8 ms·

I don't understand this obsession with text-heavy content.

by HenryKissinger 5y ago

ddingus 5y ago
Many people enjoy reading. Text is super easy to reuse, manipulate, cut, copy, paste...
pxc 5y ago
One of the virtues of this very website is its text-heavy design.
ineedasername 5y ago
It's a proxy indicator for a certain character of website. As well as a direct indicator of the content itself.
CIADidHarryHolt 5y ago
Text heavy usually means content heavy. A disturbing amount of the web is "How To Make A Made for Adsense Clickbait Page In 2021" containing lots and lots of pictures to pad out the ads and amazon referral links, but very little prose.
asxd 5y ago
I'm not sure it's an obsession, but I do like the simplicity of just text content. There's fewer distractions and annoyances (off the top my head: the aggressively annoying habit some sites have of modifying the DOM a few seconds after the page loads, seemingly timed just right so that the link you just clicked hits something else entirely). There's lots of good things about the media-heavy interactive websites of today, but sometimes it's nicer to just read what people wrote. As mentioned before, this site is a good example.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  They're not modifying the DOM. They're loading ads from external sources which then pop into the page. I hate this too but a good adblocker solves this for 95%. I had a discussion with a website developer recently asking why they insist on loading all these ads from external URLs. All the different loading times cause this. But he said the ad provider needs this in order to validate someone looked at the ads, they don't take the web owner's word for it. So blame the ad industry, not the website :)
  - asxd 5y ago
    To get a little pedantic, the DOM changes in that the size of some element gets modified after the page loads, causing other elements to shift around visually. I can empathize with the developers, but I would prefer if they sized out those elements in advance so the page elements didn't get shifted all over the place once something loads.
jimmygrapes 5y ago
Isn't that the draw of news aggregate comment sections such as this?
throwaway81523 5y ago
> I don't understand this obsession with text-heavy content. Sites with it have a positive attitude towards literacy, and that often goes with other good things.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I just love text because it's ready to consume at my own pace. I can glance through the sections that don't interest me, skip the parts I already know, I can slow during the really deep parts and consider how they fit in to my situations. All in my head. If I do that with a YouTube video, I have to constantly fast-forward and pause, and it's much harder to pick up the thread again after you've jumped a few minutes. Also, YouTubes (and the same with online courses) tend to be really slow to make sure even the slowest viewer doesn't disengage. And tend to have cutesy 'funny' bits to keep people 'interested'. I have nothing against people that enjoy those things. To each their own. But I really don't work that way myself and I hate it when people impose it on me. I just started a new job and my boss gave me a whole load of YouTube links to study and also podcasts (which I hate even more).. I really struggle wading through that kind of content :( so I proposed he just give me the topics and I research them myself.
- quartesixte 5y ago
  > I just love text because it's ready to consume at my own pace. This! Especially when my reading speed far outpaces most Youtubers talking speeds even at 2x. It drives me up the wall.
joe-collins 5y ago
Counterpoint: I do not understand the apparent massive appeal of video content. To avoid being too brief: • For entertainment: I have never cared for most television or movies. I've watched the entirety (or even majority) of fewer than ten series in my life, and movies in the low double digits. • Video is a terrible medium for covering most kinds of information. Its speed is often fixed, and it's barely searchable! It is good for showing process or sequence (e.g. some kinds of how-to content), and for showing 3D perspective it's an acceptable substitute for a freely movable camera on a digital model, but for almost anything else informative, text can convey more, and more quickly, and more responsively.
- asxd 5y ago
  This is a band-aid on top of the searching issue you described, but it's a godsend when a youtube video is nicely subtitled, so you can open up the transcription and ctrl+f to find exactly when a specific word/phrase was said. Youtube also has limited speed controls at this point. I think the fact that those features exist highlight your second point. Searchability and fixed speed make video content less accessible.
  - maven29 5y ago
