If you want to yap about something long, you will have much more success getting people to click on a Youtube video than text content published elsewhere. Especially if you already have a large subscriber base in the first place, Youtube is where his audience is, and once his audience clicks it the algorithm will keep spreading it even further.
A couple years ago I wrote a very long text essay about some controversy surrounding a niche game I play. It got a small handful of clicks within the community for that game, but that was it. A few years later, some more news developed, and I decided to do a half-remake half-followup in video format. It was very minimally edited because I don’t actually know shit about video editing, in fact I literally did most of it in Google Slides. But I knew that putting it on Youtube would result in significantly more exposure no matter how amateurish it was. Ended up taking off really well, 29k views, which is about 27k more than the text version got.
And I was a nobody publishing my first video. Ross has 413k Youtube subscribers, and in the 9 hours since this video went up, it’s at 337k views. Seems like this Youtube thing is working out well for him.
meanwhile, i don’t have time to sit and focus on reading for 10-15min. what i do have time for is putting a YT video on in the background while im making dinner
if people who write blog posts were serious they’d have a video version on youtube available in parallel /s
they are different formats… so somebody does something you think you’d like in a medium you don’t want to consume… that is absolutely a you problem
People generally prefer audio-visual content more than reading.
That’s because people are generally fucking morons who can’t, or worse, won’t fuckin’ read.
Bring on the downvotes. I don’t give a fuck. It’s been proven without a shadow of a doubt that watching things makes you more passive and digest less information than reading. I understand some things make more sense to share in a video format (like a how-to video showing how to fix something) but someone just talking at a camera is not one of them.
Maybe if we stopped enabling the fucking neanderthals among us the world wouldn’t be in such a shitty place as it already is.
haha look, I love reading and writing (and wished the whole world did, too), but either way if you need to deliver a message to as many people as possible, then you need to meet them where they’re at. In the case of advocacy work, it’s irresponsible to try to do everything on your own terms without considering your audience’s needs and preferences.
As for why people prefer videos and audio? Some guesses: its less effort, people have been conditioned through tiktok / short form content to keep consuming from the content machine, the growth of the attention economy, etc. Honestly I feel more pity than I do contempt.
And it needs to be said - meeting people “where they are” instead of making them be better is generally how we’ve gotten into such a horrible place in the FIRST place. “People like SaaS because it’s easier and they don’t care if things go away. They accept it.”
Maybe, just maybe, we should stop letting people dig themselves into comfortable holes and then try to lure them back out via new tunnels. Call them out on crawling into the holes in the first place.
Also, Snot Flickerman, while being excessively confrontational, is not wrong. 21% of US adults are considered functionally illiterate, and a large percentage of the remaining 79% aren’t able to read the MEANING beyond a literal understanding, and I’m sorry, this is a problem to be dealt with, not an expression of neurodiversity - audio/visual stimulation DOES NOT stimulate the same critical thinking centers of the brain. It just does NOT. There are DECADES of research on this.
And this is BEFORE we consider that uploading video to Youtube is putting information EXCLUSIVELY into the hands of a multi-billion dollar company that is NOT on your side and can shut it down for any reason they choose, removing it from the collective consciousness. You can copy and paste and move text around wherever you want. You CANNOT do the same with video. This is a memory hole. There are consequences to this. If you don’t SEE them, that’s a problem.
You say that, but the old men yelled at the effects of walled gardens, corporate ownership of social media, loss of ownership of personal hardware, planned obsolescence, the lack of repairability of hardware, the effect of SEO on usability of search, the dangers of owning media that you don’t really own… and they’ve been right about every single one of those things and the impacts they’ve had.
But maybe they’re wrong THIS time. And maybe you can downvote away the fact that 90% of our shared cultural experiences and history from the past decade are under the control of Google and a couple of clicks or a serious attack away from disappearing forever.
“I’ve complained about everything and sometimes I’m right” is not the flex you think it is.
Old men also yelled at Newspapers, Radio, Books, Trains, Airplanes… Anything new or different than what they are used to. If you’re only argument for something being bad is “I don’t like it, and other things I don’t like are bad” you might want to reassess your argument.
“It’s a shame anything has to change. The Sun has changed its position in the sky and I don’t trust it one bit.”
Honestly, I think it’s because search results for web articles are so poisoned by SEO spam that people turn to YouTube for information even when they would otherwise prefer it to be textual rather than video.
I’d say a large part of why this format is so successful is because there’s a large audience of people who just want something to listen to while they’re doing other activities. Text asks for the reader’s undivided attention, which honestly does make it harder to get that attention.
