Dear Facebook

Dear Facebook.

Stop it.

People have been doing silly things again. I speak of the ridiculous things people are doing to videos. People start with a cell phone video, in portrait. There are usually several things wrong with this. Firstly, apparently people have forgotten that we have two eyes and that they are not in a vertical alignment (i.e. a 9:16 ratio). Rather, we have two eyes in a horizontal format (a 16:9 ratio). Well, you’re in luck: your phone will allow you to shoot horizontally (in a 16:9 format). Use this feature! This travesty of the vertical video is usually accompanied by the dreaded distortion. People, do not shout at your cell phone. It has a microphone that is not designed to handle that level of volume. When you shout at your cell phone while it is recording, you record the distortion. When you post that recording to facebook, you induce all those who watch it to suffer the awful audio. In the words of the popular meme: DO NOT WANT.

When other people get hold of these videos, some try to correct the mistakes of the previous authors. In doing so they put filters on the sides of these videos, expanding them from a 9:16 ratio to an old style square ratio, 4:3. I’ll give them a 10/10  for trying, but you didn’t quite get it the whole way. It is a better ratio than 9:16, but it hasn’t solved the original problem.

Unfortunately, this is not the only misguided attempt that ends in a 4:3 ratio. Some heathens have taken to putting text above and below good looking well produced 16:9 videos, making them into 4:3 videos, thus going backwards in technology. They put this text on in such a way that it cannot be easily removed from the video thinking that they know better than the producer of the original video. Sadly the captions that they espouse are often far less useful than they intend, and could quite happily sit in the comments.

And now for the worst of it. I have seen some videos that began life as a 9:16 video, had the sides added to it, and then had the aforementioned captions, resulting in a truly heinous video.

These crimes against vision continue to go unpunished and uncommented on by large amounts of the populous - but no longer! I stand against these awful videos. I scroll past them and would, were it possible to do so, dislike them.

Mostly what I do is get hot under the collar about them.

I understand that there are many other problems with Facebook, but this is the one that I have chosen to write about in this rant.

That is all