    I believe that chromium is still the state for the art for realtime processing of playback rate increase at speeds greater than 4x. Forgive my stackoverflow bodge job (this isn't my bread and butter) but this is what I came up with, when I had to speedrun a couple of courses. I use the shift key to scroll the page sideways (which it can't) so that the script registers the event correctly without moving the page. I just scroll up to get through the sluggish parts and scroll down for the meaningless trivia that inevitably ends up being crucial insight when you least expect it. I would have attempted to implement acceleration with my limited skills, but my scroll wheel has mad detents so it wouldn't have helped. Not sure if it would work on youtube. javascript:window.addEventListener('wheel', function(event){ if (event.deltaY < 0) { console.log('scrolling up');for (vid of document.querySelectorAll('video')) vid.playbackRate += 0.1 } else if (event.deltaY > 0) { console.log('scrolling down');for (vid of document.querySelectorAll('video')) vid.playbackRate -= 0.1 }});
na85 5y ago
I hate videos. HEY GUYS WELCOME TO ANOTHER EPISODE OF $ASPIRING_INFLUENCER_BLOG <60 second intro movie/theme song> <2 minutes of content> THANKS FOR WATCHING AND DONT FORGET TO HIT THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON
- emptyparadise 5y ago
  Don't forget to buy a $DEFINITELY_NOT_A_SHADY_VPN subscription and use promo code OMEGAGRINDSET to get a 5% discount!
BbzzbB 5y ago
Text is the ultimate killer app.
kixiQu 5y ago
I have a personal site I'm trying to pursue an old-style feel with, but it never qualifies by the heuristics people use, mainly because: * image-heavy (with careful expressive intention! https://maya.land/latin/ https://maya.land/latin/) * I have javascript that, horror of horrors, is separated into multiple files (so I can manage it without a build step) for such malefic purposes as accessibility (https://maya.land/prefers-reduced-motion/ https://maya.land/prefers-reduced-motion/) and displaying the current moon phase But I think it's kind of good that there are different people pursuing different visions of The Good, even if many of us from different corners are all inept calling it nostalgia without better language to articulate our visions. This blogger is presenting cesspools like voat and raddle as a positive vision. Despite the fact that I think they're wrong about a lot, I think it's good that we're both out here on the web seeing and doing things differently. Maybe it takes some people to be obsessed with text-heavy content to act as a counterweight to FB misrepresenting video view counts. Maybe it takes some people like me going wild with GIFs to balance out Leo Babauta's web ethic (https://mnmlist.com/w/ https://mnmlist.com/w/), and both of us to balance out the standard wordpressy norms. ETA: I realized this looks like self-promo, so if you are suspicious of my using my own site as an example, https://sadgrl.online/ https://sadgrl.online/ isn't me but illustrates a lot of the same thing I'm trying for
- marginalia_nu 5y ago
  It's pretty hard to quantify quality due to the inherent category error in attempting to do so, so the measures are pretty much always going to be blunt and inexact. For what it's worth, while my marginalia /barely/ tolerates the technical aspects of maya.land, it's really teetering on the precipice of getting completely rejected, at the same time it ranked very highly in the search results due to its graph-adjacecy to the indieweb (it's domain #182 in that ranking).
  - kixiQu 5y ago
    One thing that I really admire/respect about your search is that it's really good at capturing a particular kind of good web page. I wonder if there's more precise language than "quality" to express that: inexactness is only inevitable because we're trying to lump everything good into one bucket. Things I've considered improvements to my site are considered degradation by marginalia search's heuristics if we're trying to fit them all on a good-bad spectrum, but maybe that isn't fundamentally what we're asking a search engine to do -- even an opinionated one.
eitland 5y ago
The point isn't that it should be text heavy. The point is that it should be light on tracking, ads and unnecessary use of scripting. (I have earned good money writing client side code the last few years so I see there is a place for it, but most websites I look for information from should not need it.)
marginalia_nu 5y ago
Well if it's not for you, then it's not for you. I'm not particularly into the marvel cinematic universe, but I don't rain on anyone's parade if they like that type of stuff. Text-heavy content isn't for everyone, and that is fine. The problem is that the modern Internet primarily caters to the lowest common denominator of viral mass appeal, which leaves the long tail, those who want more substance, yearning for more. That /more/ is out there, but it has massive discoverability issues.

