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.
In the same vein I don't think it's as much capturing millennials as keeping up with them. It's impossible to predict every upcoming trend, but if they keep themselves nimble through acquisitions and trimmed product offerings they can ride the coattails of instagram/whatsapp type companies into eternity.
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 doesn't seem like Kottke's style to plagarize, but it also seems extremely likely he read Graydon's post before writing this one. Even the phrases like "always bet on text" are the same.
Well ... uh ... I think ... I think ... uh ... everyone can hear me? ... I'll wait till the guys in the back ... oh and the girls, too, right hahahahahah ... OK ... let's get started...
Sure. I know Facebook wouldn't put out videos like that but it seems 80% of all videos linked to do start out like that and that's the quality you're going to get from anyone worth listening to. Even the polished ones, though, blatter on about things I don't care about but I can't skim ahead in the video without worrying I'm skipping something I really do want to hear.
Thus, the advantage of text. To the point. Skimmable, both forward and backward with the ability to understand what you are skipping over.
Have you ever read transcripts from talks given? Don't you wish someone would have edited out all the garbage talk beforehand? And doesn't your mouse wheel finger hurt scrolling down the page, only to be told "to hear the rest of the video, click here".
Now let's talk about the weight of video files ....
I completely agree there is a lot of garbage in a lot of video content, but if you can take advantage of the audio visual capacity you can get a lot. An example, Just watching a master craftsman do something can reveal a lot of tiny differences in technique that add up to a lot, but may not be written down explicitly.
Agreed, watching someone do something with his/her hands is (almost always) better than reading about it. But consider another scenario: a video of someone showing you how they type some code while talking about it. This sort of videos are unbearable to me, and I don't understand how some people can enjoy them. I'd rather read the code in text form, at my own pace.
My god, I hate coding videos. There is nothing more frustrating than a command-line Linux video. A.) I cannot copy/paste what you typed into your terminal into mine from a youtube video. Give a decent transcript with the steps enumerated.
I wonder if anyone has tried to build a ttyrec[0]/termrec player with synchronised audio?
Then you have the best of both worlds. Adding some sort of out-of-band overlays (like iTerm2/3 annotation maybe[2]) for
extra commentary would make it truly amazing.
..Looks like no, but in teh future plans of [1] at least.
I'm not sure how the production workflow would go - I guess you'd
- record your terminal session, perhaps with live audio recording.
- if tools existed (which they afaik don't really), being able to clean up your ttyrecs to remove typos, speed up slow typing etc, would be amazing)
- Maybe rerecord a commentary/narration audio on the edited visuals, and add any annotations.
- publish, and glory in your multimedia educational creation!
(As I continue to think about it, I'm tempted to try to build this. I wonder if it would get used?)
At first, I thought 'Yeah me too, text is so much more efficient', but then I realized something. Maybe it's only me, but for learning more complex things video lectures work wonders for me, probably because they force me to slow down and process information calmly and in order; while with text, I tend to hastily jump all over the place, skipping the more boring bits and missing important things.
That's why podcasts are so much better on 2-2.4x speed with a silence skipper. I get an effective 3x speed and as long as I'm paying attention I still get every word. It sounds like gibberish to most newcomers but if you slowly speed up you don't even notice the increments.
Lectures may require a slower speed. I am talking about more general podcasts where there is more of a discussion going on. If the speaker is fast or if there is a wealth of numbers being recited you may need to slow it down. I don't have a single podcast that I run slower than 2x which yields an actual 2.6x with silence skipping.
I'm guessing this a pivot that actually is moving away from everyday user generated content as facebook already has become increasingly a news and image-macro aggregator/sharer. Why not video I suppose? I imagine forcing video advertisements pays significantly better.
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.).
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
Yeah I did a few "<subject> in 60 seconds" videos and the two lessons I learned from that? (1) They take hours and hours and hours of work to make. (2) Your script for the video must not contain more than 50 words, so you can say very little.
Not surprising: According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_(process)#Assessment reading for comprehension normally falls in the 200-400wpm range. 10 seconds to read 49 words is 294wpm, which is smack in the middle of that range.
Television is always slow paced, because it has to be comprehensible to people with a wide variety of language skills. Youtube, and most other video player software, has a speed setting with pitch correction. I watch everything at 1.5x speed which brings standard TV slow pacing up to natural fast-paced conversation speed. The majority of people here should have no problems understanding 1.5x speed. I don't watch live TV because 1x speed is too annoyingly slow.
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.
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.
> 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
The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned -- and they have no connection to sound, as you say (well, in the Japanese case in particular there are some phonological puns, but I doubt you notice them at speed, even if you have the historical connection). In the latin alphabet I almost never recognize puns when reading (though I get them immediately if someone is reading aloud). And when I was learning German I struggled at first to read the compound words but now the morphological decomposition is automatic.
In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further
> In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further.
It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia).
While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Putting a bunch of symbols in front of them and saying that it has meaning isn't going to help them - but showing that the symbols roughly correspond to sounds that they already know have meaning is a pretty important step.
This doesn't apply to all written languages - logographic systems obviously don't have a correspondence between sounds and written symbols - but for alphabetic systems and the like it's quite a good system.
Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
> Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have symbols and phonemes correspond one-to-one, and they generally don't even when people are devising their own orthography in a green field.
For example, using C for a generic consonant, we have the following regular spelling rules in English:
aC -- TRAP vowel
aCe -- FACE vowel
eC -- DRESS vowel
eCe -- FLEECE vowel
iC -- KIT vowel
iCe -- PRICE vowel
oC -- LOT vowel
oCe -- GOAT vowel
uC -- STRUT vowel
uCe -- GOOSE vowel
Voila, ten sounds in five symbols. The problem from a phonics perspective isn't that we don't have ten different vowel symbols for these, it's that we have other ways of writing the same vowels ("beat" is not written "bete") and other ways of reading words that appear to conform to these rules ("debris" does not rhyme with "priss", or even with "his").
So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish. I can supposedly pronounce almost any Finnish word or sentence near perfectly, and I don't understand a word of the language.
The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.
> So basically everybody should model their language after Finnish.
Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.
English pronunciation <-> writing is so far from a mapping, it causes a lot of resource waste.
For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating.
Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.
Finding that common ground would mean switching from our current system of somewhat-arbitrary spelling to a different but very similar system of mostly-arbitrary spelling. It imposes the same memorization burden on everyone and the benefit is slightly more predictable pronunciation within each of a set of officially-blessed dialects. That ground gets lost over time regardless; there is a reason predictable pronunciation is a feature of spelling systems that either (1) are new, or (2) have just undergone reform.
If your biggest problem lies in a circumstance you rarely encounter, arguably fixing it is not a priority.
> for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating
This is a funny example to use, since it fully conforms to the rules I described above -- study uses the STRUT vowel, and student uses the GOOSE vowel. It would be a better example for the complaint that we have more sounds than symbols.
Good points, but I disagree. Decoding and encoding becomes a lot harder, if vowels change depending on consonants coming after them, or something else even further down the line. (I'm not a linguist.)
It's like a config file specification that supports gotos.
There are, like in most other places. What's usually written is the so called "general language". You can also speak that in a formal setting.
It's like in English, if you say "y'all" and write "ladies and gentlemen", you understand that those might mean roughly the same thing but are different words. It's not a spelling issue.
This is an important but hard to articulate distinction. Ask more if it's unclear...
Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi. Or even German where spelling is changed to keep up with changes in pronunciation.
English is somewhat conservative with spelling, so a lot of words embody their roots in their written form. Teaching kids to spell via phonetics and a huge set of rules makes spelling (and comprehension of new words) harder not easier.
Of course you can take this conservatism to absurd lengths: in French spelling and pronunciation have become so divorced after only a few hundred years that spelling bees are prime time television!
