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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

I notice it every time I'm linked to a news story that's only in a video format. I'm literate, thanks, I don't need an announcer slowly explaining things to me.

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This. A million times this. I don't understand the push that's been made on the web wherein content that would be perfectly usable as normal plaintext & images becomes videos. It is really easy for me to move freely spatially and really difficult for me to move freely temporally and this is no different on the web. Moreover, it is really easy for me to randomly access a single sentence of text and actually pretty damn difficult for me to do the same with a sentence of spoken word (and this is before you account for my minor hearing difficulties).

> I don't understand the push that's been made on the web wherein content that would be perfectly usable as normal plaintext & images becomes videos.

My guess is that it's better for advertising because they can show you ads that cannot be skipped before getting to the content.

That certainly explains some cases, but it definitely doesn't account for all cases. I still distinctly remember a video someone made that was just reading a joke list that is widely spread across the internet. The delivery didn't add anything to the list. There was no reason to be a video whatsoever. A number of howto-type videos are the same way (while some really do benefit from a video, many more don't). I've even seen a few videos with no audio and the only content was text on a black background.

My various problems with online video mean there's a lot of content from which I'm essentially cut off unless I want to put forth a special effort, and such effort is usually (though not always) not worth it.

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