However, YouTube (or should I say Google?) briefly had a glitch in which the character limit on comments changed from 500 to 200. Google employees cleared up this issue on the forums saying the 200 character limit was not intentional, but this news didn't even reach well-known celebrities on YouTube.
The popular video blogger and best selling author John Green had this to say on his twitter:
Of course, one can not avoid the irony that this was posted to Twitter, which has an infamous 140 character limit to text, the equivalent to soundbites on television. Despite this, Twitter is meant to be a place to see snippits of information, sometimes followed by a link to more information.YouTube comments on the other hand don't have a specific goal in mind. Sure, it's meant to be used to give the creator of the video feedback, but it sometimes becomes a discussion. In the best (a.k.a. rarest) cases, there will be meaningful discourse about the subject of the video. In the worst cases, there will be religious or political discussion on a cat video.
Dan Brown made this video in response to John Green's tweet, outlining how 200 characters can actually be a good thing.
Dan Brown seems to be saying that limiting comments to 200 characters prevents users from being intimidated by the "immense wall of text" and forces commenters to "get to the point." Are we really at that point where 500 characters is considered too much for people to handle? I'm also very concerned about Dan's opinion that users should "embrace any and all experimentation on YouTube's part to try to make the comment section [better.]"
Dan Brown did bring up the interesting point that limiting the character limit on typed comments would encourage people to make more video responses. While I support this new form of internet discourse, it poses a problem for me for two reasons. (1) Not everyone on the Internet or YouTube has a camera, though it seems like a great majority do. Even though this is not a huge problem, it still leaves out a portion of the Internet population. (2) If all the text comments were changed to video responses, YouTube servers would have trouble handling the increased data flow. I think it's pretty common knowledge that videos take up more space on servers than text.
Of course, a lot of this discussion on whether YouTube should have a 200 character limit or not is moot, since it was not a legitimate change in the system, but rather a glitch. It did spawn a rather interesting debate on how discourse on YouTube should take place.
I hope people don't start moving to video responses. I am against video responses for so many reasons. First of all (since it would pertain to our course anyway) our literacy WOULD probably slip if we just started talking instead of writing. I also think it would be a backwards step for the convenience/speed that we are always trying to achieve. Video's take longer to watch. It isn't something that you can skim effectively to find important information. When I skim text, for example, I can pick out keywords that I'm searching for, while videos you just have to guess. People also tend to ramble when they make video responses and until people learn to get to the point, video responses are a terrible, terrible idea and waste of time.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of learning to get to the point, that is another reason why video responses would be a backwards step. Writing is the condensed form of speaking, something in which we have to gather our thoughts and what we want to say before writing. When we talk, we have a habit of spewing whatever happens to be at the tip of our tongue. For a research project I'm doing for another class on physical and emotional benefits of writing, I can tell you that written comments are invaluable and shouldn't be booted out the door.
I think it's sad that we have to put rules out to make people more coherent and get to the point faster. Should we restrict ourselves with 200 characters (regardless of whether it was intentionally implemented into the system or not) when there are many topics that require more than 200 characters to fully articulate?