Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Is Wrong, Text Is Deathless (kottke.org)
Facebook is seeming shifting its attention to video -- first by allowing people and publishers alike to upload videos on the social network, and then by Facebook Live, with which people are able to broadcast themselves to their friends and followers. Recently, an executive with the company said that Facebook will be probably all video in five years. "The best way to tell stories in this world, where so much information is coming at us, actually is video," Nicola Mendelsohn, who heads up Facebook's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa said. "It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information." Tim Carmody, a reporter whose work has appeared on Wired, and The Verge among others, makes a strong case for texts, and why it is always going to be here. He writes: Text is surprisingly resilient. It's cheap, it's flexible, it's discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it. Plenty of people can deal with text better than they can spoken language, whether as a matter of preference or necessity. And it's endlessly computable -- you can search it, code it. You can use text to make it do other things. In short, all of the same technological advances that enable more and more video, audio, and immersive VR entertainment also enable more and more text. We will see more of all of them as the technological bottlenecks open up. And text itself will get weirder, its properties less distinct, as it reflects new assumptions and possibilities borrowed from other tech and media. It already has! Text can be real-time, text can be ephemeral -- text has taken on almost all of the attributes we always used to distinguish speech, but it's still remained text. It's still visual characters registered by the eye standing in for (and shaping its own) language.
I'll believe text is dead when facebook replaces their logo with a video. And not a video *of* text. In the meantime, there's lots of text on facebook, whether they like it or not.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Don't tell them! Let them do that mistake and suffer the fate of Windows Phone and Geocities!.
(I'm allowed to dream, am I not?)
Text can be real-time, text can be ephemeral -- text has taken on almost all of the attributes we always used to distinguish speech, but it's still remained text.
Consider what kind of people make the majority of facebook. They surely don't slashdot.
The narcissist's toolbox
"Print is dead."
RIP Egon
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Ms Mendelsohn,
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
It's quicker to consume text than video. Just an FYI
Note: Unabashed repost from yesterday because that was the stupidest thing I'd heard all day and work had a Trump segment on in the background
Facebook is wrong on so many levels.
It's just some guy's blog post saying that yesterday's opinion piece is all wrong. What a waste of everyone's time. Slashdot members deserve better quality posts!
This may merely be a result of me only actually having friends and family as my "Facebook Friends" (TM), but by my observation both this and yesterdays assertion are wildly wrong. The primary purpose of Facebook is apparently to upload photos, sometimes with a comment attached. The secondary purpose of Facebook is apparently to click emotion-response buttons to other people's photos. Sadly, the third purpose seems to be linking stupid meme pictures these days (I preferred when it was linking silly or cute cat pictures).
So, all video? Nope.
Primarily text? Not a chance.
I get that Zucky wants to overthrow Youtube, but it's really not a well thought out plan to take something people use for one thing and then demand they do something else with it.
Of course text are deathless. This debacle make me remember when TV appeared and everyone were foreseeing the death of the radio. Well guess what? It's still there and it'll be remain for a long, long time because it's main flaw it's also it's biggest strength : It have no screen. There's time where you just want to listen while your eye can do something else.
In this case, it's more or less the same thing where with text. More and more people use their cellphone for social media and most of the time you just want to use it without sound and just want to read quick social update.
Elok
I'll have to get used to speedlistening/viewing......
The assertion is inane and the rebuttal is wordy. Some comments on the original thread had it correct, it's just a brain fart from some higher up at a brain fart of a company.
Facebook will die, at least in its current relatively (and I mean relatively) benign incarnation. It's a matter of time. They have managed to remain where they are in social because they just up and buy any potential competitor. One day someone will say, no thanks.
Then they will become a government contracted data mining operation for real which is when the mask come off. Shadow profiles.
I can't even send a Picture MMS from a mofuckin SAMSUNG android on the mofucking VERIZON network, in 1996, i mean 2016 WTF WTF
The real motivation behind Facebook's push toward video are ads. It is too easy to filter and ignore banner ads from text communication, it is much harder tasks to filter commercials from the video stream.
So here you go, this isn't philosophical debate about the future of communications - it is classical foot-in-the-door technique in a move toward streaming video commercials to Facebook users.
Welcome our undying lettered overlords.
But no surprise there, as FB sucks.
