The "Stop Destroying Videogames" initiative has received official accusations of it (and myself) of violating EU rules! These would be serious charges, exce...
The good news is that they are scared.
First, they ignored it.
Next they tried to debate, well lie, their way out of it.
No one is buying their story or is feeling sorry for those greedy bastards.
So they take the other route, attack the opponent and question their intentions/ credibility.
Maybe. All I read is that he was QA. That can mean anything from game tester to someone who tests internal tooling. I haven’t seen an actual description of his role.
I honestly don’t know, but since he ended up in cyber security, I’m guessing it wasn’t games testing, but probably internal tooling. Orgs like Blizzard have a lot of non-gaming related tech, like websites, databases, etc.
I haven’t seen any disclosure about what his role was, just that he started as QA and ended up doing cyber security, both of which likely didn’t involve any coding.
He did technically end up in cybersecurity, but basically yeah, a role that involves almost zero actual technical skill.
He did social engineering, aka, worming his way into people’s emails and texts and social circles, sending fake ‘your account has been comprimised, send me your user name and password to fix’ type shit.
Ironically, social engineering is quite a fitting uh, subclass, for a low technical skill, high charisma narcissist to slot into.
He thought hacking and DEFCON was the coolest convention to go to, so him and some buddies… won the scavenger hunt badge, I believe thats more or less running around the Con with your network analyzer open on your phone, to find wifi/bluetooth enabled hidden scavenger hunt items, maybe with a couple extra steps.
Its literally a gimmick badge, its not really anything to do with actual pentesting, nothing like developing a totally novel exploit.
EDIT: Like, I am reasonably confident I know more about ethical hacking than he does, just having futzed around with tryhackme and some other free online sort of, ‘basics of hacking’ tutorials with simulated demonstrations on VMs, for a few years in my spare time.
Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are, and why they are important, and I’m guessing he would have to look it up, whilst making it look like he is not looking it up.
It’s also probably the most common type of breach. It’s way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.
A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that’s because people like glamorous titles. If you’ve spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines. That “sanitation engineer” is probably just a janitor or garbage truck driver, not the person in charge of the city water filtration services or something.
scavenger hunt badge
I haven’t been, but yeah, that sounds likely. Things like that are to get people new to the industry excited, not to actually challenge hardcore hackers.
I’ve attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they’re like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground. I’m in senior level position now, and conferences are something I’d send my juniors to for networking and to get an idea of how they want to grow their career, but I don’t really attend anymore. I imagine cyber security conferences are similar.
Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are
Lol, that’s basic TCP stack stuff, I doubt he would’ve gone that low level at a company like Blizzard. You get to that level when you’re looking for amplification attacks at a place like Cloudflare or the military.
At Blizzard, they most likely want to make sure they’re up to date on security patches, their tech support is following the proper scripts, and IT isn’t getting lazy reviewing reports and whatnot. Basically, liability coverage in case there’s a real breach so their insurance can cover any losses.
But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that’s what gets people to watch.
Ross Scott is an absolute treasure, and I’m kinda sad that he has never made more than €63k euros in a given year. He deserves more for all the work he has put in.
I’m not European, so if you are, please do what you can to encourage your reps to support this.
There are many differences, some advantages and some disavantages. If you want to read, you can read the transcript that YT generates or you can probably find the text posted in some of his blogs, I bet.
Well I think you’re old enough now to learn that not everything that gets created will be in the exact format that you specifically prefer. Some things will be made with other people in mind as the target audience and if you want to enjoy it you’ll have to engage with it in a way different from your own personal preference. It’s all part of being a grown up.
No. Automatic transcriptions have flaws. Why not write down the information? Imagine if instead of writing books, people told stories verbally and then had it automatically transcribed and published straight away. This is why I have a very hard time believing you have read a book since it obviously would massivley suck.
Unpopular opinion but setting up a whole recording studio and cutting a video without fucking up a bunch is a lot more fucking work than just writing a damn text document.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The brilliant part about writing text is that you don’t have to read all of it. You can have sections where people can find the information they actually are interested in. The only problem is less ad money.
But not enough people these days do for it to be the first form of media someone might choose to make. A video is a lot faster and more likely to be watched than longform text is too be read.