> Yes, written English isn't a phonetic language like, say, Hindi.
It is still somewhat phonetic. If you ignore the vowels that have changed sound over time and the silent letters, you can still sound out a fair chunk of English words.
> Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have be[en] dropped or tuned
Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize.
They are easier to read, assuming you already know them, because they encode significantly more information than a phonetically-based script does. That's a fairly straightforward example of more work up front allowing less work later, much as encoding wikipedia into a decompressor allows the compressed version of wikipedia to be very small.
They're not all learnable. The common character 赢 is infamous -- among Chinese in China -- for being difficult to remember. And there are much worse ones.
Yes, Chinese people who went to school do mostly know the characters. And yes, given that knowledge characters are more helpful to the reader than a phonetic writing system is.
But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text.
The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.
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.
Neither. Optimizing for user experience. Like it or not there's a new category of video content, short, casual videos. From the cooking shorts that are taking over facebook feeds to the the jealousy inducing short clips from my friends BBQ last night, this content category is growing.
Snapchat has the best UX for this type of content.
The simple idea of "tapping" to skip is the equivalent to the tab key when you're using excel. Life is better with it, and you miss it when you can't use it in other apps.
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.
Newborns can't swim in the sense that they stay afloat. A baby will drown if dropped in water.
They do have some reflexes related to swimming, in that they will hold their breath and work their feet, but those reflexes disappear with time and have to be re-learned.
It's fair to say that swimming is a learned practice.
>> ... will hold their breath and work their feet.
Imho that isn't related to swimming. That's them trying to keep their heads above water by standing up, hopefully in relatively shallow water. Even with drowning adults, they don't so much try to swim as try to grasp onto something.
Compare dogs. They have a swimming instinct dedicated to movement. Dogs don't tread. They move forwards. We flail around trying to climb out of the water. They are trying to get to shore. That has to be some sort of evolutionary relic speaking to very different ancestral environments.
Polar bears instincts accommodate both treading water and swimming within moments:
"Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
There are parts of the brain meant for specific tasks. It isn't a homogeneous mass of neurons. The bit that is working the eyes atm was designed (via evolution) to work the eyes. As was the bit that takes the message from the eyes and ups the heart rate when a lion appears in your field of view. There is certainly some flexibility, but the basic task layout is a layout, not a random allocation.
I disagree with Dawkins. If genes were the unit for evolution, we wouldn't exists. We would all just be bacteria spewing out copies of genes, with the planet buried in a pile of tiny protein chains. Genes are the servants of the species. They are a tool used by species to pass on traits, or even to acquire traits from other species. Genes are inert absent a species using them.
that suggests that once born, an individual could have all of their genes removed, and be perfectly fine, other than not being able to pass on traits to a new individual.
Yes. Genes and DNA are not the same thing. DNA is a means of recording and passing along genes. And alien organism that doesn't use our system of DNA/RNA could still possess genes. So it is theoretically possible to remove all manifestations of genes and have the organism continue to function.
This is not very far fetched. Much of our DNA is used for a short time during development and then effectively turns off for the rest of our life. Taking that DNA away might go unnoticed.
You know exactly what he meant. You are using the word design in a different way than him.
There's absolutely a part of the brain that specializes processing visual information, just as there are organs throughout the rest of your body that specialize with other different tasks.
I think pretty much everything in your body is specialized and is "meant" for something. No matter how hard you try, you're not going to get your heart to replace your pancreas or kidneys. And you can't replace your lungs with brain tissue. Sure, doctors can transplant a toe to replace a thumb or a heart blood vessel with a vein from a leg with great success, but it's doing pretty much the same function, just in a different place.
As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body parts tend to be specialized.
meaning is a nice convention to signify that something works well for some use case.
like, you didn't intend to type anything, it was just a series random processes that resulted in some text, but by convention, it's nice to say that you meant to write something.
> Our brains evolved to what they are today long before reading was a thing.
