When mindlessly browsing Reddit, I found that I usually just jump directly to the comments, read a couple, and continue. Lemmy seems a bit more curated (read: smaller), and therefore it’s easier to actually engage in discussions, which leads me to read the article, think critically about it, and respond (if I have something to say) in the comments–bigger is not always better!
Yes—and there seem to be more linked articles, compared to linked YouTube posts. I prefer to read, rather than wait through ads and a blah-blah-blah intro explaining why I should want the content about to be revealed by the loquacious host.
Reading is a highy efficient way of transmitting information. It feels like a giant step backward in cultural evolution to force information into an aural format with visual candy-coating as enticement.
I’m with you on the YouTube thing, but you seriously should consider investing some time on getting those ads blocked.
Also SponsorBlock! Watching a video on Youtube is much nicer when you don’t have to manually scrub through the interminable VPN sales pitch.
Yeah; I could cut and paste the url into NewPipe. But links seem to default to the Toob, and if I just want to get a quick glimpse to see if the material is worth my time, I can’t be bothered.
@108beads Read the transcript, if it’s available
I’m half and half on this. I agree that reading is more efficient, but I also tend to skim through the article on first read then sometimes would have to read it again if I missed some information.
Listening to it in video or podcast format forces me to absorb the entire information from start to finish, thus I don’t really need to listen to it again. Added benefit of podcasts for me is that I could listen to it while driving, and it helps me not to fall asleep on the highway 😂
Yes. There’s less fluff/firehouse level of content. I’ve mentioned this to friends as a selling point. It’s also much easier to feel like your comment might actually be seen.
I’ve noticed I was reliant on the TLDR bots that shorten news articles by like 70%.
I kinda miss them because of simplicity and efficiency, but I’m not minding the actual comment discussions
lemmy.world already has one: https://lemmy.world/u/tldrbot.
seems to work pretty good.
I’ve been posting niche stuff on a country instance.
I use a few sites to manually summarise the article, a majority I use SMMRY which is what the autotldr bot used to use.
I hated reddit with its lack of submission statements and I see similar happening around here. Some people are doing them and I love it, others refuse to so it’s frustrating to decide to click through. Tildes.net gives you a word count so you know how much time you need to commit. I’m of the mind that a submission statement if summarised well can educate if people don’t want to click through. A single title rarely helps anyone.
There should be some examples in my profile.
I think at this point there should be a LLM extension which does it quickly for you everytime you end up on an article.
I’m torn.
Yes, article summaries can be nice, and often demonstrate just how unnecessarily wordy the original is.
On the other hand, not needing to follow links to the original is at least part of what’s killing original creators, especially journalists and their outlets. As much as we dislike ads, subscriptions, and requests for donations, those are what fund the sources we most cherish.
there are too much journalists. if they agree to consolidate into less numerous news outlets and share a universal pay to read platform (the same concept of flipboard), i would gladly pay/or allow ad playback. but they agreed to disagree, they now must bear the consequences.
actual comment discussions
I sincerely hope that everything stays this way. Filtering, tagging and reporting users who constantly was posting those obnoxious low effort oneliners was basically becoming a full time job. It killed all the discussions in the bigger subs. It’s already obvious on some of the bigger instances/communities that some users unfortunately just switched platform.
Personally I didn’t like some of the popular bots like autotldr but I can see why other people did.
I think a reason for this is that there’s far more botspam than anyone guessed on Reddit. I have no idea exactly how inflated their user numbers are, but the fact that traffic only went down by ~10% during the blackout is quite a big red flag.
For me, it’s because the number of comments is too low to expect that some one may summarize the article.
