Move over, text: Video is the new medium of our lives

Imgonnatrythis , 6 hours ago (edited 3 hours ago)

Says the text based article😅… Load of shit. There’s little I despise more than someone making a video of something that could have been two lines of text or hell, 20 lines of text. Video can be such an expressive medium, stop shitting on the format by using inappropriatly. If anything the pendulum has already swung way too far towards video and hopefully things will rationalize soon. When I have to watch some dumb video, I put captions on and usually just read the captions. Wish there was a tool for YouTube that just extracted whole caption transcripts so I didn’t even need to play the videos.

RamblingPanda , 4 hours ago

There is a tool like this and I’ve used it. But I forgot about it until now and it only got what was available, an automatic translation too bad to even laugh at. But it should be possible to find it. Dunno, YouTube caption download or something like this should do the trick.

RamblingPanda , 4 hours ago

And Grayjay (Android and maybe iOS app) allows it as well.

Imgonnatrythis , 3 hours ago

I tried grayjay, kind of interesting. Do not see anyone to extract a transcript though

RamblingPanda , 1 hour ago

It’s under download, last option

Demdaru , 2 hours ago

If you click “see more” in the description, there is a transcription! It’s still kinda pain im the ass, but allows getting through it faster…it’s not perfect tho.

Also. Captions and 2x speed ftw.

Telorand , 6 hours ago

Paywall, so I’m just going to respond to the title’s premise.

Video is relatively new, sure, but it will never replace text. The two supplement each other, and that’s been the case since YouTube first came out.

TikTok exists, but so did Vine, until it didn’t. What’s on the rise (again) is podcasts. Meanwhile, text has existed for thousands of years and continues to exist alongside video and audio. So I don’t think text is going anywhere, and what little I could read of the article sounds like someone experiencing the Dunning-Kruger Effect and confirmation bias who hasn’t actually done any historical or anthropological research.

Sounds about right for someone terminally on TikTok.

shortwavesurfer , 6 hours ago

Plus, there’s something to be said for efficiency. Text takes up very little disk space, where video takes up a lot of disk space. I hear of people that use like a terabyte worth of data per month on their internet connections. And personally, I can’t even get over 100 gigs, even with downloading books and watching some YouTube(99% audio only).

True OP , 6 hours ago

Just a life hack for this article and other websites as welll: Disable JavaScript.

conciselyverbose , 3 hours ago

Video is relatively new, sure, but it will never replace text

The problem is that, for most people, it has. They’re not willing to read.

Telorand , 1 hour ago

And that’s the claim I’m rejecting. I think it’s confirmation bias, not a fact that stems from evidence.

conciselyverbose , 1 hour ago

I see it daily with most people I interact with in multiple, varied communities (and no, I don’t and refuse to use those platforms, because video content is shit).

They will not read two paragraphs of text. They will happily spend hours churning through junk short videos.

fart_pickle , 6 hours ago

This is the hill I’m going to die on. I will continue to ingest text or die trying.

cheese_greater , 6 hours ago

Videos take too long to skim thru and parse yourself, I wanna get to the keywords

conciselyverbose , 3 hours ago

Yep.

I do plenty of audiobooks for longer form content, where I know I want all of it. But I absolutely have no interest in having 10 paragraphs turned into a 10 minute video.

Eldritch , 2 hours ago

Yep. I like both. But if I want the gist of something fast or am not in an environment or situation I can sit and watch without disturbing or being disturbed by others. I want text. No fiddling with a progress bar to get back to where I was. Quick easy done. At home I’ll watch videos all day. But it will never be as efficient.