There’s also just the fact that, like, there isn’t a good platform for text content to reach viewers the way that Youtube does. Ross has 413k Youtube subscribers, and not only does that mean it’s reaching those 413k users, after those subscribers click it the algorithm will continue to push it even further into the feeds of people who aren’t already subscribed. A lot of people are first learning about SKG through seeing these Youtube videos pop up on their feed. Where could Ross even try to publish text content that would get anywhere close to that kind of reach? Nothing remotely like that exists for text, and probably never would.
You can be grumpy and shake your cane at a sign of changing times, but remember what the purpose of this is. Ross needs to reach as wide of an audience as he can if he wants SKG to succeed. Putting it in a format that is more digestible, on a platform where people actively seek this type of content, will reach more viewers. Which will in turn lead to more support for SKG.
Do you want the movement to succeed, or do you want to sit here and hate on video content?
There is more to information than reach. Youtube is a single point of failure. If Google decides to shut down his channel, his material is gone. It’s a memory hole. It’s been pulled out of the collective consciousness. Text can be replicated easily and anywhere. Not even the wayback machine can back up video with any consistent reliability. People FEEL like they’re fighting the power with youtube, but it’s the easiest possible way to shut down information, because normal people cannot host video.
Also, Europe is 745 million people, the vast majority of which do not speak English as a first language. They are the ones who need to see this. This video has ONE set of auto-generated subtitles. If I’m a Pole, I can translate your text by machine. It’s not ideal, but it WORKS. What is the majority of Europe supposed to do with this?
And before you say “everyone in Europe speaks multiple languages”, that is NOT something you can rely on. It’s a selection bias - most of the people you interact with in Europe speak English so you get the idea everyone does, cutting off the huge percentage who do not. They need information too. They still vote.
It’s much more important that this news reaches audiences now than whether Youtube lasts years into the future. By then, we would hope this video is obsolete anyway. This is something that is able to be ephemeral, long-term preservation is ultimately not a priority here.
Where would you suggest that Ross publish text content that could achieve the 394k views this video got in the span of just 13 hours? Where else can he get that kind of audience?
I did not suggest that Youtube the service is going away. But I AM suggesting that a little bit of pressure on Google from ANY one of the major companies that would be affected by EU action on game preservation would EASILY cause them to just shut the channel down, or remove the video. If it gets enough following? EA just has to threaten to pull their ads with youtube, and it’s gone. It doesn’t even have to be visible. You’d never even know it. And even if you knew it, and wanted to counter, where else could you PUT it? You can put text ANYWHERE. Find me other places to host long-form video with any reliability.
I am ALSO not suggesting in the short term that there is somewhere he can get a bigger audience. I AM suggesting that in the LONG term the costs of using video as a platform are high.
And years from now is not about obsolescence, it’s about HISTORY. Ten, twenty years from now, will there be enough information available for someone to understand what’s happening now? The details of this moment? And it is RELEVANT. The details of what happened 20, 30 years ago inform everything that happens in the world now, just as the details of what’s happening NOW will inform the future. We ALREADY have people defending Nintendo running illegal pressure tactics because they don’t understand the history of what’s already decided law on emulation. What happens when people get to the future and need to know what happened here with SKG, and the detailed commentary is youtube videos, half of which have had their channels shut down or gone private, and the other half of which is in unsearchable algorithmic social media and discords that have disappeared? We live in a world where everyone screams their facts and half the people automatically follow it regardless of accuracy, and at the same time we’re putting our most detailed information into the most transient and ephemeral format possible. There are already millions of youtube videos that are just GONE. They can’t be seen… can’t even be searched - there’s not even a placeholder that something WAS there. Who’s to say there was anything? Who’s to say what it DID say? Are we relying on memory?
I can’t CONVINCE you that’s a bad idea. It should be self-evident. But if it isn’t, I can’t make it any clearer.
The ultimate solution is steering people away from video and back to text, which can be backed up and archived and duplicated easily and in perpetuity, and no, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t even know that it’s possible. But mark my words, this is not a benign, generational transition. This is a shift that’s going to have major negative consequences, and all the downvotes in the world will not change that reality.
Whining that you don’t like video and therefore no one else should use the format is just not productive. Do you want SKG to reach the audience it needs in order to succeed, or do you just want to be mad that other people like to watch videos?
Look, I’ll give you what you want. Yes, many, many more people saw the video because they want to watch video. It will have a bigger impact. Maybe even save the effort!
