Video Comments? Blow Me.

Video Comments? Blow Me. / 04.23.08

(This is an old school Scrivs’ rant where curse words fly so if that isn’t your thing just wait till tomorrow or browse the archives.)

The biggest site of the last two years (YouTube) revolves around video so it only makes sense to think that video is the complete future of the web. Today I got to see the perceived future of comments on blogs with TechCrunch’s implementation of Seesmic comments and let me tell you…HOLY SHIT THIS IS THE WORST IDEA IN A WHILE. Why in their right mind would anyone think this is useful or a great feature is beyond me. Supposedly there are some pros to this so let me see if I can make some up.

Pros

Apparently people believe that you will be able to get the right tone of an individual from their video comment since it is so often lost in text form. However, how many people are still going to pop off at the mouth like they do in text if they must do it on camera? Not many. If anything this might make blog comments less of a warzone if that is what you want. But we will give the benefit of the doubt to geeks around the world that if they truly have something to say with emotion they will say it.

Next we get to put a face to a name. Couldn’t we do that with Gravatar or something similar? What does seeing a person’s face have to do with what they say? But again, benefit of the doubt for our need to stalk people online, too bad we will be staring at males between the ages of 400-900.

Cons

Instead of going into an essay format for this one I will just pop off of a list.

Can’t scroll
Can’t scan
Can’t quote
Can’t reply effectively
Wastes time
People aren’t entertaining
People carry on about nothing
Will be spammed even worse…SHOUT OUT TO MY SITE
99% of the people weren’t made for video
Text is usually more articulate
Background noise
Umm
Errr
Argh
*blink
Upload time
Rick Rolls forever

Let’s not pretend that this makes us more human. Let’s not pretend that this makes us more likely to engage. YouTube does it the right way, you can do video responses, but those are given their own section and if you wish to view them have at it. Integrating them with other comments kills the conversation. It breaks it up.

If you really love this idea then let’s just call you for what you are…a dork. Not even a geek. Do you spend all your time watching every commercial on TV? Nope. Why? Because they suck and what makes you think video comments will be any different? Oh because we like to believe that anything we say is important? Stop kidding yourself.

And dear god are we going to moderate all of them? Give me 10 text comments I can check in 5 seconds to see which ones are spam. Give me 10 video comments that are a 1 minute a piece and that’s 10 minutes I have to spend monitoring them. No thanks.

I don’t understand why people call a new feature the future. Do they even think about how people use the web? With a text comment I am always about 80% sure it is being read by people viewing the comments, but with a video comment? Maybe 1% if I got lucky or had a famous name to back me up.

One of the most important commodities to humans is time. We go to YouTube and don’t mind wasting time because the time isn’t wasted. We spend it watching popular videos that we know have a chance of entertaining us. Video comments waste time that I don’t want to waste. It really is that simple. When I want the weather I check the widget on my desktop, I don’t go to the weather channel and wait for a report. You aren’t making my life any better with video comments and you sure as hell aren’t making it anymore efficient.

To finish off this grand example of english prose let me link to you some of the video comments to see how wonderful and enlightening they are.

4 Responses

Aidan Henry // May 5th, 2008

Hey Scrivs,

Couldn’t agree with you more. Video comments are a joke. They’re an ego thing. People think that their opinion is so important and others will want to watch them preach it. Basically, video comments are a a form of engagement/discussion for the ego-maniacs out there.

Oh… and I think Arrington has a boner for Seesmic… and maybe a backdoor business arrangement…

Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com