Mailbag - reading the letters or not

[staxquad]

I vote for compromise.

Dave does his thing according to Dave and the malcontent viewers compromise by skipping what they don't want to view.

[lapm]

Personally i don't understand why all the hate for letters/postcards? Its Daves eevblog mail segment after all. And he docent force you to watch them after all 

Ok, this is just my opinion, but i rather enjoy those letters and postcards.

[MacAttak]

Dave is driving this bus and I'm just along for the ride.

But I do like the mailbag segments as they are. IMO it adds personality and flavor, two qualities that are hard to come by on the Internet of Mostly Crap. It was Dave's soldering videos that led me here, but it was the mailbag videos that made EEVBlog seem down to earth and welcoming - a large part of why I stayed.

If people don't like it, then they aren't forced to watch those. Its OK to skip sometimes! I find some of the gear teardowns boring so I zip through them (I just don't see myself needing to deal with a 50 year old scope, ever)... but I wouldn't ask him to stop doing those just because *I* don't like them.

Everyone has their own preferences.

[WarSim]

Personally i don't understand why all the hate for letters/postcards? Its Daves eevblog mail segment after all. And he docent force you to watch them after all 

Ok, this is just my opinion, but i rather enjoy those letters and postcards.

I only scanned this thread so, I am not responding to all posters. 
I think all the gripping is pathetic. 
From what I have seen Dave likes postcards, and the whiners got him to post his last postcard video on another channel.  Everyone in that decision should be ashamed of themselves. The most that should have happened is to ask that the videos with a lot of postcards have the meta tag of postcard. I was personally discussed that people have browbeat Dave into segregate what he likes to another venue. As far as I can tell it was fuel buy a bunch off self cantered lazy idiots that are not able to use the scrub bar to skip what they don't like.
This VBlog is free to watch, Dave is not your employee to demand tailored content from. Why can you whiners be happy Dave provides the content you do like and quietly tolerate what you personally don't like. I am sorry that I am compelled to talk to you like children, but you are acting like spoilt children. 
If Dave decides to sell content interests then the investors have a right to a say. Lets say $2,500/year for a 1% influence in content. But Dave has already decided not to become commercial like Ben, so this point is moot. 

I personally appreciate all the content Dave's content. It is very apparent that making the content is something he enjoys. It is also very obvious when he is browbeat into something. Every time there is a dip in passion I have always found threads like this complaining about something that caused a change. Don't you whiners realize the one sure way to ruin this VBlog is to kill Dave passion for the content he makes? There are so many failed and failing podcast that are passionless drivel. Just stop! 

I am sure Dave appreciate hearing what you like, and suggestions presented tactfully. It is disappointing to read very few positives and way to many complainers. 

Thank you Dave for your all your videos. I am not a fan of postcards. I do like the postcard videos because you are so interested in them. It is also interesting to see the different places you get cards from. After traveling so much for so many years it is nice to see postcards from places I will never go again. I have gotten very tired of travel and have almost completely stopped these days. 

[Stonent]

I'd be more likely to send a postcard if I knew it was going to be read out loud rather than just stuck to the board.

[Fsck]

I vote for compromise.

Dave does his thing according to Dave and the malcontent viewers compromise by skipping what they don't want to view.

This. However, I do agree with Stonent and that you're probably going to get more interesting things to read if there was actually a chance it'd be read outloud.

[m12lrpv]

Personally I like the letters and postcards because it allows us an insight into another aspect of Dave's life and thankfully one that he's prepared to share. It's part of his personal interaction with others and more often than not it shows us how all how he inspires so many people in the electronics world. Some might argue that the forum provides that feedback but the reality is that taking the time to type or hand write a letter and physically post it shows a level of personal engagement that a forum cannot ever provide.

If people just want to look at gadgets then they should switch over to the home shopping channel.

And as for complaints about mispronunciation of names and places... some people need to get over their bigotry. Australian place names are as hard as anywhere to pronounce and we don't get offended and have a sook when foreigners mispronounce them. And as for the "Australia, not Austria"... I was in Austria 2 weeks ago and had a great laugh at all their "Austria, No Kangaroos" paraphernalia so obviously there are a lot of people who cannot tell the difference between the two places and at least it shows that the Austrians have a sense of humour over that.

[dcel]

Just keep doin' whatcha doin' Dave....

I still vote for a "Mailbag" marathon!

More Mailbag!

Still watching....Whatever it is....
Chris

[scratch_monkey]

Hi guys.

Been watching for a while but not registered to forum.

I liked the mailbag as it was, thats why I kept watching. I don't know how much extra work it would be to put the postcards as a separate vid, but from a viewer perspective it would be the best choice, as the intrested people can watch, and the others not.

I still think the letters sent with items should be shown, even if just for a few seconds so people can pause and read.

People can skip the content they don't like, but they cannot watch content that is not posted.

[Dread]

I voted to just open the package but the more I think about it that would just be rude.  I think you should at least read part of the letter and acknowledge the sender.  But please no more postcards, as a Ham Operator I have thousands from every part of the world so it's really boring for me. ( Selfish)

[EEVblog]

I liked the mailbag as it was, thats why I kept watching. I don't know how much extra work it would be to put the postcards as a separate vid, but from a viewer perspective it would be the best choice, as the intrested people can watch, and the others not.
People can skip the content they don't like, but they cannot watch content that is not posted.

