Bonus points if you say “the argument in this video is too complicated to be easily summarized” and the video can easily be summarized in two sentences.
I thought I’d unquestionably endorse this pitting, but then I read many of the posts and they seem to boil down to “videos are for dumb people with no attention span, except this one video series I love”, which is just snobbishness.
In terms of my personal perspective, I agree that video links in leiu of an argument are the bane of forums like this.
But I “watch” a lot of videos, in the sense that I listen to a bunch of them while I do chores (yes, and I’m aware of, and listen to, podcasts too).
And of course lots of things like chess analysis work soo much better in this format.
Finally YouTube “How to” guides have taught me everything from how to stich fabric to how to swim; you just have to be ready to skip past the waffling intro. And skip altogether any video where the presenter clearly wants to be a YouTube star (and so is trying too hard to be humorous and manic).
And the worst of those is the how-to videos covering tiny, simple concerns. I’ve been working with new some new color grading* / video editing software. Sometimes I can’t remember a keyboard shortcut or, say, what pull-down has screen guides.
I Google it and the first 8 hits are YouTube videos. It’s so very maddening. I can see how-to vids for horse riding or serving a tennis ball. But not “What is the capital of Idaho?”
I now add: " -youtube " to any Google search. It doesn’t get rid off all of them, but it helps.
*adjusting the tone and color and visual look of videos and films
I think this is a distinction between two different things. Video is often better as a form of entertainment. We’re just saying it’s worse as a means of conveying information.
I agree this isn’t always the case. If you want to learn how to tie a knot or make an omelet or play golf, for example, watching a video can convey this information better than text. But if you want to learn something like the causes of the Korean War or the plot of Hamlet or recent changes in Covid policy, you’ll do better reading about it.
Let’s me add something. I absolutely hate the print reports which talk about a video and then don’t show it. They have a video of something else not related to at all to the incident but don’t link to what they’re talking about.
That’s entertainment, though, and after all, the only logical way to review clips of a movie is with video.
Lots of videos are fun to watch, but they’re meant to be fun.
I completely endorse this thread. For news and most other things, I prefer to read. And if I’m not reading, my next alternative is usually a podcast, where I can listen to the audio while doing something else like driving or washing the dishes or taking a walk.
Yep. I often go to Google for help with new things that I’m trying to do in Photoshop or Premier Pro or some other piece of editing software, and it’s incredibly frustrating how many of the hits are video links that contain ten minutes of bullshit in order to explain something that should take 45 seconds. I remember the early 2000s, when guides like that usually consisted of text and a series of screenshots, which is exactly what I want.
There are some types of teaching videos where the video itself really helps. My wife and I took some pottery lessons last fall, and now we spend a few hours each week at our local pottery studio. We’re still rank amateurs, with a lot to learn, and online videos by experienced potters have really been helpful in our learning. In pottery, so many of the techniques involves specific types of hand positions and movements that I generally find video much more useful than text and pictures. And even when the potters aren’t speaking or giving any specific information, just watching them work, and watching things like hand position and wheel speed and tool use, really helps us to understand how things work.
I purchased a really popular book on pottery techniques, and it’s very good, but in a lot of cases the text descriptions really don’t give a clear sense of exactly what you need to be doing at any given moment.
Yes!!! I want the text! i HATE, HATE, HATE the video of someone telling what the text would be.
I of course agree with everyone else in this thread, but as should be obvious, the dope is highly self selected in this regard. By definition people aren’t comfortable reading pages and pages of text don’t post here.
Ever since it came out, television news was more popular than news papers so its not surprising that most people would prefer to watch than read. The exception seems to be the rise of texting over calling, which I can’t quite figure out.
Someone commented in a thread some time ago:
“All the science fiction writers assumed that we would want our own video telephones. Turned out we all just want our own personal telegram sets.”
