Especially the blind links to YouTube.

Tell me what you’re linking to (particularly the channel or creator) and why it’s worth my time. Otherwise I’m not even giving it a second thought…

There’s a place for them. There’s a place for everything. I agree if I’m here I’m mostly here to read/comment but it’s easy enough for me to just skip videos.

It is frustrating when a video is just dumped with no text, explanation reason or discussion. I also don’t like it when its used to market a brand/product or a influencer. Mostly because it feels like its there to take from the community here rather than contribute.

I actually love video and visual content but in recent years i have become offput due to the youtube effect of stupid voices and clickbait titles. It always feels a bit pushy, like i am being Told or Sold something, which destroys my natural inquisitiveness.

I feel like any video link more than a few minutes isn’t really meant to be viewed directly from the post/link.

If something seems interesting, I’ll put it on the TV and go back to browsing.

I can’t imagine people just watch a long video on their phones or only screen. It’s just people sharing a link to be watched elsewhere

I don’t mind them but I also don’t usually watch them.

I will watch music videos but that’s about it, but I’m a bit of an outlier as I never really got into watching videos or youtube in the first place

It has to REALLY grab my interest in order for me to watch it, and I’m probably going to back out if I see that it’s longer than a minute or two.

I’m with you, they should only be in dedicated video- or special interest communities where it’s appropriate.

If it doesn’t have a description of what is in the video I tend to ignore them.

Posts where it is clear that the video is just from title, like a link to a music video for a song, are perfectly fine. But a post that says a person comments on a topic need something more than that before I’m going to click, especially if I don’t know who the person is and why I would care about what they have to say.

There is some content that is better as a video. But turning what should be a one paragraph statement into a 15 minute video? Fuck that noise.

I don’t mind them. Personally, I would perfer a link to a web article

It’s okay but I would really love if I was able to filter by video, picture, article link or text post.

Sometimes, I’m really looking for interesting text posts and discussions to read and it would be nice to skip the memes and all that.

How would people feel about a feature that lets them filter their feed by post type? You could choose not to see any videos or any images, etc.

There are things that can only really reasonably be done in video. !ukraine@sopuli.xyz has clips of attacks being shown, for example. For those, I’m fine.

I almost always dislike things that could be done in text being in video. It’s faster to read than to watch, and much easier to skip around. It’s easily searchable, can be viewed on any kind of Internet connection, and consumes less battery on low-power systems. I think that a lot of the content that shows up in this form exists only because YouTube provides an easy way for people to monetize content, and there isn’t really a terribly effective analog for text.

There are a very, very small handful of things that I can think of where one could use both forms, and I’ve seen someone use video to legitimately get information across more-quickly. Maybe Montemayor’s military history videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd8_vO5zrjo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXjydKPcX60

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHO6xrSF7Sw

I’ve read a bunch of material about the Battle of Midway, and while you can find more-detailed material out there, and if you put an hour-and-a-half into watching those three videos, you’ll probably get more out of it relative to the time invested than you would from the other sources I’ve gone through. Some of that is because of his heavy use of maps. Annoyingly, a lot of text sources don’t stick maps showing the state of a battle inline, but put them in separate sections or rely on a single map with tracks containing timestamps that one has to keep referring back to. Much easier to get a sense of what’s going on spatially to have “current state of things” maps thrown onscreen as one walks through the events.

But that sort of thing is really the exception that proves the rule. I’d guess that the great majority of videos I’ve seen could (a) be done in text and (b) be much more-condensed and I could pick up all the relevant material with much less time investment.

My biggest complaint about videos is simply that the fediverse hasn’t figured out a decent video hosting solution yet. YouTube is an evil monolith, but at least their videos fucking load. It seems like every other video hosting solution that the fediverse tries either buffers endlessly or refuses to load entirely.

Also, fuck catbox.moe, those links never fucking work for me. I’m convinced they have my VPN blocked, because every single catbox link is completely dead. If I’m blocked, at least tell me that instead of just sitting on an endless loading page with no fucking content.

At least with something like Lemmy, the videos aren’t being served algorithmically. It’s communities I have subscribed to, rather than having some shadowy algorithm decide what it thinks will keep me engaged. That’s my big complaint with most modern video platforms, and Lemmy doesn’t do that because it’s content I have actively subscribed to.

Plus, I greatly prefer this kind of comment platform, instead of whatever Instagram/Tiktok/YouTube/etc are doing. Having a video posted here means I can access it along with my preferred comment format.