Many people are now talking about the “death of the ad-supported internet model,” and I can only say that it can’t come quickly enough.
The main reason why it all switched to ad-supported is the massive costs of storing and streaming all that high-definition video. And for what? So I can see every pore on Joe Rogan’s face while he sits in front of the mic and talks for 3 hours?
Or so that some video game dweeb can read his essay about why an obscure JRPG is the height of postmodern art over 30 minutes of game footage. Or all the channels trying to imitate Kurzgesagt with shitty animation and information they gathered from browsing Wikipedia.
Face it. Most of this video is unnecessary. 99.9% of all possible information can be relayed through text, pictures, and the occasional sound file.
Furthermore, most video content creators are unnecessary too. I can just read about a laptop’s specs and the reviewer’s experience with it. I don’t need LinusTechTips to stare at me with his reptilian eyes while he destroys the inferior product with an oversized novelty mallet.
Most of what’s on YouTube and other video-heavy social sites is not insightful, not creative, not informative, not fun, not sexy, and honestly shouldn’t exist at all.
I mean, by that logic, 99.9% of all food is unnecessary. Why season your food when you can just have plain chicken, plain salad, etc? It’s just the nutritional content that matters, right?
There’s this thing in life called enjoyment. People like to enjoy things.
My current company makes mobile games. We’re supported entirely by ads, because even our IAPs are indirectly dependent.
Most of the Appstore and Play Store are like this btw, so those will go too.
And that would be amazing! All of our games are crap, all of the freeware is crap, it’s all garbage drowning out the 3-4 good, open source apps in each category. These are entire businesses and industries that don’t need to exist, don’t solve real problems, and one app at a time make the internet worse.
Oh tell me about it. I work in the content marketing industry. The whole field shouldn’t exist, and I hope ChatGPT just kills it. We made search engines crap with all our SEO and we churn out useless semi-plagiarized content.
I work in content marketing too; sounds like youre doing it wrong. There are absolutely causes that need professional help, and deserve it.
Kinds sounds like youre just telling on yourself here, but 🤷♂️
Your entire argument applies to books as well.
It’s a bad argument.
Most books are probably crap (Sturgeon’s law) but most of what is in books can’t be relayed in another way.
Books (or online text) allow for thoughts or information to be collected in a way that is informationally dense yet compact while also serving as a (virtually) permanent physical record.
That’s the advantage that books have over relating information orally.
In contrast to books or text, videos are informationally sparse yet very large.
But maybe I missed something, please feel free to elaborate on your point.
So you’re argument boils down to “the presence of bad apple means we should toss the whole bunch”
This is an awful take, books can be relayed as audio, ever hear of audiobooks? I guess fuck blind people right?
Orally doesn’t mean audio. Orally means in person communication.
Audiobooks are fine. I’d say still inferior to actual books because they require equipment and a large time commitment. Great for accessibility however.
Additionally, in your rush to paint me as some blind people hating ableist you seem to have forgotten that Braille is a thing.
It would actually be interesting and informative to hear from some actual blind people about which they prefer and which mode of delivery — audio or Braille — allows them to process information faster.
Books (or online text) allow for thoughts or information to be collected in a way that is informationally dense yet compact while also serving as a (virtually) permanent physical record.
What is the difference between a text file and a video file in the digital space? You’re argument seems invalid at it’s core.
The difference is a 1000 word article requires maybe 500kbs to be stored and the size of a video of someone reading that article in glorious 4k60fps even with the best compression algorithms in the world would be still be several orders of magnitude larger.
That data has to be stored somewhere. Those datacenters require energy and maintenance which is neither cheap nor very good for the climate.
But there’s two points I’m trying to make and I may have conflated then somewhat.
- Text is the superior mode of knowledge transfer. It’s easily searchable (more so in digital form but even print allows for tables or content and indexes), can be re-read or scanned through easier than scrubbing through a video file.
- The vast majority of video content online is vapid and doesn’t need to exist either at all or just in video form. Short clips of concerts on Instagram, video reviews of things that don’t require visual demonstrations, essays read over what is essentially archival footage, video podcasts that are two hours of a group of guys sitting around a table…
If I was curating videos 99% of TikTok and Twitch streams wouldn’t make the cut because they seem utterly pointless to me. But they are both massively popular so I think it’s better to just let people produce content and what’s popular will sort itself out. It’s good to have choices.
Probably not unpopular.
99 percent of what’s on youtube doesn’t appeal to a person.
Problem is that 1 percent that appeals to the person varies from person to person. (Still I’d say above 50 percent of videos on YouTube, only 40 percent or so get 300 views.)