It's truly amazing to me what an ivory tower Silicon Valley has become. Seems like everybody there assumes that everyone has blazing fast internet that is SYMMETRICAL!!! Sorry, but lack of symmetry is one reason why using the cloud for everything fails. That and speeds that most people are willing to pay for pales in comparison to what Silicon Valley likely averages. Further, they assume that everyone has that kind of speed wherever they go which to them means from the hipster coffee bar, to their fancy-shmancy all-expense-paid offices, to their hipster clubs, to their trendy loft apartment. Newsflash, people, there is a big world out there and it doesn't have 4G access.
..for the illiterate. Kudos to Facebook for creating a welcoming space for the text-challenged (and Visual Basic users). They're pretty near that goal already.
If their execs think they are immune to a Myspace-level drought turning Facebook into the latest internet desert.
There will still be chunks of concrete and stone with text on it when the human race has either moved on from Earth or died out.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I really hate it when I'm trying to figure out how to do something - anything- and the only help I can find is a 20 minute video that explains something that can be explained with a couple of bullet points that can be read in 20 seconds.
It's 15 minutes of yak yak yak yak, 30 seconds of solution, then minutes of yak yak yak. And you find out that it's still wrong because the video is out of date.
Same reason i'd rather exchange e-mails rather than talk to people in person. It's a pointless waste of time when I want to get a transaction done.
I wonder if text is why we haven't detected other advanced alien civilizations. Our extraordinary ability to apply our advanced language skills to a totally different medium and sense, allowing us to develop advanced technology because we can store knowledge outside our brains, achieved without any additional evolution. What are the odds that other intelligent species had the wiring needed listen with their eyes?
I think a part of the Internet's appeal to some is the ability to post their opinion without personal judgement on the character. You can voice an opinion or ask a question quickly and mostly anonymously.
We have been used to text with newspapers and the digital world for a really long time and it's certainly not going away.
A good example of this is forums. I don't imagine forums being turned into video clips of you responding to replies. It's just too personal and involved (my hair has to be nice, have to be clothed, and can't be shoveling in ice cream while I talk).
Now that's not to say that there can't be an increase in video usage. But I don't ever see it becoming a main source of the general internet public's way to create content.
What Fbook wants to do is just become a streaming channel for advertising and commercially produced content. That makes them the most $ per bit/sec of bandwidth. Everyone has noticed that Fbook has become less about individually created posts and more targeted content, shares and reposts of commercial material etc. Like Utoob. Fbook will do the same with video - first get you hooked with you or your friends stuff then gradually switch to rerurns of I Love Lucy. That will be in the internet fast lane while everything else is in the no lane.
In a video only facebook, how will people comment back on the videos? With other videos? I don't get it. Who is going to want to go through the work of making an entire video for a five word comment? Even if people make them, no one will read them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Immortal, eternal, enduring, interminable, undying, and other synonyms are preferable to use. Search google for the word deathless and it doesn't even return a definition for it. Let's kill deathless.
For real learning. I MUCH prefer a well written text document over a video. Many is the time the guy who is teaching me something I need got lazy and put it in a video, and while i'm watching it I'm thinking... "Get to the POINT already!" I have to watch a 10 minute video when I could have read the text in two.
There are a few people who edit out all the useless stuff and just put important information in a video, and their credibility and watchability are high. Unfortunately they're rare.
Text or Video?
How many videos on YouTube have you seem where someone rambles on for 5 minutes with uh, *sniff*, uh, *sniff* before getting to the fucking point which could be summarized in a few lines of text that takes 30 seconds to read?
Text is _extremely_ efficient and compact for S:N -- video usually isn't unless you have a GOOD speaker. Considering that you can say a lot with 140 bytes that requires 100x more bandwidth with video, text isn't going away anytime soon.
People need to stop falling for the Fallacy of Duality: That choice B is "magically" better then choice A. Together they are great when properly used. The advantage of one is the disadvantage of the other, and vice versa. It is akin to arguing if time or space is better. WTF? Communication is multi-paradigm.
--
First Contact is tentatively scheduled for ~2024..2040. Are you ready to accept the fact that you're the "new dumb teenager in the galaxy?"
I was going to make some comment about how much easier it is to compose a well thought-out text reply vs. a video speech in a short time, but remembered the average facebook user can't do either.
So how about an compromise, facebook: you can change everything to video, but you have to auto-reject everything that is uploaded in a high vertical aspect ratio in an effort to end this 'portrait mode' plague.
I guess that is one reason I like Slashdot.
I dislike the video content on CNN.com. I don't need a video of a reporter reading a story. I can read myself. In general would rather read a story and see a high-quality still picture than a tiny compress video.
Don't get me started on pictures or videos of text.