I don't understand this obsession with text-heavy content.

ddingus 5y ago

Many people enjoy reading. Text is super easy to reuse, manipulate, cut, copy, paste...

pxc 5y ago

One of the virtues of this very website is its text-heavy design.

ineedasername 5y ago

It's a proxy indicator for a certain character of website. As well as a direct indicator of the content itself.

CIADidHarryHolt 5y ago

Text heavy usually means content heavy. A disturbing amount of the web is "How To Make A Made for Adsense Clickbait Page In 2021" containing lots and lots of pictures to pad out the ads and amazon referral links, but very little prose.

asxd 5y ago

I'm not sure it's an obsession, but I do like the simplicity of just text content. There's fewer distractions and annoyances (off the top my head: the aggressively annoying habit some sites have of modifying the DOM a few seconds after the page loads, seemingly timed just right so that the link you just clicked hits something else entirely). There's lots of good things about the media-heavy interactive websites of today, but sometimes it's nicer to just read what people wrote. As mentioned before, this site is a good example.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
They're not modifying the DOM. They're loading ads from external sources which then pop into the page. I hate this too but a good adblocker solves this for 95%. I had a discussion with a website developer recently asking why they insist on loading all these ads from external URLs. All the different loading times cause this. But he said the ad provider needs this in order to validate someone looked at the ads, they don't take the web owner's word for it. So blame the ad industry, not the website :)
- asxd 5y ago
  To get a little pedantic, the DOM changes in that the size of some element gets modified after the page loads, causing other elements to shift around visually. I can empathize with the developers, but I would prefer if they sized out those elements in advance so the page elements didn't get shifted all over the place once something loads.

jimmygrapes 5y ago

Isn't that the draw of news aggregate comment sections such as this?

throwaway81523 5y ago

> I don't understand this obsession with text-heavy content. Sites with it have a positive attitude towards literacy, and that often goes with other good things.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I just love text because it's ready to consume at my own pace. I can glance through the sections that don't interest me, skip the parts I already know, I can slow during the really deep parts and consider how they fit in to my situations. All in my head. If I do that with a YouTube video, I have to constantly fast-forward and pause, and it's much harder to pick up the thread again after you've jumped a few minutes. Also, YouTubes (and the same with online courses) tend to be really slow to make sure even the slowest viewer doesn't disengage. And tend to have cutesy 'funny' bits to keep people 'interested'. I have nothing against people that enjoy those things. To each their own. But I really don't work that way myself and I hate it when people impose it on me. I just started a new job and my boss gave me a whole load of YouTube links to study and also podcasts (which I hate even more).. I really struggle wading through that kind of content :( so I proposed he just give me the topics and I research them myself.

quartesixte 5y ago
> I just love text because it's ready to consume at my own pace. This! Especially when my reading speed far outpaces most Youtubers talking speeds even at 2x. It drives me up the wall.

joe-collins 5y ago

Counterpoint: I do not understand the apparent massive appeal of video content. To avoid being too brief: • For entertainment: I have never cared for most television or movies. I've watched the entirety (or even majority) of fewer than ten series in my life, and movies in the low double digits. • Video is a terrible medium for covering most kinds of information. Its speed is often fixed, and it's barely searchable! It is good for showing process or sequence (e.g. some kinds of how-to content), and for showing 3D perspective it's an acceptable substitute for a freely movable camera on a digital model, but for almost anything else informative, text can convey more, and more quickly, and more responsively.