NONE of that answers any of the concerns that video as the default format of record is shortsighted and transient. It doesn’t address any of the concerns I’ve already listed. It doesn’t address the issue of LANGUAGE. It doesn’t address the issue of ACCESSIBILITY. It doesn’t address the issue of ARCHIVAL. If video is our primary method of communication and record keeping from here on, then our history is already lost. Our access to it is only through an untrustworthy gatekeeper and our own collective memory, which we have seen again and again over the past few decades is absolutely awful and in some cases worse than nothing. No victory we win now means ANYTHING if long term we forget the fight, and companies just come at it again when people are paying less attention and conditions are more favorable. Which is what’s happening. Again and again.
Nothing I say or do is going to convince people otherwise. People actively and gleefully gather with others who don’t like hard truths to convince each other that everything is fine, and that the convenient direction is the correct one, and they will continue to do so. But if you can honestly say, with all objectivity, that none of these problems are real or matter? Well, I’m glad to be an old fart who’s not going to live to see the fallout.
This is like saying people making videos about Palestine conflict are aiming at the Palestine people. People can care about stuff that doesn’t affect their country directly. You have to be a 12 year old for this to be news.
Well if everything else that’s been said wasn’t good enough for you, let me point out another angle. He’s giving an impassioned speech. It is a much more expressive format to convey emotion, which is important when trying to rally a call to action.
I don’t think speeches are a sign of something wrong with society. People have always given speeches. Doing that in the format of speaking vocally is hardly a new concept.
If you want to yap about something long, you will have much more success getting people to click on a Youtube video than text content published elsewhere. Especially if you already have a large subscriber base in the first place, Youtube is where his audience is, and once his audience clicks it the algorithm will keep spreading it even further.
A couple years ago I wrote a very long text essay about some controversy surrounding a niche game I play. It got a small handful of clicks within the community for that game, but that was it. A few years later, some more news developed, and I decided to do a half-remake half-followup in video format. It was very minimally edited because I don’t actually know shit about video editing, in fact I literally did most of it in Google Slides. But I knew that putting it on Youtube would result in significantly more exposure no matter how amateurish it was. Ended up taking off really well, 29k views, which is about 27k more than the text version got.
And I was a nobody publishing my first video. Ross has 413k Youtube subscribers, and in the 9 hours since this video went up, it’s at 337k views. Seems like this Youtube thing is working out well for him.
I run a blog (not linking it here on this account), and I experienced the exact same thing as you.
People generally prefer audio-visual content more than reading. Why else would audiobooks take off as well as they did?
I don’t have time to sit and focus on a YouTube video for 20 minutes, so I just simply miss out.
If this was a serious effort then a written version and a website would be available in parallel. If there is one, is there a link?
meanwhile, i don’t have time to sit and focus on reading for 10-15min. what i do have time for is putting a YT video on in the background while im making dinner
if people who write blog posts were serious they’d have a video version on youtube available in parallel /s
they are different formats… so somebody does something you think you’d like in a medium you don’t want to consume… that is absolutely a you problem
Oops, sorry for expressing my opinion.
I could skim read an article at my own pace instead of having to watch for 20m, but whatever.
Perhaps it could have multiple formats so it reaches a wider audience.
That sounds like a degrading society
Strong “books are ruining society” energy.
I’m the opposite actually.
Way to miss the point
That’s because people are generally fucking morons who can’t, or worse, won’t fuckin’ read.
Bring on the downvotes. I don’t give a fuck. It’s been proven without a shadow of a doubt that watching things makes you more passive and digest less information than reading. I understand some things make more sense to share in a video format (like a how-to video showing how to fix something) but someone just talking at a camera is not one of them.
Maybe if we stopped enabling the fucking neanderthals among us the world wouldn’t be in such a shitty place as it already is.
“Books are for fucking morons who can’t, or worse, won’t fuckin remember”
haha look, I love reading and writing (and wished the whole world did, too), but either way if you need to deliver a message to as many people as possible, then you need to meet them where they’re at. In the case of advocacy work, it’s irresponsible to try to do everything on your own terms without considering your audience’s needs and preferences.
As for why people prefer videos and audio? Some guesses: its less effort, people have been conditioned through tiktok / short form content to keep consuming from the content machine, the growth of the attention economy, etc. Honestly I feel more pity than I do contempt.
Less effort, at the cost of WAY more time.
And it needs to be said - meeting people “where they are” instead of making them be better is generally how we’ve gotten into such a horrible place in the FIRST place. “People like SaaS because it’s easier and they don’t care if things go away. They accept it.”