I’m pretty sure the reason CNN and other news sites make you watch video news stories is ad revenue. When I read an article on a news site, I can basically block out any ads on that site and not even know what they are advertising. When you click a video link, it always starts with an unskippable ad. That, to me, is the reason for this. Not a preference by viewers, not lower literacy…money.
Videos absolutely have their place. I’m on YouTube all the time. Just not for information/education.
Well, I will sometimes watch a video if it has tips for a video game I’m playing, such as showing how to get some achievement, but usually that’s because I can’t find it written anywhere, and invariably I am skipping 5 minutes of chatting and whatever they think is a cool intro with music and bad graphics, so that I can see the 15 seconds of video that’s relevant. So even then I’m annoyed.
But I watch funny videos, listen to music, and so on. I do quite a bit of YouTube. It’s just not an information source, it’s an entertainment source.
I love listening to podcasts while I do chores, or take a long shower, and so on. Again, that’s great entertainment. I don’t usually do a video for that because generally I want to see what’s happening in the video and I can’t if it’s just in the background. (Music videos are an exception of course, because it’s really just the music I care about.) This is all legitimate.
It’s rare that I need to see how something is done in video format rather than have it explained to me. I’ll give an example; I am not a car guy. At some point I realized that going in to get my oil changed on a regular basis was a real hassle. If I can fix computers I should be able to do something as simple as an oil change. There were videos available but the most useful thing I found was a written article, that listed everything step-by-step, including pictures. It made it easy and it was a great reference, and it was easy to re-read a step if I forgot something. As long as a task is something that can be properly conveyed in written format, it is objectively better to have it presented that way. (I will concede that for some things that just won’t work, so how-to videos are not useless.)
I love texting over phone calls. To me they have two significant advantages that would appeal to anyone:
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Texting is simply easier in the sense that you control your time better. If my sister calls me right now, I must speak to her right now. If I cannot talk now, the call was a waste of her time and we need to talk again later. But if she texts me, I can reply now, or five minutes from now, or thirty minutes from now, and she has the same advantage when counter-replying.
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Things written are vastly easier to remember. If I call my daughter and say I’m coming home and can I get you anything to eat, I have to remember her order. If she texts it to me, I can simply read it when I get the food and the likelihood of error is far lower.
The loathsomeness of videos substituting for text is exceeded only by related pop-up videos that intrude when you’re trying to read a story. Fortunately I’ve been encountering this only on sports sites. So far.
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As much as I despise video presentations with the hot heat of every tokamak plasma that has ever been confined, it may be worth pointing out that CNN is a poor choice of whipping boy since their name is Cable (TV) News Network. Their textual website followed many years of presenting all of their content in video format.
That said, there is one thing that has not been mentioned here (though there was a thread on it some while back) are those videos where the content is so important that it brooks no silence, so the editor trims out every little pause in speech with sharp cuts between the end of one phrase and the beginning of the next. The makers of those videos should be [redacted: we are not supposed to say shit like that even in the Pit].
See this ad on your fave news site describing whatever that you will totally agree with! (click link, followed by ad before ad you’ll like,) 
I completely endorse this pitting. I definitely get annoyed when information that could be more quickly absorbed by text is provided as a video. It is much easier to scroll over irrelevant text than skip forward 10 seconds until you reach the part that you are interested in. Some how-to videos are useful and I have seen some places that list the relevant time stamp in the description them, but that is far and few between.
//i\\
Even worse is when they then add an annoying “robot voice” to read you the text, complete with weird cadences and pronunciations.
I don’t watch Tik-Tok (GET OFF MY LAWN YOU HOODLUMS) but my wife does and every once in a while I hear those stupid robot voices (it sounds like Siri or Alexa) reading text while it shows a video without any other sound. I don’t understand the appeal of this.
I like instructional videos when the images and actions are obviously important, like when I had to install a new control panel on our dishwasher. I’m not handy at all, but the video I found for this exact model DW made it very easy for me.