asxd 5y ago
This is a band-aid on top of the searching issue you described, but it's a godsend when a youtube video is nicely subtitled, so you can open up the transcription and ctrl+f to find exactly when a specific word/phrase was said. Youtube also has limited speed controls at this point. I think the fact that those features exist highlight your second point. Searchability and fixed speed make video content less accessible.
- maven29 5y ago
  I believe that chromium is still the state for the art for realtime processing of playback rate increase at speeds greater than 4x. Forgive my stackoverflow bodge job (this isn't my bread and butter) but this is what I came up with, when I had to speedrun a couple of courses. I use the shift key to scroll the page sideways (which it can't) so that the script registers the event correctly without moving the page. I just scroll up to get through the sluggish parts and scroll down for the meaningless trivia that inevitably ends up being crucial insight when you least expect it. I would have attempted to implement acceleration with my limited skills, but my scroll wheel has mad detents so it wouldn't have helped. Not sure if it would work on youtube. javascript:window.addEventListener('wheel', function(event){ if (event.deltaY < 0) { console.log('scrolling up');for (vid of document.querySelectorAll('video')) vid.playbackRate += 0.1 } else if (event.deltaY > 0) { console.log('scrolling down');for (vid of document.querySelectorAll('video')) vid.playbackRate -= 0.1 }});

na85 5y ago

I hate videos. HEY GUYS WELCOME TO ANOTHER EPISODE OF $ASPIRING_INFLUENCER_BLOG <60 second intro movie/theme song> <2 minutes of content> THANKS FOR WATCHING AND DONT FORGET TO HIT THAT SUBSCRIBE BUTTON

emptyparadise 5y ago
Don't forget to buy a $DEFINITELY_NOT_A_SHADY_VPN subscription and use promo code OMEGAGRINDSET to get a 5% discount!

BbzzbB 5y ago

Text is the ultimate killer app.

kixiQu 5y ago

I have a personal site I'm trying to pursue an old-style feel with, but it never qualifies by the heuristics people use, mainly because: * image-heavy (with careful expressive intention! https://maya.land/latin/ https://maya.land/latin/) * I have javascript that, horror of horrors, is separated into multiple files (so I can manage it without a build step) for such malefic purposes as accessibility (https://maya.land/prefers-reduced-motion/ https://maya.land/prefers-reduced-motion/) and displaying the current moon phase But I think it's kind of good that there are different people pursuing different visions of The Good, even if many of us from different corners are all inept calling it nostalgia without better language to articulate our visions. This blogger is presenting cesspools like voat and raddle as a positive vision. Despite the fact that I think they're wrong about a lot, I think it's good that we're both out here on the web seeing and doing things differently. Maybe it takes some people to be obsessed with text-heavy content to act as a counterweight to FB misrepresenting video view counts. Maybe it takes some people like me going wild with GIFs to balance out Leo Babauta's web ethic (https://mnmlist.com/w/ https://mnmlist.com/w/), and both of us to balance out the standard wordpressy norms. ETA: I realized this looks like self-promo, so if you are suspicious of my using my own site as an example, https://sadgrl.online/ https://sadgrl.online/ isn't me but illustrates a lot of the same thing I'm trying for

marginalia_nu 5y ago
It's pretty hard to quantify quality due to the inherent category error in attempting to do so, so the measures are pretty much always going to be blunt and inexact. For what it's worth, while my marginalia /barely/ tolerates the technical aspects of maya.land, it's really teetering on the precipice of getting completely rejected, at the same time it ranked very highly in the search results due to its graph-adjacecy to the indieweb (it's domain #182 in that ranking).
- kixiQu 5y ago
  One thing that I really admire/respect about your search is that it's really good at capturing a particular kind of good web page. I wonder if there's more precise language than "quality" to express that: inexactness is only inevitable because we're trying to lump everything good into one bucket. Things I've considered improvements to my site are considered degradation by marginalia search's heuristics if we're trying to fit them all on a good-bad spectrum, but maybe that isn't fundamentally what we're asking a search engine to do -- even an opinionated one.

eitland 5y ago

The point isn't that it should be text heavy. The point is that it should be light on tracking, ads and unnecessary use of scripting. (I have earned good money writing client side code the last few years so I see there is a place for it, but most websites I look for information from should not need it.)

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Well if it's not for you, then it's not for you. I'm not particularly into the marvel cinematic universe, but I don't rain on anyone's parade if they like that type of stuff. Text-heavy content isn't for everyone, and that is fine. The problem is that the modern Internet primarily caters to the lowest common denominator of viral mass appeal, which leaves the long tail, those who want more substance, yearning for more. That /more/ is out there, but it has massive discoverability issues.