Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

#1. A commenter is not a website.

#2. There are a lot of considerations apart from bandwidth when it comes to disseminating information. For eg., having to use speakers or even reach for a set of headphones is reason enough for me to skip to the text.



I think csense meant bandwidth in the sense of rate at which the audience takes in the information, not network bandwidth. You're in agreement with one another.


Yes, by "lower-bandwidth" I meant "video usually [1] takes more of my time to transfer ideas from the author's mind into mine than equivalent text." I wasn't referring to bytes-on-the-wire [2].

[1] Sometimes video is more efficient than text. E.g. with respect to video games, gameplay videos can convey a lot of information in a short time. Basically if you want to teach someone about some system that changes over time, showing how it changes in video is often a lot clearer and faster than trying to describe it with words or static diagrams.

But a video that just involves listening to a person talk -- or, worse yet, read slides from a projector -- usually just ends up wasting my time compared to equivalent information presented as text.

[2] It's obvious that video consumes way more bytes-on-the-wire than text.


I see. Yes, I misread your comment. Apologies. We are, as another commenter eloquently put it, 'in violent agreement'.


Offtopic: A great word/ phrase for describing this situation, which I'd like to see become more popular. "You two are in violent agreement."


Excellent phrase - I'm joining your campaign to popularise it.


You're agreeing with csense without realizing it. He said "this website" to refer to the site with the videos (not the comment above him), and saying video is "lower-bandwidth" to mean that is less quickly communicative, not that it somehow takes less internet bandwidth than text.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: