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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why does he feel that it’s necessary to present the information by talking into a webcam? What’s wrong with publishing text?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Watching/listening to a recording is faster than reading something. I can multitask while listening to it, for instance.
Watching/listening to a recording is faster than reading something.
That’s just wrong.
I can multitask while listening to it, for instance.
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?
what’s your problem? lmao
probably faster to create and gets more views
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.
He’s presenting information to his audience, where his audience is.
Total shit argument. You can publish text on youtube too.
And how many people will actually see it? when he releases a video, i get it on my feed. but i have never seen a text post from any of the creators i’ve subscribed to.
I see it all the time. Maybe your creators don’t care about the feature? Also, you can simply use the description of the video. Of course, this means less ad watch time so obviously not happening.
While text posts on Youtube are technically a thing that exists, you can’t expect a significant portion of users on the platform to pay attention to those. People go to Youtube to watch videos. That’s what the platform is for, that’s what the audience is there for.
Stop killing games is larger than being youtube content now. News are reporting about it. How about starting a website where you present this information instead of on a youtube channel? The obvious answer to why not is that he wants the sweet ad revenue that youtube provides at the cost of wasting everyone’s time.
deleted by creator
You forgot the most important part: no ad revenue from text posts on youtube.
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
no reason to give him more work
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
For anyone else that might waste some amount of their lives reading this: Gish Gallop