Maybe, just maybe, we should stop letting people dig themselves into comfortable holes and then try to lure them back out via new tunnels. Call them out on crawling into the holes in the first place.
Also, Snot Flickerman, while being excessively confrontational, is not wrong. 21% of US adults are considered functionally illiterate, and a large percentage of the remaining 79% aren’t able to read the MEANING beyond a literal understanding, and I’m sorry, this is a problem to be dealt with, not an expression of neurodiversity - audio/visual stimulation DOES NOT stimulate the same critical thinking centers of the brain. It just does NOT. There are DECADES of research on this.
And this is BEFORE we consider that uploading video to Youtube is putting information EXCLUSIVELY into the hands of a multi-billion dollar company that is NOT on your side and can shut it down for any reason they choose, removing it from the collective consciousness. You can copy and paste and move text around wherever you want. You CANNOT do the same with video. This is a memory hole. There are consequences to this. If you don’t SEE them, that’s a problem.
This guy gets it.
“Old men yell at cloud” vibes.
If neither of you are old men, then I really pity you.
You say that, but the old men yelled at the effects of walled gardens, corporate ownership of social media, loss of ownership of personal hardware, planned obsolescence, the lack of repairability of hardware, the effect of SEO on usability of search, the dangers of owning media that you don’t really own… and they’ve been right about every single one of those things and the impacts they’ve had.
But maybe they’re wrong THIS time. And maybe you can downvote away the fact that 90% of our shared cultural experiences and history from the past decade are under the control of Google and a couple of clicks or a serious attack away from disappearing forever.
“I’ve complained about everything and sometimes I’m right” is not the flex you think it is.
Old men also yelled at Newspapers, Radio, Books, Trains, Airplanes… Anything new or different than what they are used to. If you’re only argument for something being bad is “I don’t like it, and other things I don’t like are bad” you might want to reassess your argument.
“It’s a shame anything has to change. The Sun has changed its position in the sky and I don’t trust it one bit.”
Really? Because I’m pretty sure it’s all the old guys that created all that crap, and all the new guys who are trying to get from under it.
Honestly, I think it’s because search results for web articles are so poisoned by SEO spam that people turn to YouTube for information even when they would otherwise prefer it to be textual rather than video.
I’d say a large part of why this format is so successful is because there’s a large audience of people who just want something to listen to while they’re doing other activities. Text asks for the reader’s undivided attention, which honestly does make it harder to get that attention.
There’s also just the fact that, like, there isn’t a good platform for text content to reach viewers the way that Youtube does. Ross has 413k Youtube subscribers, and not only does that mean it’s reaching those 413k users, after those subscribers click it the algorithm will continue to push it even further into the feeds of people who aren’t already subscribed. A lot of people are first learning about SKG through seeing these Youtube videos pop up on their feed. Where could Ross even try to publish text content that would get anywhere close to that kind of reach? Nothing remotely like that exists for text, and probably never would.
You can be grumpy and shake your cane at a sign of changing times, but remember what the purpose of this is. Ross needs to reach as wide of an audience as he can if he wants SKG to succeed. Putting it in a format that is more digestible, on a platform where people actively seek this type of content, will reach more viewers. Which will in turn lead to more support for SKG.
Do you want the movement to succeed, or do you want to sit here and hate on video content?
There is more to information than reach. Youtube is a single point of failure. If Google decides to shut down his channel, his material is gone. It’s a memory hole. It’s been pulled out of the collective consciousness. Text can be replicated easily and anywhere. Not even the wayback machine can back up video with any consistent reliability. People FEEL like they’re fighting the power with youtube, but it’s the easiest possible way to shut down information, because normal people cannot host video.
Also, Europe is 745 million people, the vast majority of which do not speak English as a first language. They are the ones who need to see this. This video has ONE set of auto-generated subtitles. If I’m a Pole, I can translate your text by machine. It’s not ideal, but it WORKS. What is the majority of Europe supposed to do with this?
And before you say “everyone in Europe speaks multiple languages”, that is NOT something you can rely on. It’s a selection bias - most of the people you interact with in Europe speak English so you get the idea everyone does, cutting off the huge percentage who do not. They need information too. They still vote.
It’s much more important that this news reaches audiences now than whether Youtube lasts years into the future. By then, we would hope this video is obsolete anyway. This is something that is able to be ephemeral, long-term preservation is ultimately not a priority here.
Where would you suggest that Ross publish text content that could achieve the 394k views this video got in the span of just 13 hours? Where else can he get that kind of audience?
