Specifically on news sites, but I suppose it applies to the web in general.
Another entry on my long list of pet peeves is the fact that you usually can’t tell a link goes to a video or to an article. A special circle in hell should be reserved for pages that have videos that auto-play. Personally, I hate videos by default because I can read much faster than it takes to sit through some goofball’s self-indulgent display.
Do you prefer videos to text? Why?
Videos are usually a waste of time, unless there’s something that can only be appreciated visually, such as a dashcam video, or (or course) porn.
I don’t think you’ll find many people voicing a preference for video over text on a board that doesn’t even allow still images.
Yeah I guess that’s sort of what I’m getting at, but if that’s the case, who are they catering to? I guess some people aren’t ok with actually READING, god forbid. There are whole swaths of websites I don’t even bother going to anymore because everything has been switched to video.
They are catering to the 90+% of internet users who hate reading. Who in turn are very, very rare here at this particular very much tiny minority web site.
I also suspect, but do not know, that peripheral ads are more effective on a page with a video than they are on the same page with many paragraphs of text.
IMO, the whole time you’re watching the video, the adjacent ad for cars or pills or whatever is seeping into your subconscious. But if you’re actively reading and scrolling, those ads are being consciously filtered out and may not even be in the visible window for the majority of the time you’re scrolled partway along the page.
I fricken hate, hate, hate all of the video on the web. Especially when the visual adds nothing to the experience. I don’t need to see you typing commands put the info in text and move along.
God no.
I’ll see some interesting headline, and when the link goes to a video, I just skip it.
Not only don’t I want to watch a video, but I especially don’t want to watch 30 seconds of talking heads before getting to the 5 second subject video.
I hate going to a tech site to learn how to change some setting in Windows or whatever, and the help page is a video showing me how to click through every damned menu to do what I want. I could have read the instructions in about 25 seconds. But here is 7 minutes of some jackass clicking around and editorializing about it. Just give me the text goddammit!
I HATE web videos at any news site. I like to quickly scan text for information, not sit through a damn video.
I hate videos on news sites, but I prefer video in special circumstances.
For example, near the end of his Escapist run, Movie Bob started posting text reviews along with the video reviews he had been already doing for years. A lot of what I like about Movie Bob is the style of his videos and so I would watch the videos rather than read the text.
But on a news site? I just shut off the video and read the article underneath. If there is no article underneath, I look for a different site.
There are LOTS of people who prefer that you watch their video…
And those people have a name:…they are called “advertisers”.
I don’t think the videos are there because they think people prefer to watch videos than read. I think they are there because it is easier to MAKE a video than to write a well-written article.
It’s not easier to make a good video. But standards on videos are now so low that I agree it’s easier to make a crappy video than to write a well-written article.
This. It’s the primary reason I stopped using Yahoo as a primary source for reading news on the internet. Half the time, I’d follow a link, find out it was a video, then go to Google to find the same story elsewhere so I could read it instead.
Last weekend I was working on my bathroom remodel. I just needed the rough specs for installing the shower manifold. I knew they came with box, it was one single piece of paper, but I couldn’t find it at the time of the install. No problem I’ll just go to the website. That one piece of paper was an 8 minute video of how to install the shower start to finish, complete with a tool list and prep. All I wanted to know was how high to mount the manifold off the floor and what side was the hot and cold.
Videos have their uses, even in news. But that use isn’t to give a basic news story. You either combine a bunch, or have some sort of interview. Maybe an important remote piece. In addition to text, if you’re a text news site.
What I don’t get is why they so often integrate the two. I don’t mean those articles that also have a video–those are smart. I mean running text and video stories in the same list. If videos are my preferred format, I’ll click on your video tab. If I’m looking for some in depth discussion or interview, I’ll look in the video tab. If I want to hear you talk, I’ll check out the podcast.
I can only figure that enough people go ahead and click on them that they wind up with more revenue than just a story. I’m pretty sure video ads are worth more, and people only want to put up with them if they are about to watch a video.
This, in spades. Fuck this video shit - I can read 500 words a minute. I feel like I have to downshift my brain to first gear when I’m watching a video for informational purposes.
There are times I just want to watch clips and listen. Of course those are usually times when my computer is off and I’m sitting in front of the TV.
Most of the time, I want to read because I can skip to the sections I care about and read at my own pace.
The biggest complaint I have isn’t how common video is, but the fact that you can’t always tell what you’re going to get when you click. Some news sites are very inconsistent about what you get - sometimes it’s all text, or all video, or a combination of the two.
A secondary complaint is how hard it is to find the video you want when you really do want it. When Chile’s volcano went up a few months ago, I wanted to watch footage of the fireworks. YouTube was jam-packed with 5-minute news clips that featured 4:30 of a talking head and 0:30 of the same stock footage of the volcano. Come on, people! I just want to watch a volcano blow up. (Compounded: apparently, the same volcano went up a few months earlier. No real way that I could separate one eruption from the other in searches).
I’m with you guys about hating news videos but my absolute biggest hate are video walkthroughs of games. For example say you’re stuck in a game and just need a little hint to get going again. It’s bad enough you have to watch someone else play the game for a while until they get the point where you’re stuck, but in the process you have to watch their cursor meander around while they think of the next thing to try, or watch them slowly type a misspelled command, backspace over the entire thing (not just to the mistake), retype it again WRONG, pause, backspace over the entire thing again, etc. I’m screaming at the computer “just let me do it for you, asshole!”
I hate videos and always prefer text.
The exact subject of one of my posts in the mini-rants thread a few months ago. If I get there and it’s video I’ll mark the heading and then right-click/Search Google if I really want to see what the news was.
Otherwise, just piss in their ear.