-Charles
You have to remember, tech execs are often falling over each other to make grand proclamations so they can appear visionary. This reminds me of a similarly absurd comment by a tech executive that "78% of small businesses have fully adopted cloud computing".
Um, I think I'd call that number into question...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
"Video will give us more revenue. Therefore, we're killing text. We'll try anyway."
Yes text has its virtues, and yes it will always be around in some form or another, but none of these arguments about the virtues of text are hitting the real issue: text makes less money than video. This is the point that matters, most of this other crap is meaningless. Except the bit about searchability - Facebook can't give up text in any large way until they come up with an effective system to data mine video. Five years seems like a reasonable estimate for that.
Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it
Who says so?
Mankind uses texts since roughly 6000 years, minimum.
And I would assume that what lets make us think is what also helps us to process text.
The summary is pretyy missleading anyway. Most people process text 4 to 10 times faster than a video (with spoken language).
And would wager that every videa that is "sofisticated" takes much longer to produce than writing the equivalent text.
What is next? I like to book a flight and make a money transaction and make two videos for it and post them to somewhere?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The word is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media.
—Neal Stephenson, In The Beginning Was The Command Line
You'll see videos that go viral and people are all enamored by them, but if you read a transcript of the video you'd think maybe the person writing it was heavily influenced by years of huffing paint and freon. Video just ends up being more forgiving to those who are far from eloquent. Which is why twitter became so popular. If you only have to type a few words at a time to get your thoughts out there, more people are able to do that without sounding like complete gibberish.
Their customers want it, so they will get it. And I am not taling about the several billion people. They are not the customer, they are the product.
What will happen is first nothin, next a logo of FB in a corner and next an ad of whatever their customer wants to add to whatever.
In the beginning this will be done zith an overlay, later it will be encoded. They will see to it that only those with adds are seen and not text or anythig else.
A new and better FB will rise that has none of these things as it will be text based and the whole process will be repeated.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
...but how many people are actually good at it? That's why this isn't going to happen. I might be willing to read your 3 line quip about politics. I am absolutely not listening to some rambling uh, ah, filled nonsense rant about politics.
Facebook needs to believe that all video, all the time, is the right way to go. That way, when they wipe themselves out and go bankrupt, it will not only finally get Facebook out of... well... our faces, but it will demonstrate quite clearly that video is *not* the be all and end all of media consumption.
I personally despise how things are going more and more video. Especially supposedly professional video that is poorly edited, and even more poorly scripted where the person is saying "Um" and "Uh" all the time because it hadn't even occurred to them that they should plan out what they were going to say.
you cant even visit any facebook pages without being a member of facebook so i blocked them with my /etc/hosts file, i hope more people just simply block facebook completely, they wont let me anonymously visit their website, i wont let them visit my computer, sounds fair
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I really wonder where some of this shit is coming from.
"Email is dead"
"Internet of Things"
"Text is dead, everything will be video"
All of these things sound like some idiotic crap that someone "spitballed" in some sort of "what's the conventional wisdom going to be today" meeting at Gawker (or Facebook, or whatever), which is then breathlessly promoted as 'the next big thing'.
We're societally like a bicycle that's slipped its chain - pedalling ever-faster with no resistance but in fact slowing coming to a complete stop. I wonder when we'll fall over?
-Styopa
"Facebook is seeming shifting its attention to video "
That's why the lower classes who dwell there, can't write very well and have no clue about grammar.
The singular reason these morons push video is to insert adverts. Wake me up when I can his ctrl+f and search through a video.
With video, you can tell immediately whether the speaker is attractive or not, and ignore the ones who aren't. If you're reading text instead of watching someone talking, you're in mortal danger of paying attention to someone who isn't attractive . The horror.
all dick videos, all the time.
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
It'll happen any day now.
I contracted a protozoan parasite while in India (gives "training on our backend" a whole new meaning). Many of my most recent posts have been about the quality of my poops, because 6 weeks of the shits is fucking annoying as fuck. No one wants to see that on video.
(although, I could be wrong. send me enough money and I'll see what I can shit out for you)
tell what stories to who?
Did you wake up this morning on G-Rated planet Earth? Do people ever screw you over with your data? Have you ever thought who has access to Facebook servers?
To close your account merely means *you* can't access it. Facebook and every large government in the world can in a moment's notice because of moles.
Zuckerberg.
Video is a waste of time. You can't effectively skim video, like you can with text. If the "author" can't spend the time to transcribe their idea, why should I waste MY time listening to their verbal tics to get to THEIR point?