I did not suggest that Youtube the service is going away. But I AM suggesting that a little bit of pressure on Google from ANY one of the major companies that would be affected by EU action on game preservation would EASILY cause them to just shut the channel down, or remove the video. If it gets enough following? EA just has to threaten to pull their ads with youtube, and it’s gone. It doesn’t even have to be visible. You’d never even know it. And even if you knew it, and wanted to counter, where else could you PUT it? You can put text ANYWHERE. Find me other places to host long-form video with any reliability.
I am ALSO not suggesting in the short term that there is somewhere he can get a bigger audience. I AM suggesting that in the LONG term the costs of using video as a platform are high.
And years from now is not about obsolescence, it’s about HISTORY. Ten, twenty years from now, will there be enough information available for someone to understand what’s happening now? The details of this moment? And it is RELEVANT. The details of what happened 20, 30 years ago inform everything that happens in the world now, just as the details of what’s happening NOW will inform the future. We ALREADY have people defending Nintendo running illegal pressure tactics because they don’t understand the history of what’s already decided law on emulation. What happens when people get to the future and need to know what happened here with SKG, and the detailed commentary is youtube videos, half of which have had their channels shut down or gone private, and the other half of which is in unsearchable algorithmic social media and discords that have disappeared? We live in a world where everyone screams their facts and half the people automatically follow it regardless of accuracy, and at the same time we’re putting our most detailed information into the most transient and ephemeral format possible. There are already millions of youtube videos that are just GONE. They can’t be seen… can’t even be searched - there’s not even a placeholder that something WAS there. Who’s to say there was anything? Who’s to say what it DID say? Are we relying on memory?
I can’t CONVINCE you that’s a bad idea. It should be self-evident. But if it isn’t, I can’t make it any clearer.
The ultimate solution is steering people away from video and back to text, which can be backed up and archived and duplicated easily and in perpetuity, and no, I don’t know how that happens. I don’t even know that it’s possible. But mark my words, this is not a benign, generational transition. This is a shift that’s going to have major negative consequences, and all the downvotes in the world will not change that reality.
You didn’t actually answer my question.
Whining that you don’t like video and therefore no one else should use the format is just not productive. Do you want SKG to reach the audience it needs in order to succeed, or do you just want to be mad that other people like to watch videos?
Look, I’ll give you what you want. Yes, many, many more people saw the video because they want to watch video. It will have a bigger impact. Maybe even save the effort!
NONE of that answers any of the concerns that video as the default format of record is shortsighted and transient. It doesn’t address any of the concerns I’ve already listed. It doesn’t address the issue of LANGUAGE. It doesn’t address the issue of ACCESSIBILITY. It doesn’t address the issue of ARCHIVAL. If video is our primary method of communication and record keeping from here on, then our history is already lost. Our access to it is only through an untrustworthy gatekeeper and our own collective memory, which we have seen again and again over the past few decades is absolutely awful and in some cases worse than nothing. No victory we win now means ANYTHING if long term we forget the fight, and companies just come at it again when people are paying less attention and conditions are more favorable. Which is what’s happening. Again and again.
Nothing I say or do is going to convince people otherwise. People actively and gleefully gather with others who don’t like hard truths to convince each other that everything is fine, and that the convenient direction is the correct one, and they will continue to do so. But if you can honestly say, with all objectivity, that none of these problems are real or matter? Well, I’m glad to be an old fart who’s not going to live to see the fallout.
Fully agreed, have an upvote
What’s wrong with society for this to happen? Are Americans illiterate?
What’s wrong with society for books to happen? Do Americans not have memories?
This has nothing to do with Americans, they can’t even sign the petition
So you have to be american to care about the petition? Please.
You only seem to care about the fact that this is a video, not about the petition at all.
It’s a guy with a video platform making a video aimed at Europeans for a European initiative, and you’re calling Americans illiterate as a result?
This is like saying people making videos about Palestine conflict are aiming at the Palestine people. People can care about stuff that doesn’t affect their country directly. You have to be a 12 year old for this to be news.
I’m reading these comments while listening to an entirely different video essay. There’s a time, place, and use for various types of media.
Well if everything else that’s been said wasn’t good enough for you, let me point out another angle. He’s giving an impassioned speech. It is a much more expressive format to convey emotion, which is important when trying to rally a call to action.
I don’t think speeches are a sign of something wrong with society. People have always given speeches. Doing that in the format of speaking vocally is hardly a new concept.
Yes