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Facebook Now Lets Users Comment With a Video (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the media-consumption dept.

An anonymous reader writes: As internet users continue to consume more videos than ever before, Facebook has decided to further add to the trend and officially launch video comments. Users are watching so many videos that the Cisco Visual Networking Index forecasts internet video traffic will represent 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2020. Facebook said via a blog post that the new feature was developed at Facebook's 50th Hackathon. The team that built the feature included: Bob Baldwin who lead the initiative with Hermes Pique and Sameer Madan working on iOS, Muhammed Ibrahim worked on the web, and Billy Ng worked on Android. Baldwin's past projects consisted of features that let Facebook users include photos or stickers in the comments. The new video comments feature may help Facebook catch up to Snapchat in terms of daily videos viewed on the social media platform.

3 of 29 comments (clear)

  1. No thank you by Motherfucking+Shit · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Am I the only one who actively avoids videos whenever I'm not specifically seeking them out? If I'm looking to watch a movie or TV show or someone's recording of a concert, great, show me the video in glorious HD. Otherwise, please no. On the desktop, auto-playing videos and janky players annoyed me so much I installed a browser extension to force them all to prompt before playing. If I'm on mobile, videos chew through both my battery and my data plan much faster than I'd like. On Twitter where I follow lots of NOAA/NWS accounts, I'm not going to play the little tornado videos they post, I don't see how a 15 second 5MB clip offers compelling added value over a 300KB still photo.

    I see multiple negatives and no real upside to communicating this way. I'd rather have fewer videos, not more. Annotating every inane social media comment with a video clip is just pollution. It's bad enough reading through some of that stuff through my own head-voice, I really don't want to experience it all in yours.

    --
    "BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
    1. Re:No thank you by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 2

      I don't see how a 15 second 5MB clip offers compelling added value over a 300KB still photo.

      Because it's movin' pictures, dude, Web 2.0, a rich multimedia experience!

      I feel the same way. I hate it when a news "article" has a 10 word summary and a video I'm supposed to watch to get the information. Yahoo is especially bad at this bait and switch.

      If it's text I can quickly scan it to pick out the parts I want, but with video I have to clunk along at their dullard pace until they finally decide to tell me what the fuck is going on.

      --
      Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
    2. Re:No thank you by brunes69 · · Score: 2

      You are not the only one, and also not the only millenial.

      Videos are very popular with teens and tweens, but the older you get, the less time you have, and the more "information dense" you want your communications. Videos are basically the least information dense way to communicate anything. It takes an order of magnitude longer to consume a video about something than to read an article on the same subject communicating the exact same information.

      Videos have their uses, don't get me wrong, but the idea of video comments is ridiculous.