient to read and write at what we'd consider a grade school level these days, sure.)

996 out of a thousand would be 99.6%, but I agree with your suspicions.

"would be"? You mean it isn't?

(I've been reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=486574 )

Well, extrapolate the data, from a largely rural society where you could get through life without ever reading a single word, and today, where literacy is held in somewhat higher regard, and the effect of mandatory education on literacy rates doesn't look that profound.

I'd say the basic introduction to liberal arts and natural sciences are much better arguments for mandatory education than literacy rates.

There was no public education on any sort of large scale until at least the 1840's, and not really widespread until the reconstruction era government.

That's fascinating. What I was taught about education in that era involved the whole "1 room schoolhouse" thing (which probably says a lot about the quality of the public education I received.)

Those seem like pretty high numbers if you counted everyone who lived there, which would include a lot of slaves. Did he count them? And they all knew how to read and write? Seems dubious to me. If he did not count them, who else did he not count?

http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy

The federal department of education was created in 1867. Strange how illiteracy decreased with the expansion of schools

you trust statistics from a .gov site on the efficacy of government programs?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com