Personally I think if he did that people wouldn't pay attention. My experience is that when you complain to people about digital rights they just glaze over unless you walk them through all the ins and outs and the implications.
It's an uphill battle to inform the public. Most people just don't understand and don't care to understand the issues until it actually hits them, such as with the farmers who bought JD.
Almost every conversation I've had over the years goes two ways:
"Why do you care so much about <Flock, Ring Cameras, big tech name>? If you have nothing to hide, why are you so concerned?"
Or:
"Why do you care so much about <Flock, Ring Cameras, big tech name>? We already walk around with cell phones in our pockets 24/7."
I used to be more passionate about persuading people about privacy, but I've pretty much given up. I've come to the conclusion that the majority of the population doesn't care what is happening around them as long as they have internet access and their iPhone.
My response is typically, "I have literally everything to hide. I don't want you to know my middle name. I don't want you to know what I had for breakfast. It's none of anyone's business."
And weirdly, the response I get is, "Oh yeah, fair."
This. I never watch video posts. I can skim-read a text site in seconds to see if it's worth a real read. I can't do that with video, and there's always some ads in it, whether the author put them there or not. I hate ads.
And it's not just HN either, video is a very poor substitute for a well written article. Video can augment a well-written article, but it can't replace it.
If you have YouTube Premium, you can use their Gemini AI to summarize videos. I've "consumed" tons more videos since I discovered it, since I can get a good idea from the summary if it's worth actually watching the video.
My overall minutes of YT have gone down, but I probably interacts with 2-3x more videos. Just like skimming on HN!
Posting here for anyone who might not know this: you can click and hold on most YouTube videos and they will play at 2x. I find that to be a good test at whether the host is communicating effectively. If I can understand them perfectly clear at 2X they are talking too slowly.
Then you get things like the ATP (I can't bring myself to say ATP podcast because La Brea Tar Pits and all that) where two hosts are fine at 1.5x and the third becomes a chipmunk.
Maybe they can make Overcast have dynamic speed based on speaker.
Here's where I admit that I can't identify them - but offhand I think it was Siracusa. I know because I tried speeding up a recent episode and he started talking and I had to slow it back down.
I'm not sure if you got it, that inhumanely != inhumanly. Where inhumanely is without consideration for the human race, whereas the other is non-human-like.
> I'm not sure if you got it, that inhumanely != inhumanly. Where inhumanely is without consideration for the human race, whereas the other is non-human-like.
Note they're also synonyms, so the confusion is understandable:
The person presenting is also important. I may be interested in the topic but if I don't like the presenter or their delivery then I'm still not going to watch it. Text doesn't have this issue.
Monetization. It's incredibly hard to monetize text content, particularly these days where Google's search AI has all but killed clickthrough rates. Youtube however, that will reliably give you revenue share.
That may be so, but are you skimming, or actually retaining the the things you care about? Video can have a lot more impact and staying power when it comes to things that matter in this context.
For me personally, I retain much less information from video vs reading it.
For text, I change my reading speed based on comprehension, going faster for things I know, and slower or rereading for things that are new or complicated. For video, you're expected to consume the info at the rate provided in the video, losing attention when they spend too long on info you're already finished with, and then blowing by other info that I want to spend more time considering.
There are options like adjusting video playback speed and rewinding, but that's not how video is typically consumed and is much less convenient than just altering your reading speed.
But still, there are many many HNers who binge watch YT videos all the time, and share it here, or suggest YT videos as "dive deeper" links on many topics.
Video content, particularly on youtube, gets very little traction here generally.
I watch his videos, but not from links here and that is probably what you are seeing: those of us who might follow your link have already seen the video (likely via grayjay rather than youtube) and will skip over it to the next interesting new thing. People who don't already watch him will see “[video] (youtube.com), 1 point, discuss” and think “oh, another video that could be a few paragraphs of text which would be much faster to read than watch, that so far no one else has seen as worth interacting with, preceded by two unskippable adverts”.
A link to youtube is only going to get much attention if it is lucky to have a title that jumps out to a few people so it gains the first few votes and/or comments that get the ball rolling. Even then Louis' videos aren't going to get a hot debate going: most people either entirely agree so don't see the point commenting further, or they aren't the sort of people who are reading HN at all or are but don't follow video links.
I watch long form videos on topics I care about. If I care about the topic, I likely have already seen the videos. But I'm not going to watch a 20 minute video posted to HN to discuss it. If it's not something I can skim over in 3 minutes, it's too long. Take the post we're on right now. You can read through the entire contents of the article in 1 minute.
Unless the video is about an extraordinary natural phenomenon that can be seen, video (and audio) is strictly inferior to text for communicating information.
that seems pretty easily falsifiable. Sometimes you want want to consume content while doing something else that precludes reading. Sometimes you want to relax your eyeballs after staring at a screen all day. Theres plenty of reasons to consume audio or video.
Voting on hackernews is a bit weird compared to reddit. The whole UI is strange to me.
Having said that, I noticed that there is in general too much content to consistently e. g. vote or do similar actions. I was watching Rossman's video almost daily in the past; stopped doing so a while ago simply because of lack of time on my part. I need to choose more carefully where I invest my time. (Also, for some reason, when Rossman was in New York, his videos had a better punch; not sure if I am the only one noticing this but he seemed to have a better focus when he was still in New York, even though I understand he relocated, to stop getting milked by politicians in New York.)
Not needing to be at the top of his game anymore makes anyone lose that sharpness. As you just said, he doesn't need to fight New York politicians anymore.
I stopped coding for the past year or so and I'm considering going back because I definitely feel my own sharpness lost.