You could be on a poster for "evolution stops at the neck".
Obviously, our brains did not evolve to what they are today long before reading was a thing, because that happened before today. There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
>> There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.
Charitably, reading was not "widespread in the population" at that time. sandworm101's comment shows a pretty appalling understanding of evolution -- the selective pressure for reading ability exists as soon as anyone can benefit from learning to read, not when everyone is required to try -- but a somewhat better understanding of history.
Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.
There's an excellent book [1] that explores the neurological aspects of language. TLDR: language evolved to be efficient for our existing brain structures—our brains did not evolve to be good at language.
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].
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.
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.
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.
Interesting! I do the same with video lectures from Coursera. For example, Odersky's lectures may be interesting, but boy is he a slow speaker. I simply cannot stand his -- and to be fair, most -- lectures unless I play them at 2X speed.
And still, I'd rather read the PDF slides.
Video isn't a particularly good way of conveying formal information. Text with graphics is way better.
I never tried it at 2x speed. I will give it a try when I find an appropriate vid. Thanks to those of you who responded to my post, it gave me some good info.
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.
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.
Of course, movies can be beautiful and even enjoyable because of their slowness sometimes - but that is completely different from the online experience, where everything moves extremely fast and there is always an overload of information, so to keep up with it, you want to be able to ingest it as quickly as possible.
Exceptions apply of course for long form writing pieces, where the pacing and the wording is as much a part of the content as the content itself.
Most of us don't realise how difficult editing is. There's a camera in our phones, and uploading to Facebook, Youtube or Snapchat has never been easier, so now we're all film makers. It just that almost no one realise how hard their favourite podcast or youtube channel has worked on editing. Or how many times they redone the exact same bit, to get it absolutely perfect, and watchable.
It's easier and faster, to re-read a few sentences, edit the worst bit, re-read and post. There's not really a fast way of editing the worst parts of a video.
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.
I think that, in part, the article is misleading since I did not take away that Facebook thinks there's no purpose to text or that it will vanish entirely, and likely they share the same opinion as you.
The counterpart line to the "text is dead" idea is the following from Facebook in the article:
>“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”
To me, this says less about "text is dead" and more "our users are choosing to share experiences with video, and they're doing it off-platform." Similarly, they continue with the following:
>"But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech."
I think 'text is dead' is Facebook's segue to bloviate about an upcoming set of features surrounding multimedia, which in turn is pretty much just a "stop uploading videos elsewhere" gambit. Facebook does do a pretty good job at making videos uploaded elsewhere work seamlessly with Facebook. I'd have to imagine that the next natural step is just to get those on Facebook in the first place.
So, I don't get the impression they want youtube-cut videos to replace the textual Facebook arguments; I think they're just trying to build up hype for FacebookVid or whatever they decided to call their next set of multimedia features.
Just today we had a "children illustrated guide to kubernetes" receiving lots of upvotes(243), and some comments saying it's a much better way to learn stuff.
So i'd say text isn't the ideal, it's just a matter of economics that we are surrounded by text all the time, and maybe facebook can shift that.
On a sidenote, i'm curious why aren't there aggregators for well illustrated content ?
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!?! ;-)
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."
They're probably thinking of memes and emojis as well. It can't be argued that well-structured text is a strong suit among individuals communicating with Facebook.
The folks at Facebook are not stupid. This is likely setting the groundwork to ream more bandwidth through their Aquila project https://info.internet.org
More bandwidth means more money, which means convincing more of the public to invest more in Facebook.
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.
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 just read most of the comments, but I didn't read the article. I was much more interested in the comments.
Having said that, if these comments were an audiobook, or a word for word movie script, I'd probably only be through about 5 of them.
Words rule!
On the other hand, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, a movie must be worth billions! Unfortunately it takes a lot of study of a picture to get 1,000 word out of it. That's a lot of pausing.
174 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadMillennials are the biggest and most active group, and more important to them compared to "everyone else" - they know what they're doing.
