Just the text, ma'am

September 16, 2010 7:52 AM

What if there was a tag for non-video posts? I can't watch videos at work, but I can read text.

When I look at metafilter at work, I can read text but I can't watch videos. There's a lot of posts nowadays that are just links to videos. I want a way to filter them out, so I'm looking at a list of only posts that I can actually read.

I'm thinking two tags: textonly and containstext (if someone links to a video and a text article). They could be added automatically by checking the links against known video sites. It wouldn't be perfect, but probably better than having people hand-tag posts.

posted by Galaxor Nebulon to Feature Requests at 7:52 AM (21 comments total)

Trying to get the entire community to affirmatively use tags is a non-starter. While I appreciate your general goal, can't you just either not click on the links or find another way to indicate when a link has a video behind it [I can see Greasemonkey being pretty good for something like this]? Adding tags automatically to posts is a problematic path to start going down and while I totally see where you're coming from, this wouldn't be something we'd be likely to implement at a site level.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 7:55 AM on September 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

Yeah, while I appreciate the motivation this is a wholly unweildly idea and not something we're gonna do. I can appreciate the extra filtering being annoying for you, but this place is largely a help-yourself sort of place as far as avoiding the stuff you aren't interested in.

One thing you could do to at least help mitigate the issue though is to turn on the "Display YouTube Video inline?" item in your Preferences; that will throw a little indicator next to youtube links, which would give you a heads up about a lot of those posts where there's video content in the lede.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:59 AM on September 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I used to have a userscript (greasemonkey) that marked vimeo, google video and youtube links with an icon, but I can't seem to find it. That would help you out if someone could find it.
posted by Brent Parker at 8:16 AM on September 16, 2010

When I watch the local news, they pretty much just tell me to "log on to our website for more information." When I do, I am confronted with a video of their broadcast.

WHAT IS UP WITH THAT? The T in HTML stands for text!

/lawn
posted by Devils Rancher at 8:24 AM on September 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Aww, look, someone only wants to be involved in posts where they review the links first. That's kind of nice. I can't say that I always get to the links in the posts I comment in.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 8:45 AM on September 16, 2010

Just turn on the YouTube preview icon in your profile, that will mark the majority of video posts for you.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:47 AM on September 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Another option would be to use Yahoo pipes and construct a negated regex along the lines of (youtube\.com|video\.google\.com|vimeo\.com|break\.com|livelink\.com|metacafe\.com|ted\.com) that you would match against text of the item.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:53 AM on September 16, 2010

I would like the following post characteristics auto-tagged:
- Videos
- Spoilers
- Op-Ed links
- Flash
- Comic Sans
- Wikipedia links
- Sites requiring registration
- "First posts"
- Quonsar
posted by mkultra at 9:16 AM on September 16, 2010

Also:

-climbing very very high things without safety
posted by Devils Rancher at 9:22 AM on September 16, 2010

I also can't watch video at work - kindof.

My employer blocks youtube and vimeo, but oddly enough if I use Chrome as my browser (which can be installed without admin rights on my otherwise locked down machine?) and use the inline video viewing on MetaFilter, I CAN watch videos.
posted by matty at 9:39 AM on September 16, 2010

I have the opposite problem. I can watch videos at work, but I can't read text*. Maybe we could arrange a trade?

* So apologies for any typos; I'm posting this comment from work.
posted by Eideteker at 10:17 AM on September 16, 2010

I can watch videos at work, but only if they're ill-advised public library parodies of The Office.
posted by box at 10:20 AM on September 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I can neither watch videos nor read text at work. All I see is the number and position of favorites (or lack there of) in a thread. Luckily the pattern dispersion of favorites relay God's own truth and a working history of the cabal.
posted by 2bucksplus at 10:22 AM on September 16, 2010

I can't watch youtube at work either but can watch many other videos. I have a whole bookmark folder (that syncs) that is just for videos that people have posted online that I'm interested in (95% come from here) so I can watch them at home.

What I'm saying is that even if I had this feature, I wouldn't use it. Because then how would I find out what videos to watch at home.

*I read so much text at work , I really do try not to read it there (I only write it.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 11:13 AM on September 16, 2010

ThePinkSuperhero : I can't say that I always get to the links in the posts I comment in.

What are these "links" of which you speak? I thought we all just got together and talked about whatever was on our minds.
posted by quin at 11:27 AM on September 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Greasemonkey. That is a very good idea. I should get on that.

Also, yeah, those youtube preview icons help a lot. Thanks.
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 11:42 AM on September 16, 2010

Target Alert is a FF extension that labels links by their type. (video, pdf ect)
posted by CunningLinguist at 12:48 PM on September 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Userscripts is down atm, but looking thru the google caches it looks like there are scripts that highlight links to certain domain names.
posted by Brent Parker at 2:53 PM on September 16, 2010

I can read text and watch videos but I can't type comments. I'm not even typing this one — it was actually created by a rare and bizarrely specific database glitch.
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:13 PM on September 16, 2010

Porn. Everything is porn. All video and text that passes through my screen has a filter applied, turning even the most turgid of Dickens' novels downloaded wholesale from project Gutenberg into a jumbled mass of purple prose. Videos of cute kittens become pulsing piles of masturbating fur (one shudders to think of the retractable claws) or else the leather-clad visions of an overly-aroused Batman. The problem seems to be company-wide; there's no stopping the onslaught. So I disabled the video, to save myself from the worst of it, but even still I am haunted constantly by the ramblings of a desperate Anais Nin, as all the musings of Metafilter metamorphose into the misadventures of languid lesbians feasting at the delta of venus. Even this comment was originally merely a statement about genital interaction, and now look what's become of it...
posted by kaibutsu at 4:18 AM on September 17, 2010

Pulsing piles of masturbating fur? I think you must have your Lovecraftian Horror filter dialed up a little too high as well.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:13 AM on September 17, 2010