Unpopular Opinion

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We don't need all this video online (reddthat.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

34 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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…