- feature-chasing Periscope/Vine/Snapchat/Meerkat/Twitch/Youtube
- enticed by pre-roll ads
- planning future Oculus integration, live VR streaming, etc.
Sure. I know Facebook wouldn't put out videos like that but it seems 80% of all videos linked to do start out like that and that's the quality you're going to get from anyone worth listening to. Even the polished ones, though, blatter on about things I don't care about but I can't skim ahead in the video without worrying I'm skipping something I really do want to hear.
Thus, the advantage of text. To the point. Skimmable, both forward and backward with the ability to understand what you are skipping over.
Have you ever read transcripts from talks given? Don't you wish someone would have edited out all the garbage talk beforehand? And doesn't your mouse wheel finger hurt scrolling down the page, only to be told "to hear the rest of the video, click here".
Now let's talk about the weight of video files ....
Then you have the best of both worlds. Adding some sort of out-of-band overlays (like iTerm2/3 annotation maybe[2]) for extra commentary would make it truly amazing.
..Looks like no, but in teh future plans of [1] at least.
I'm not sure how the production workflow would go - I guess you'd
- record your terminal session, perhaps with live audio recording.
- if tools existed (which they afaik don't really), being able to clean up your ttyrecs to remove typos, speed up slow typing etc, would be amazing)
- Maybe rerecord a commentary/narration audio on the edited visuals, and add any annotations.
- publish, and glory in your multimedia educational creation!
(As I continue to think about it, I'm tempted to try to build this. I wonder if it would get used?)
[0] http://0xcc.net/ttyrec/
[1] http://tty-player.chrismorgan.info/#drop-in-video-replacemen...
[2] https://www.iterm2.com/img/screenshots/v3-screen-shots/iterm...
I can't watch Allan Adams in MIT quantum mechanics faster than 1.25x. Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra on the otherhand I watched consistently at 2x.
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.
This is true. And it is exacerbated by confirmation bias.
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.).
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.
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).
'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.
(The above comment is 49 words)
For comparison, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_li... claims that 250wpm is the speed auctioneers speak at and that normal speech is 150-160wpm.
Getting words spoken at you is terribly inefficient compared to reading them.
Other <video> elements can be sped up entering this into the javascript console:
document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 2
(There are also browser extensions that can do the same thing.)
As well, you can quickly copy paste and remix text in a way we can't with video yet.
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.
The phonic connection to reading is overrated IMHO and this is why I wrote of a hack of the visual system. Kanji/Hanzi are so easy to read because over the millennia the ones that are hard to recognize at speed have bene dropped or tuned -- and they have no connection to sound, as you say (well, in the Japanese case in particular there are some phonological puns, but I doubt you notice them at speed, even if you have the historical connection). In the latin alphabet I almost never recognize puns when reading (though I get them immediately if someone is reading aloud). And when I was learning German I struggled at first to read the compound words but now the morphological decomposition is automatic.
In fact I think the trend to teach kids English via "phonics" makes spelling harder; comment back if you want to discuss further
It took me a long time to realise the point of learning 'phonics' at school (they were called phonograms in Australia).
While I can see why writing and reading without speaking makes phonics look useless, for children, all of their language is initially communicated through sound. Putting a bunch of symbols in front of them and saying that it has meaning isn't going to help them - but showing that the symbols roughly correspond to sounds that they already know have meaning is a pretty important step.
This doesn't apply to all written languages - logographic systems obviously don't have a correspondence between sounds and written symbols - but for alphabetic systems and the like it's quite a good system.
Of course, English uses 26 letter to represent 44 or so sounds, so as far as learning to read and write via phonics goes, English is one of the worst examples there is.
What you really want, for learning to read and write via phonics, is determinism -- you want someone to be able to write something if they know how it sounds, and to be able to read something if they see its written form. There's no need to have symbols and phonemes correspond one-to-one, and they generally don't even when people are devising their own orthography in a green field.