I'm all for text for text. I'm on Slashdot right now, a text-based site. I use a CLI text interface for most of my work on the computer. That said:
> when PC keyboards are abandoned for cameras
That happened a few years ago. Most computing hardware sold today comes with two cameras and no keyboard hardware, only a fake virtual on-screen keyboard.
Text isn't dead. But Facebook will be if they believe this. Reason enough not to correct them.
> "It conveys so much more information in a much quicker period. So actually the trend helps us to digest much more information."
Incorrect.
I can't tell you how many howtos I've found only in the form of a video where they go on and on and take ten minutes to get to the meat of the matter, which could easily be condensed into easier-to-follow text paragraphs that I could read in half a minute and implement almost as quickly. Text is also vastly superior for studying at my own pace. For those of us whose education is ongoing/neverending, text (be it electronic or printed on paper) is king.
Video is great for entertainment, conversation, etc. but will it replace text? Never.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
This is why I still come to Slashdot. The kinds of stories the editors spot and showcase, and the kind of stories the community submits cannot be found on mainstream news outlets like NYTimes, or WSJ, or ABC. Keep publishing these unique and interesting voices that we may not find on our own. Kudos to the editor.
Nicola Mendelsohn is a 'tard.
At the bottom of the
OP should have stopped right there.
Oh, I'm sorry sir, I thought you were referring to me, Mr. Wensleydale.
I can only conclude that these idiots at Facebook are really poor readers.
At work, reading a page of text looks sufficiently like work that it doesn't matter what it is. Kind of harder to slack off watching the news or whatever when it's only available in video form. Really annoys me on the BBC website when I see a story that looks interesting and it's a video.
No. Smartphones and tablets don't have physical keyboards because there's no room for them. As you yourself note, they come with whatever means to enter text the constraints of the form factor permits built-in. That they happen to have cameras is irrelevant.
Text is never going anywhere because with text, if I want to convey the idea of eleventy billion universes exploding and turning into butterflies I just did, whereas with any other medium how would you even begin?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If you don't even know that even as you comment in Slashdot your text (being spell-checked) is easily monitored.
Since the spies are overwhelmingly outnumbered they feel the need to scout every possible detail before they orchestrate even the smallest mini-9/11. Without a catastrophe their jobs are moot so they create catastrophe. The Jewish mass media monopoly (research it) is in no small way complicit.
This is why your communications are tracked. This is why the American government got so mad when Edward Snowden told about Prism and all the rest of the surveillance apparatuses in place. Think: whole network at corporate level. CA certs to DNS to backbones to name it.
Use encryption on your local machines or you are absolutely being profiled. Do you think the governments don't know this? They are the ones tracking you via Microsoft and Google etc.
Text will obviously not die, this is just executive extrapolation about going from a few percent videos to a few percent more in a short time span.
I can read text with the sound off at work, in bed, while watching a movie, or while riding on a noisy train. Videos are only desirable if I am wearing headphones, or the rest of the family is busy in a separate room. Having the audio on often catches the ear of other folks who just have to ask what I am watching, which is very distracting (not just while watching pron). When it comes to most instructional videos, they just suck. A half hour to talk through a half dozen one line instructions with motion sickness inducing camera movement.
So maybe for illiterate tweens who are not self-aware and don't mind bugging everyone else in the room/class/car/office/theater/etc we will see near saturation with videos, but I don't see it happening for the majority of posts. Maybe if Facebook goes by the way of MySpace and Friendster I will be wrong, but so long as they stay popular with a broad demographic I just don't see it.
TLDR; could you make a video?
Microsoft tried to kill text already when they got rid of Messenger in favor of Skype, which offer a terrible text experience in comparison to everything else.
FB better start putting security controls and sincerely limiting access to minors or they will be in a world of hurt of having videos of minors online. FB will become a pedophiles wet dream.
Five years from now Facebook will be as irrelevant as Myspace, Livejournal, and other more-or-less defunct 'social media' sites have become -- and nothing of value will have been lost.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
3D studio max? Maybe some Photoshop. Or if you aren't a Luddite, Gimp.
Just for laughs, think of how ridiculous /. would be if users comments were recorded video instead of text.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Just post a video of yourself saying the words "eleventy billion universes exploding and turning into butterflies." Done. Video, not text.
Was that so hard?
If you're sharing pictures, then a typical home broadband connection has enough spare upstream bandwidth to share them with pretty much anyone who might be interested (unless you 'go viral' or are DDoS'd).