Please consider joining the People Preventing Longform Text From Going Extinct (PPLTFGE). PPLTFGE believes text can actually be quicker and more concise than video. Most influencer videos can be compressed into a couple lines of actual information that takes only a few seconds to read as opposed to watching a ten minute video.
Yeah, I watch those “Save Me Time” slop videos on YouTube too.
But I appreciate more detail. While those videos do decently well, they miss details quite a lot that aren’t necessarily needed for the argument but help support what is being said.
Reach and convenience. Why do you think podcasts exist on YouTube when they could’ve as well been audio-only?
Besides, some people like to see the speaker, because it gives visual clues about what’s being said. Not everybody absorbs info efficiently through reading texts or just listening. Sometimes you need more than one way of recieving information.
Who‘s gonna actually read it tho? Like 90% of the people who watched that video would never have read a whole text. Not to speak of the issue of getting the text out to people.
So there’s some magical limitation which only lets him make videos? He’s doomed to solely create videos and if he as much as thinks about writing a blog post, he gets struck by lightning or something? What an interesting phenomenon.
I was looking forward to some conversation regarding this subject in the comments, instead all we’ve got is people talking about text vs video, and drawing any attention away from actually discussing the video.
I think it’s interesting that people have to attach their names and prove they’re real to sign this, but serious complaints can be filed anonymously. I’m not European, so does this mean anyone random can file complaints? Or it’s done somehow officially, just shows up anonymously?
I’m asking to understand how this works because this could not be the industry entirely.
The anonymous complaint system aids whistleblowers.
But it also means that the complaints can come from less than reputable sources.
The upshot of this is that the complaint doesn’t get as much traction and is vetted more closely.
This complaint amounts to the condiment on a nothingburger.
Trying to stop the petition based on a technicality that someone is working too hard seems a bit unhinged. Anyone that stands to be hurt enough by the movement would have had lawyers on retainer to handle things like this.
It’s also possible that someone supporting the movement used it as a false flag to get more attention, but there’s 1.4+ million eyes on it. I don’t see that being an advantageous path either.
Either way, the complaint is bunk and will end up being ignored with a moment’s scrutiny.
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That thumbnail is really not helping the movement. Really hope this goes through though.
It’s Ross. This is what he does. The movement has persisted regardless. Bless him.
Oh haha sure sure. Seriously, good on him.
People are clicking, tho
My dude looks like Dr. Neo Cortex or a Civil War General
Put him in a ponytail, bulk him up a bit, de-age him a decade, and you’ve got a theoretical physicist with an penchant for crowbar related mayhem.
I think it’s a running bit at this point, but it is one that will haunt my nightmares.
Every single video has his face doing something insane looking.
The good news is that they are scared. First, they ignored it. Next they tried to debate, well lie, their way out of it.
No one is buying their story or is feeling sorry for those greedy bastards. So they take the other route, attack the opponent and question their intentions/ credibility.
Dear God, predictable and sad.
You just mentioned everything pirate SW did. You think he a plant?
He was a developer with the financial incentive to not put in the work required by this initiative into his presumptive games.
OK so not a plant bit conflict of interest. Okok
Probably not in the direct sense, given that he uh ‘used to work’ at Blizzard.
As a game tester.
By that metric, I am an ex MSFT employee, because I did that routinely as well.
(I then went on to actually work for MSFT as a database admin/dev, but you get the idea)
He’s is an extremely useful and extremely idiotic useful idiot, like uh, Tim Pool.
Maybe. All I read is that he was QA. That can mean anything from game tester to someone who tests internal tooling. I haven’t seen an actual description of his role.
Ah, thats true, that is more accurate.
So he was … testing tools for testing games, or some kind of internal process?
I honestly don’t know, but since he ended up in cyber security, I’m guessing it wasn’t games testing, but probably internal tooling. Orgs like Blizzard have a lot of non-gaming related tech, like websites, databases, etc.
I haven’t seen any disclosure about what his role was, just that he started as QA and ended up doing cyber security, both of which likely didn’t involve any coding.
He did technically end up in cybersecurity, but basically yeah, a role that involves almost zero actual technical skill.
He did social engineering, aka, worming his way into people’s emails and texts and social circles, sending fake ‘your account has been comprimised, send me your user name and password to fix’ type shit.
Ironically, social engineering is quite a fitting uh, subclass, for a low technical skill, high charisma narcissist to slot into.
He thought hacking and DEFCON was the coolest convention to go to, so him and some buddies… won the scavenger hunt badge, I believe thats more or less running around the Con with your network analyzer open on your phone, to find wifi/bluetooth enabled hidden scavenger hunt items, maybe with a couple extra steps.
Its literally a gimmick badge, its not really anything to do with actual pentesting, nothing like developing a totally novel exploit.
EDIT: Like, I am reasonably confident I know more about ethical hacking than he does, just having futzed around with tryhackme and some other free online sort of, ‘basics of hacking’ tutorials with simulated demonstrations on VMs, for a few years in my spare time.
Ask him what SYN, SYN-ACK and ACK are, and why they are important, and I’m guessing he would have to look it up, whilst making it look like he is not looking it up.
It’s also probably the most common type of breach. It’s way easier to compromise tech support than find a vulnerability, so it makes a ton of sense for a company like Blizzard to have an auditing team to test the various attack vectors.
A lot of roles like QA and cyber security sound glamorous, but that’s because people like glamorous titles. If you’ve spent even a tiny amount of time working in a relevant industry (in this case, anything touching computers), you should be able to read between the lines. That “sanitation engineer” is probably just a janitor or garbage truck driver, not the person in charge of the city water filtration services or something.
I haven’t been, but yeah, that sounds likely. Things like that are to get people new to the industry excited, not to actually challenge hardcore hackers.
I’ve attended and even spoken at some tech conferences, and they’re like 90% entry level stuff with a handful of interesting events and talks that actually break some new ground. I’m in senior level position now, and conferences are something I’d send my juniors to for networking and to get an idea of how they want to grow their career, but I don’t really attend anymore. I imagine cyber security conferences are similar.
Lol, that’s basic TCP stack stuff, I doubt he would’ve gone that low level at a company like Blizzard. You get to that level when you’re looking for amplification attacks at a place like Cloudflare or the military.
At Blizzard, they most likely want to make sure they’re up to date on security patches, their tech support is following the proper scripts, and IT isn’t getting lazy reviewing reports and whatnot. Basically, liability coverage in case there’s a real breach so their insurance can cover any losses.
But yeah, streamers like to appear like they know their stuff because that’s what gets people to watch.
No, he is a narcissist bastard that likes to be always right. Going on his first impuls on what he thinks the answer should be and sticking with it.
He is too dumb, to self-involved and not competent enough to be a plant.
Ross Scott is an absolute treasure, and I’m kinda sad that he has never made more than €63k euros in a given year. He deserves more for all the work he has put in.
I’m not European, so if you are, please do what you can to encourage your reps to support this.
Why does he feel that it’s necessary to present the information by talking into a webcam? What’s wrong with publishing text?
There are many differences, some advantages and some disavantages. If you want to read, you can read the transcript that YT generates or you can probably find the text posted in some of his blogs, I bet.
Automatic transcripts are not comparable to intentionally written text. Are you actually serious?
why not?
I don’t believe that you’ve read a book in your entire life if you consider automatic transcriptions to be comparable to actual written text.
Well I think you’re old enough now to learn that not everything that gets created will be in the exact format that you specifically prefer. Some things will be made with other people in mind as the target audience and if you want to enjoy it you’ll have to engage with it in a way different from your own personal preference. It’s all part of being a grown up.
But he’s reading a script, man, why do you want to read the manuscript?
It’s the same content as the video. Was that not what you were asking for? What do you want?
No. Automatic transcriptions have flaws. Why not write down the information? Imagine if instead of writing books, people told stories verbally and then had it automatically transcribed and published straight away. This is why I have a very hard time believing you have read a book since it obviously would massivley suck.
I looked over the transcript, looks accurate enough. Did you actually find any problems with it?
Uh la la
because it’s a split from his normal monthly update video where he is supposed to be interacting with his channel members.
He’s already fighting the fight, no reason to give him more work. :P
Unpopular opinion but setting up a whole recording studio and cutting a video without fucking up a bunch is a lot more fucking work than just writing a damn text document.
He’s a YouTuber he already has the recording studio setup he’s just using the systems he already has in place
fast forwarding is your friend
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?
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.
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.
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.
“Books are for fucking morons who can’t, or worse, won’t fuckin remember”
Fully agreed, have an upvote
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.
That sounds like a degrading society
Strong “books are ruining society” energy.
I’m the opposite actually.
Way to miss the point
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.
What’s wrong with society for this to happen? Are Americans illiterate?
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.
Yes
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 european to care about the petition? Please.
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.
You only seem to care about the fact that this is a video, not about the petition at all.
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.
He’s presenting information to his audience, where his audience is.
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No grasshopper, you cannot
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Posts are not written content, U know nothing waste of DNA & resources.
Odysee does that faaaaar better. Youtube is a video-hosting platform & acts the part
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Because people don’t read longform text anymore.
The brilliant part about writing text is that you don’t have to read all of it. You can have sections where people can find the information they actually are interested in. The only problem is less ad money.
I agree, but the issue is not the text. The issue is the people not reading it anymore.
-Written in text, in a long thread full of text
Well yeah, I still read longform text.
But not enough people these days do for it to be the first form of media someone might choose to make. A video is a lot faster and more likely to be watched than longform text is too be read.
Please consider joining the People Preventing Longform Text From Going Extinct (PPLTFGE). PPLTFGE believes text can actually be quicker and more concise than video. Most influencer videos can be compressed into a couple lines of actual information that takes only a few seconds to read as opposed to watching a ten minute video.
Don’t delay, donate today to the PPLTFGE!
Yeah, I watch those “Save Me Time” slop videos on YouTube too.
But I appreciate more detail. While those videos do decently well, they miss details quite a lot that aren’t necessarily needed for the argument but help support what is being said.
Watching/listening to a recording is faster than reading something. I can multitask while listening to it, for instance.
That’s just wrong.
Why post it to youtube in that case? If you’re watching a video where the only the audio is relevant, why the fuck is it a video?
“Why isn’t this text?”
YouTube has more accessibility and reach.
“Then why isn’t it an audio file?!?!?!”
Fucking what? You seem to just be upset that this exists in a way people will access.
what’s your problem? lmao
Going for personal attacks when you cannot think of a response? Peak intellect.
You called someone an ignorant prick in this thread. Appeals to decorum are off the table for you, fuckhead.
Reach and convenience. Why do you think podcasts exist on YouTube when they could’ve as well been audio-only?
Besides, some people like to see the speaker, because it gives visual clues about what’s being said. Not everybody absorbs info efficiently through reading texts or just listening. Sometimes you need more than one way of recieving information.
It’s getting him views.
Also, I would not have read his text. The slightly strung out look is working, it got you to comment :)
probably faster to create and gets more views
For anyone else that might waste some amount of their lives reading this: Gish Gallop
Who‘s gonna actually read it tho? Like 90% of the people who watched that video would never have read a whole text. Not to speak of the issue of getting the text out to people.
Imagine the audacity of a video creator to publish a video on a video platform, what has society come to smh
So there’s some magical limitation which only lets him make videos? He’s doomed to solely create videos and if he as much as thinks about writing a blog post, he gets struck by lightning or something? What an interesting phenomenon.
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FNAF-like image
“If everything Terry Davis believed was actually correct” looking thumbnail lol
I was looking forward to some conversation regarding this subject in the comments, instead all we’ve got is people talking about text vs video, and drawing any attention away from actually discussing the video.
Great.
Was there anything in particular you wanted to discuss?
I think it’s interesting that people have to attach their names and prove they’re real to sign this, but serious complaints can be filed anonymously. I’m not European, so does this mean anyone random can file complaints? Or it’s done somehow officially, just shows up anonymously?
I’m asking to understand how this works because this could not be the industry entirely.
The anonymous complaint system aids whistleblowers.
But it also means that the complaints can come from less than reputable sources.
The upshot of this is that the complaint doesn’t get as much traction and is vetted more closely.
This complaint amounts to the condiment on a nothingburger.
Trying to stop the petition based on a technicality that someone is working too hard seems a bit unhinged. Anyone that stands to be hurt enough by the movement would have had lawyers on retainer to handle things like this.
It’s also possible that someone supporting the movement used it as a false flag to get more attention, but there’s 1.4+ million eyes on it. I don’t see that being an advantageous path either.
Either way, the complaint is bunk and will end up being ignored with a moment’s scrutiny.