For example, using C for a generic consonant, we have the following regular spelling rules in English:
Voila, ten sounds in five symbols. The problem from a phonics perspective isn't that we don't have ten different vowel symbols for these, it's that we have other ways of writing the same vowels ("beat" is not written "bete") and other ways of reading words that appear to conform to these rules ("debris" does not rhyme with "priss", or even with "his").The rules for pronunciation is very directly linked to the spelling, with few exceptions.
Sure, as long as you assume the only goal is to validate a phonics approach to teaching reading. Some people appreciate that english words get the same spelling in Minnesota as they do in Mississippi.
For foreigners like me that mostly use it in text, the biggest overhead is in speaking, for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating.
Even if there are dialects that pronounce the same word differently, you could still find a lot of common ground.
If your biggest problem lies in a circumstance you rarely encounter, arguably fixing it is not a priority.
> for example I always mess up the words study and student, it's infuriating
This is a funny example to use, since it fully conforms to the rules I described above -- study uses the STRUT vowel, and student uses the GOOSE vowel. It would be a better example for the complaint that we have more sounds than symbols.
It's like a config file specification that supports gotos.
It's like in English, if you say "y'all" and write "ladies and gentlemen", you understand that those might mean roughly the same thing but are different words. It's not a spelling issue.
This is an important but hard to articulate distinction. Ask more if it's unclear...
English is somewhat conservative with spelling, so a lot of words embody their roots in their written form. Teaching kids to spell via phonetics and a huge set of rules makes spelling (and comprehension of new words) harder not easier.
Of course you can take this conservatism to absurd lengths: in French spelling and pronunciation have become so divorced after only a few hundred years that spelling bees are prime time television!
It is still somewhat phonetic. If you ignore the vowels that have changed sound over time and the silent letters, you can still sound out a fair chunk of English words.
Um.... there are plenty of characters that would, at first glance, appear to be identical to each other. There are plenty more that people have difficulty identifying out-of-context, but not when they appear in context. Characters don't get dropped for being hard to recognize.
They are easier to read, assuming you already know them, because they encode significantly more information than a phonetically-based script does. That's a fairly straightforward example of more work up front allowing less work later, much as encoding wikipedia into a decompressor allows the compressed version of wikipedia to be very small.
What do you mean by "learnable"?
But memorizing a decent inventory of characters is a process of several years, and the boost in ease of understanding is under normal circumstances too small to notice. I notice that communicating in characters is easier because I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, and the semantic content the characters come with helps gloss over my lack of vocabulary and poor grammar. I can already understand English; I would get minimal help from extra semantic annotations to English text.
The total savings in terms of ease-of-reading in Chinese characters compared to an alphabet, summed over a person's entire life, will never pay back the effort it requires to learn them.
Snapchat has the best UX for this type of content.
The simple idea of "tapping" to skip is the equivalent to the tab key when you're using excel. Life is better with it, and you miss it when you can't use it in other apps.
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.
Newborn babies can swim, obviously with no practice. In fact isn't it a classic example of an instinctive human behaviour?
They do have some reflexes related to swimming, in that they will hold their breath and work their feet, but those reflexes disappear with time and have to be re-learned.
It's fair to say that swimming is a learned practice.
Imho that isn't related to swimming. That's them trying to keep their heads above water by standing up, hopefully in relatively shallow water. Even with drowning adults, they don't so much try to swim as try to grasp onto something.
Compare dogs. They have a swimming instinct dedicated to movement. Dogs don't tread. They move forwards. We flail around trying to climb out of the water. They are trying to get to shore. That has to be some sort of evolutionary relic speaking to very different ancestral environments.
Polar bears instincts accommodate both treading water and swimming within moments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scFiRRTU5jg
"Meant"? Nothing in your body or brain is "meant" for anything. There is no "meaning", or "intention", for starters. And the brain is nothing if not adaptable. If your brain is "meant" to be anything, it's versatile.