Or you get TOS'd. The acceptable use policy that many last mile ISPs impose on their home broadband customers prohibits running a publicly accessible server over the connection.
and Death is Textless.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I've had this conversation with a number of content creators who are switching to video (and audio podcasts.) The most common complaint I hear from people about text content switching to video is that it takes more effort and more time to consume video; the equivalent of a 20-minute video takes maybe 5-minutes to read as text, and it's easier to read an article piecemeal around other activity (work). The video tends to consume 20 minutes straight. On the other hand, the most common reason I'm given by creators for switching to video is that it takes less effort to create. There's an overhead, of course, while you first get your technology sorted out, and _professional_ quality video requires editing, etc., but _amateur_ video takes essentially as long to create as it does to watch. Writing takes effort, and proofreading, and thought to distil your ideas down to coherent sentences.
(I am certain that there are exceptions to this - people who write text in a single pass as fast as they can type, and/or people who agonise over the scripts of their amateur video for hours. I'm not saying this is _always_ true, I'm describing a general trend only among those half a dozen or so authors I've spoken to, and spoken to their audiences. I'd be interested to hear about others' experiences.)
So what I'm saying is, video is the lazier option - less effort for me to create, more effort for you to consume. That being the case, it's almost certainly the wave of the future for "creators" on Facebook.
I'll believe text is dead when www.retromud.org and http://www.douglasadams.com/cr... stop resolving.
Text is dead! Long live the most durable and interpretable format ever invented by man!
i am impatient. i can't skim a video. i can't instantly skip ahead, either (buffering .....)
i can't copy and paste a video.
i can't print out a video.
when i google how to do something, i skip right past all the video links. the text links get me my answer orders of magnitude quicker, and i can access and absorb information hundreds of times faster through text than through video.
i could live a little longer in this prison
I've gotten rather sick of 5-15 minute videos for something that can be taken care of by one simple paragraph or even just a few words of text if it had been written instead.
If we want to know how many zeni a foozle costs in Bindeels Adventures, I want a simple number, not a long ass video of some bozo fumbling around in game trying to get to vendor and then shows a fuzzy purchase window that's a bitch to read because your video compression sucks almost as bad as you do!
(Yes, some people will probably recognize zeni, I have no idea what a foozle is, and as far as I know, there is no such thing as Bindeels Adventures.)
Shannon, help them.... Have yet to see much "information" on FB... in text....no way it's gonna improve in video...
even Facbook must die.
FQ2,
Nah, Facebook is bang on the money. Don't you all remember how video messaging made SMS obsolete?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Facebook is a company looking to make money, Video streaming is big and getting bigger and seriously needs FAR better software available not just to the masses, but to anyone.
The currently locked down market is crap. We need easy to use multi camera recording with audio syncing. Computers are fully capable of doing that well enough on their own, the code should have been available 10 years ago, It's a shame we don't have more developers with vision, instead we let businessmen and stockholders shape the future of computing and for that matter the future of humanity.
OMG you guys are so naive sometimes. DO you think a fucking retard who drops college would be able to detemine what is the future of communication media? (...) just chek out the next video encoding algorithms that will have it's legal intellectual property expired on the next years and you'll already have some bugs to exploit using the same dirty tricks that youtube has on flash content (which is in fact the reason china blocks youtube. what? do you think the most cultural country ofthe world would reject culture that easy? you guys are naive, and suck for this)
Text is surprisingly resilient.
Surprisingly?. Someone hasn't been paying attention to the last five thousand years of human history.
Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it.
A claim like that requires either a citation or a sound, persuasive argument.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
If Nicola Mendelsohn says it, you can count on it happening. In addition to thousands of Facebook employees that must adhere to his vision or get fired, Nicola has an uncanny knack for predicting some of the most disruptive, world changing, technology trends. These include:
1. Using PCs to store recipes in the kitchen
2. CueCAT
3. 3D televisions, playing 3D content from blu-Ray and cable channels
5. VR headsets
Now that everyone is so good looking, and the lighting is always good, it's just inevitable that video will replace text. Especially when, um, video is ah, self-editing.
And the audience! They just love watching videos about people blowing a big fart. Was it a wet one? The suspense is what keeps people watching.
I envy the employees in Nicola Mendelsohn's organization. To have such a purposeful project to work on. plus having diversity bullshit packed up your ass, it's really the payoff of all the schooling and hard work!
Text is concise, poignant, intuitive, inscrutable, reliable, and yes, resiliant. If you need Facebook for the video then I guess that just means I'll skip 100% videos instead of 99%. I don't like bullshit.
