Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

I think there may even be a chicken and egg situation going on - for some reason, media websites such as CNN are pushing giant rich media content objects at us like videos, which obviously are meaningless to a text browser. Even webdev blogs are being posted with big GIFs every paragraph or two.

I'm not sure why content creators are feeling the need to go multi-media - perhaps it's getting harder and harder to tell who your audience is, or segment your audience, or maybe the "smearing" of society is causing an audience for a given topic (ES6 development, say) to have so many different desires it's impossible to create content on the subject without annoying some portion of them (either by having plain HTML and CSS for your blog post with no helpful GIFs, or a bunch of GIFs that piss off people in text browsers or slow connections).

View on HN

> I'm not sure why content creators are feeling the need to go multi-media

I was around for BBSes and the early public internet, and I do appreciate text interfaces... that said, I've always felt there was something quite magical about graphics and audio. The web allows the author quite a bit of freedom in this regard, so it ends up pretty chaotic and uneven.

I find that graphics help to get a point across quickly, even for folks who are very comfortable with tons of text (most people in the world really aren't, and the language you prefer is likely not their first anyway so it's quite a bit of work for them)

It can be misused just like anything else, and tastes can be subjective. It's nice, then, that web browsers being at their core agents for the user, you can also get a fair bit of control on what you want to block by default, or have animations be click-to-play, and so on, which override the author's design.

They go multi-media for preroll ads. These are contextually more resistant against adblockers, and bring in more revenue.

Even on my iPhone I can’t browse CNN while simultaneously listening to music or the radio (iPlayer). Even though the videos are silent until clicked, they still take over the audio. Gets me every time!

What would a better experience be on iOS? I personally wouldn’t find mixing the audio and having to pause one or open a per-app volume mixer control panel to be a better implementation.

Play them with no sound by default if you are already listening to something.

Not sure, but to have this happen even for silent videos seems particularly annoying

From what I know, even "silent" videos can have an audio stream, which just happens to have all its samples decode to 0 (or nearly 0.)

Videos embedded into a webpage have a "muted" boolean attribute, so the nice behavior would be to not pause the music player when muted video starts playing.

Back when going multimedia was very primitive and was clearly just a shiny feature with no direct benefit to anyone other than for the creators to partake in new world, I'd have agreed with your statement. In the current situation of muted Facebook videos being a major form of (dis)information distribution, everyone can point to all-encompassing multimedia communication as a potentially extremely lucrative medium. Therefore there shouldn't be any surprise as to the prevalence of that type of content.

This leads to some perverse incentives, though...I have started to see like-farming "tag your friends" pages will post a video of a static image, overlaid with a subtle movement effect like falling snow, undoubtedly because someone realized they'll get more eyeballs from the all-knowing News Feed algorithm if their content is video.

"For some reason"

I think we should probably expect the Cable News Network to traffic heavily in video, yes?

If you've ever watched History or The Learning Channel, you might not expect much anymore.

Or if you're still a subscriber of American Telephone & Telegraph's services.

I find myself thinking of a line regarding early computer games development.

About how whenever game devs got a new toy to play with (faster CPU, better audio, etc etc) for years the games released would be heavy on bling and lite on content.

I suspect something similar happens in other parts of the computing world, and the web has long since hit its tech equivalent of "eternal september". Meaning that these days there are so many new "toys" coming into the web world that people can't help include them into whatever they are making, even if it makes little to no sense to do so in the long run.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com