Evolution is a random process, there is no designing, there's no goals.
(2) There is a goal: species survival.
(3) The only rule is that whatever aids (2) is a rule for purposes of (1).
Check out Dawkins' The Selfish Gene.
This is not very far fetched. Much of our DNA is used for a short time during development and then effectively turns off for the rest of our life. Taking that DNA away might go unnoticed.
There's absolutely a part of the brain that specializes processing visual information, just as there are organs throughout the rest of your body that specialize with other different tasks.
As a whole, humans are quite adaptable to their environment, but specific body parts tend to be specialized.
No, but the brain can replace brain tissue for one task with brain tissue for another task. It's called neuroplasticity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity#Treatment_of_b...
I agree with the GP, if there's one characterization that applies to the brain, it's "versatile".
like, you didn't intend to type anything, it was just a series random processes that resulted in some text, but by convention, it's nice to say that you meant to write something.
You could be on a poster for "evolution stops at the neck".
Obviously, our brains did not evolve to what they are today long before reading was a thing, because that happened before today. There was no point at which brains stopped evolving.
Evolution operates on a different timescale. For all intents and purposes, our physical structure hasn't evolved since reading became widespread in the population perhaps a couple hundred years ago.
Very high literacy rates within endogamous subpopulations go back much farther than a couple hundred years, though.
1: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-New-Science-Read/dp/014...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afXzziwURRU
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.
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.
[0] using https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube-youtu...
And still, I'd rather read the PDF slides.
Video isn't a particularly good way of conveying formal information. Text with graphics is way better.
Videos of people just speaking text is terrible and the wrong tool for the job.
Like this: http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
1. https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed
This is completely baffling to me.
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.
Exceptions apply of course for long form writing pieces, where the pacing and the wording is as much a part of the content as the content itself.
But on facebook ?
Most of us don't realise how difficult editing is. There's a camera in our phones, and uploading to Facebook, Youtube or Snapchat has never been easier, so now we're all film makers. It just that almost no one realise how hard their favourite podcast or youtube channel has worked on editing. Or how many times they redone the exact same bit, to get it absolutely perfect, and watchable.
It's easier and faster, to re-read a few sentences, edit the worst bit, re-read and post. There's not really a fast way of editing the worst parts of a video.
I cannot name a single movie that was not dull compared to a book it was based upon.
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.
The counterpart line to the "text is dead" idea is the following from Facebook in the article:
>“The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video,” Mendelsohn said. “It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information.”
To me, this says less about "text is dead" and more "our users are choosing to share experiences with video, and they're doing it off-platform." Similarly, they continue with the following:
>"But Mendelsohn went further, suggesting that stats showed the written word becoming all but obsolete, replaced by moving images and speech."
I think 'text is dead' is Facebook's segue to bloviate about an upcoming set of features surrounding multimedia, which in turn is pretty much just a "stop uploading videos elsewhere" gambit. Facebook does do a pretty good job at making videos uploaded elsewhere work seamlessly with Facebook. I'd have to imagine that the next natural step is just to get those on Facebook in the first place.
So, I don't get the impression they want youtube-cut videos to replace the textual Facebook arguments; I think they're just trying to build up hype for FacebookVid or whatever they decided to call their next set of multimedia features.
So i'd say text isn't the ideal, it's just a matter of economics that we are surrounded by text all the time, and maybe facebook can shift that.
On a sidenote, i'm curious why aren't there aggregators for well illustrated content ?
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."
More bandwidth means more money, which means convincing more of the public to invest more in Facebook.
The "information density" to "bandwidth" ratio (is there a term for it?) is seldom justified for the majority of video content.
Having said that, if these comments were an audiobook, or a word for word movie script, I'd probably only be through about 5 of them.
Words rule!
On the other hand, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, a movie must be worth billions! Unfortunately it takes a lot of study of a picture to get 1,000 word out of it. That's a lot of pausing.