In text, most people get to the point pretty quick. I've seen too many videos where the person seems like they will never get to the point. A video I would expect to last about a minute ends up being 5 or more, and they get to the point near the end. FB is already a waste of time. This would make it even worse. Not that I care (being a non-user).
I don't use Facebook, but if I did, I would drop it if it was all video. I hate finding something is a video and not text. I just close it. With the obvious exception if I was actually looking for a video.
Do they want to change to FaceTube?
People need to stop falling for the Fallacy of Duality [...] Together they are great when properly used.
In theory, older, more flexible technologies can coexist with newer technologies that are less flexible yet more appealing to the majority of the general public. But in practice, investors chasing the most profitable investment cause one technology to be maintained and others to end up discontinued, especially if the less profitable technology is ideal only for a distinct minority.
For example, 10-inch laptops are well suited for coding on hobby projects while riding public transit to and from your day job. They are less likely to hit the seat in front of you when opened than the more common 13-inch size, and they fit in a smaller, more discreet bag that's less of a thief magnet. But laptop makers stopped making the 10-inch size in 2012 in favor of a higher profit margin product called a "tablet". Even a tablet with a clip-on keyboard isn't a perfect substitute, as tablet user interfaces are based on smartphone user interfaces and thus tend to inherit design decisions made for a 4 inch screen, such as lack of side-by-side app views. Not being able to see your program and output at once makes debugging more difficult. Furthermore, this user interface is more difficult to replace because tablet operating systems tend not to give bootloader or even administrative access to the device's owner.
but you have to auto-reject everything that is uploaded in a high vertical aspect ratio in an effort to end this 'portrait mode' plague.
Other than through vertical video, what's the best way to record someone using a treadmill? I've run into cases where I couldn't step back far enough to get both head and feet in a landscape mode shot and have had to resort to vertical video.
Other than through vertical video, what's the best way to record someone playing a portrait mode arcade game such as Pac-Man or Donkey Kong? Or should these videos just be rejected outright as alleged infringements of copyrights owned by Namco Bandai and Nintendo respectively?
What is next? I like to book a flight and make a money transaction and make two videos for it and post them to somewhere?
Server-side facial recognition to confirm your identity, so that you don't book a round-trip ticket and give the separate legs to different people to abuse the discount, would require a video.
in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes
You left out Texts.
In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death, taxes, and text.
And in which country would that be legal? I mean not being allowed to resell something you got via a discount?
Any country with strong contract law. See, for example, the Skiplagged lawsuit.
In the link you provide the operator of the web site is not even a contractor of one of the involved parties.
The United States isn't the only country that recognizes tortious interference as a form of secondary liability.
They are wrong, text is way faster. People who have practiced a bit can read 4 or 5 times faster than a video runs. And, text is way easier to search and index.
Most of the people I know skip any article that lacks a text transcript. Video is too klunky.
The thing video is good for is moving images of things that do not need a text description, like sunsets, music and ships and planes. And maybe video game streams. But you can't spend your whole life being entertained, or it will be a very short life.
You can use it in crowded and noisy places. Try that with video.
Text is accessible. It can be translated to Braille or speech for the blind. It can be made larger for the vision impaired. It reaches the deaf, who find audio and video content challenging to use at best.
Text is flexible. It requires very few device capabilities. It can travel over low bandwidth links.
Text is fast. It can be skimmed as needed.
Text is unambiguous. Things are spelled out. Things like addresses, where precision matters, are conveyed efficiently.
Irrational Exuberance by FB
Casteism
Consider the source of that comment: an exec for the company in (some) countries with large illiterate populations. It appears to me that this exec is referring to spreading Facebook to even illiterate populations, without regard for spreading (real) education!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
One has only to look at the rise of platforms such as Slack to realise that Nicola Mendelsohn is dead wrong. She must be a student of the John C. Dvorak school of prognostication.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Remember those media theorists who said that media companies want to turn the internet into the next evolution of television, where it exists for an oligopoly of content creators to sell to a mass of passive consumers? Facebook is at the forefront of this movement. Zuckerberg's vision is for FB to wrest the crown from the likes of Comcast/Disney/CBS and become the next 800lb content creator (with advertisers footing the bill). Notice how they are burying mundane status updates in users' feeds and drowning them out with 'suggested adverts' and 'so-and-so friend likes this company, check it out' and other such marketing drivel? The writing has been on the wall for quite some time.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman