YouTubeFi?

April 23, 2006 11:16 PM

Should there maybe be a special place within MetaFilter Network for YouTube and Google Video links (and the like)? I know that there's other video linky sites out there, but this is MetaFilter, and I like people's taste better here.

Some people really don't seem to care for video posts, and grump about how common they're becoming, but sometimes they're good. I doubt there will be a decline in the amount of video and stuff that will be available for discovering and linking to. Maybe we should get used to it, but keep the other best-o-the-web stuff separate, or distinct in some way.
posted by dammitjim to MetaFilter-related at 11:16 PM (42 comments total)

meh, pick ANY specfic topic and someone has made the same argument, newsfilter, politicfilter... I suspect Friday Flash Fun had it's detractors back in the day... this is the appropiate place to insert, "if you don't like it flag and move on".

No way yer going to push through any changes with this suggestion. So, not to sound mean and all metafiltery about it, this is not a good topic.
posted by edgeways at 11:21 PM on April 23, 2006

Videosift. Brought to you by our very own (insert username here: I forget).

Most of the video sucks, but some (like the recent Feynman documentary) doesn't. We assume that people have the intelligence and taste to filter the good trad-web stuff to make their posts to the front page; we should assume they can do the same with the latest piece of video flotsam (or maybe jetsam).

Plus, the novelty will hopefully wear off eventually.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:22 PM on April 23, 2006

Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor not a link categorizer.
posted by scarabic at 11:23 PM on April 23, 2006

meh, pick ANY specfic topic and someone has made the same argument

Seconded. Give it up.
posted by scarabic at 11:28 PM on April 23, 2006

They don't bother me. I was thinking about the video-haters, feeling like the blue was all gunked up with music videos and stuff. But you're right, newsfilter, politicfilter... where to stop?
posted by dammitjim at 11:34 PM on April 23, 2006

why stop? If something becomes a problem it gets fixed. There is a lot of video nowadays but that is not necessarily a bad thing, the video haters can make their own case, and will likely be shot down unless there is a clear problem. "Best of the web" is not an exclusive thing defined as text, flash, or whatever. I guess I understand your concern, but let those that see it as a problem fight their own battles, it will make life easier for you, I guarantee it.
posted by edgeways at 11:45 PM on April 23, 2006

Never understood the YouTube hate. If the content stands on its own, what's not to like? Judging a link based on its URL is pretty ridiculous.
posted by brundlefly at 11:56 PM on April 23, 2006

YouTube hate confounds me as well. Just watch. The next new media that becomes available online will be hated on just as much.

"What's up with all these HoloTube links clogging up the blue?"
posted by Afroblanco at 12:04 AM on April 24, 2006

YouTube hate confounds me as well. Just watch.

Punny! :D
posted by slater at 12:43 AM on April 24, 2006

dammitjim posted "Should there maybe be a special place within MetaFilter Network for YouTube and Google Video links (and the like)?"

Yes.
posted by peacay at 12:48 AM on April 24, 2006

Well, there's this. There used to be a way to edit the metafilter URL to point to things like tagname.metafilter.com but it dosn't seem to work anymore.
posted by delmoi at 1:21 AM on April 24, 2006

Maybe someone clever with Greasemonkey can put together a script to killfile all posts tagged with youtube/iraq/whatever the user wants, although this sounds more like a pony to me.
posted by DaShiv at 2:15 AM on April 24, 2006

I seem to remember the last time we covered "shouldn't posts matching criterion C be relegated somewhere other than the blue" topic (where C is a member of an unbounded set that usually includes news and politics as prominent membeters), Matt wrote up a really good explanation of his views. I think he said that moving a certain topic or a certain kind of post elsewhere breaks the "filter"-iness of Metafilter. The grey and the green aren't just otherwise-blue posts about different stuff, they're totally different paradigms. To start separating out some subjects will weaken Metafilter.

I generally just ignore the (news|politics|video)filter.
posted by Plutor at 2:48 AM on April 24, 2006

i have a video fish. in my new media pants.
posted by quonsar at 3:32 AM on April 24, 2006

I think my own dislike for YouTube grows out of a general distrust/hatred for tv. It is evil, but so seductive.
posted by R. Mutt at 4:32 AM on April 24, 2006

I hate links that lead to pages with HTML.
posted by Astro Zombie at 4:42 AM on April 24, 2006

Segregation is just what the man wants you to think is right.

P.S. If you haven't disabled javascript, blocked images and put your own custom style sheet that that displays everything in 12pt roman than you haven't surfed the internet yet.
posted by furtive at 5:28 AM on April 24, 2006

furtive passes spellcheck, fails grammar.
posted by furtive at 5:29 AM on April 24, 2006

I tend to skip youtube links with vague descriptions, but sometimes people flag them and I have to sit watching them wondering what all the fuss is about. The vaguely described ones combined with a lack of tags means that they are hard to search for and wind up being double posts from time to time, but the sheer number of available videos means that this doesn't happen too often. I can't see any reason for sticking the links in a different place.
posted by jessamyn at 5:42 AM on April 24, 2006

In other words, you're saying that people should use more descriptive link text to avoid comments like these? Revolutionary.

I'm going to go ahead and suggest that more people rewrite the FPP in comments. I don't really know how to flag a crappily worded post (it breaks the guidelines?), but if one of the first three comments is a more descriptive version of the FPP, it might save a lot of kvetching and wasted click time.
posted by Eideteker at 6:16 AM on April 24, 2006

Judging a link based on its URL is pretty ridiculous.

Except that YouTube videos play really badly on my computer, if at all (while Google Video, Vimeo, etc. play fine, no idea why). Still, no need for MetaVideo - I have developed this remarkable ability to not click on links that I don't want to click on.
posted by jack_mo at 6:16 AM on April 24, 2006

I never understood the whole dislike of "excessive video linking". Posts to text are groovy, posts to images are groovy, combinations of the two are groovy, and posts to audio are groovy, but make the images move synchronously with the audio?! Horrible!!

Now, if the argument is that all the links go to the same two or three sites (YouTube, GoogleVideo, etc.), then it's an argument I can understand. I disagree with it, but it seems like a reasonable argument. But people who complain about links to video themselves, regardless of where the video is hosted, seems as arbitrary as complaining that "We link to too many .org sites".
posted by Bugbread at 6:19 AM on April 24, 2006

stav: Videosift. Brought to you by our very own (insert username here: I forget).

That'd be Dag Maggot over on the red teal.
posted by hangashore at 7:19 AM on April 24, 2006

Metafilter: I have developed this remarkable ability to not click on links that I don't want to click on.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 7:51 AM on April 24, 2006

People have always posted interesting videos to MetaFilter. Just because most of them are now hosted on Google and YouTube doesn't make them any less post-worthy.
posted by driveler at 8:07 AM on April 24, 2006

Tag it and move on.

Maybe everytime there's a bad FPP we could have a contest in that thread to see who could rewrite it the best, vote on it by flagging as fantastic. After 24hrs, the best new version of the post replaces the previous version. Let's get Meta!
posted by blue_beetle at 8:17 AM on April 24, 2006

Some of us out on the periphery of the intarwebs have crap, or just over-loaded, connections... but I don't know I'd go as far as hating vid-links. Tagging them might be nice. Oh look! People do that.
posted by pompomtom at 9:28 AM on April 24, 2006

My favorite mefi link of the past week or so was that collection of supercar videos, so the youtube haters can suck it, as far as I'm concerned.
posted by empath at 11:17 AM on April 24, 2006

The YouTube videos are frequently Best of the Web. And they rarely take up much blue. (Sometimes too little.)

The political posts often are Best of the Web, when they're reasonably researched.

The newsfilter posts are very rarely Best of the Web.

It seems so simple, really.
posted by Aknaton at 11:33 AM on April 24, 2006

The "best of the web" standard is deprecated.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 11:49 AM on April 24, 2006

I propose videos.metafilter.com and instead of us all fighting over what the background color is, the background will be an embedded looping video of Mathowie dancing.
posted by twiggy at 12:11 PM on April 24, 2006

YouTube and GoogleVideo links are the new Flash
posted by matteo at 12:34 PM on April 24, 2006

The YouTube videos are frequently Best of the Web.

Frequently?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:51 PM on April 24, 2006

Metafilter has outgrown its "let's throw everything into the blue and see what sticks" design. What we need are some mandatory and assigned categories: news, politics, video, flash, history and culture, etc. etc. Then a system to customize the display--I want to see culture and politics posts but not video or Google posts. Voila, everyone gets the Metafilter they want. Including the folks who like things just as they are, who can simply stick with the default, which will show all posts.
posted by LarryC at 2:40 PM on April 24, 2006

All Matt needs to do is set up a tag-to-DNS system wherein any tag entered by anyone automatically becomes a subdomain on the .metafilter.com domain -- and results on said subdomain are limited to entries with that tag.

Just think! We could have diosyougotohellandyoudie.metafilter.com, just because someone wanted it! AWESOME!*

Seriously, though, the "tags" page already exists; couldn't we have this by simply putting a search box on the "tags" page that allows us to return content with a tag match, sorted by date, on a metafilter-looking page? If it's done with a query string pass (so that it's bookmarkable), everyone can make their own direct link to the equivalent of whatevertheheckyouwant.metafilter.com.

*nothing personal, dios, just that your name tends to be involved in a lot of contentious comment threads, so seemed a logical choice for the example
posted by davejay at 3:04 PM on April 24, 2006

By "couldn't WE", I of course meant "couldn't MATT", because lord knows the rest of us don't do anything around here hardly, mods excepted
posted by davejay at 3:05 PM on April 24, 2006

YouTube and GoogleVideo links are the new Flash

Nothing will ever be as bad as flash.
posted by Afroblanco at 7:41 PM on April 24, 2006

The irony being, of course, that both sites use Flash to play video.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:17 AM on April 25, 2006

Saying "Flash is bad" is just as idiotic as saying "Javascript is bad". Sure it is, when people use it for obnoxious background blinking or loud techno music intros. But that's the newbie use, not the technology. You could say, for that matter, that "HTML is bad", but, well, that'd be idiotic, too.
posted by Plutor at 5:05 AM on April 25, 2006

I would argue that Flash has done more damage then good. If YouTube and Google Video used QuickTime to play their videos, I would be much happier.
posted by Afroblanco at 8:09 PM on April 25, 2006

Quicktime -- now there's a technology that really does suck.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:09 PM on April 25, 2006

Really? What's wrong with Quicktime? I've never had any problems with it. Nobody uses it to load annoying sidebar ads or create irritating UI elements. Works great on PCs and Macs. What's not to love?
posted by Afroblanco at 11:17 AM on April 26, 2006