You'd think that's the way the world would work, but sadly it doesn't for many people, as evidenced by several other threads at the moment (and plenty before that) of people complaining about content they don't like.
There are many incredibly selfish people out there who want ONLY the content they "signed up for" spoon fed to them. Everything else they deem as crap, a waste of my time, evidence of my "channel going down hill"/"not as good as it used to be" 

Anyway, as the content producer, that burden is mine and mine alone.

[Orpheus]

"The content they signed up for"

Yeah, there's a problem right there: are you meant to know what was going on inside their individual heads? Or really (beyond a modest prudence) even care? This is your life!

I've taken to calling a few people in my life "hokey" in passing, as in "I see your point, hokey" or "I'll get right on that, hokey." It doesn't seem to register with them, like some SAT [vocabulary test] word they don't know-- or maybe they assume it's a Southernism for "okay" (I deliberately slip some Dixiana in when I think a Yankee might be feeling intimidated or defensive) In actuality, I mean "hokey" as in "hokey pokey", because obviously "they're who it's all about".

Even if you were the slave of your audience, someone else might have signed up for the very stuff they disdain. That thought would never occur to a hokey, nor would they care.

[Excavatoree]

You'd think that's the way the world would work, but sadly it doesn't for many people, as evidenced by several other threads at the moment (and plenty before that) of people complaining about content they don't like.
Anyway, as the content producer, that burden is mine and mine alone.

One of these people complained about the mailbag video in which Sagan appeared.   Dave replied "well, it was either a video with Sagan, or no video at all."  This idiot replied "well, I wish it had been no video."

Uh, what kind of stupid does one have to be to not realize that if one doesn't watch a video, the result is indistinguishable from the case in which that video was never made?   What kind of arrogant <insert appropriate epithet here> would rather there not be a video he or she doesn't like rather than simply not view it? 

[alm]

One of the issues is that video navigation in Flash or HTML5 video players on sites like Youtube sucks. Skipping forward or backward is unreliable (the player might decide to reload the stream or just start from the beginning), clumsy (clicking/dragging across the progress makes it very easy to overshoot and does not provide any history of where you came from) and it provides no useful index. The thumbnails help a little, but are not always available and their time resolution (something like 30s?) is often too low. It surprises me how little progress we have made in the past ten years or so with video navigation on the internet.

There's not much that Dave can do about it, but it makes the medium of video much less suited for just watching what you want than say skimming a textual blog for things that look interesting and then backtracking to read what's shown in that picture. Of course not watching a video is always an option, especially with things like the post cards video, but I thought that the popularity was one of the reasons for Dave to do the mailbag videos at all.

[WarSim]

One of the issues is that video navigation in Flash or HTML5 video players on sites like Youtube sucks. Skipping forward or backward is unreliable (the player might decide to reload the stream or just start from the beginning), clumsy (clicking/dragging across the progress makes it very easy to overshoot and does not provide any history of where you came from) and it provides no useful index. The thumbnails help a little, but are not always available and their time resolution (something like 30s?) is often too low. It surprises me how little progress we have made in the past ten years or so with video navigation on the internet.

There's not much that Dave can do about it, but it makes the medium of video much less suited for just watching what you want than say skimming a textual blog for things that look interesting and then backtracking to read what's shown in that picture. Of course not watching a video is always an option, especially with things like the post cards video, but I thought that the popularity was one of the reasons for Dave to do the mailbag videos at all.

The issue where the viewer uses a bad streamer instead of a downloader may be valid, but still self cantered, be it to a slightly lower degree. 
Yes postcards are popular but it is difficult to defend something against the overly vocal complainers. 

Don't mind the postcards in a separate video, I'm disappointed that it was pushed off to an "alternate channel". 

[alm]

The issue where the viewer uses a bad streamer instead of a downloader may be valid, but still self cantered, be it to a slightly lower degree. 

I don't think Dave gets ad money for downloaded videos, so it's kind of in his interest to make the experience with the Youtube player acceptable .

Don't mind the postcards in a separate video, I'm disappointed that it was pushed off to an "alternate channel".

I don't mind video's that don't interest me in the EEVblog channel either. I don't care for the postcards, but I certainly don't mind scrolling past it on Youtube.

[Stonent]

I wonder how the split between actual engineer and hobbyist would be?
Perhaps the professionals just want the technical content and the hobbyists want everything.

[WarSim]

The issue where the viewer uses a bad streamer instead of a downloader may be valid, but still self cantered, be it to a slightly lower degree. 

I don't think Dave gets ad money for downloaded videos, so it's kind of in his interest to make the experience with the Youtube player acceptable .

I don't think we are taking about the same thing here. 
I was referring to the youtube viewers that download the content for offline viewing.  Often called offline down loaders. 
I know that the current youtube stream delivery algorithm is horrid even without using scanning. 
During certain daily scheduled times youtube is completely unusable unless one nerfs the stream to very low resolution.

[alm]

I'm not disputing that these players work better. But they directly grab the mp4 file from Youtube, so this is likely not counted as a view by Youtube and since Youtube displays ads via the Flash player, they won't get counted as ad impressions either.

[WarSim]

I'm not disputing that these players work better. But they directly grab the mp4 file from Youtube, so this is likely not counted as a view by Youtube and since Youtube displays adds via the Flash player, they won't get counted as ad impressions either.

Well I hope youtube fixes their problems so I can stream again so my views count. 
Until then the authors will have to make due with my god thoughts. 

[FrankBuss]

I'm not disputing that these players work better. But they directly grab the mp4 file from Youtube, so this is likely not counted as a view by Youtube and since Youtube displays adds via the Flash player, they won't get counted as ad impressions either.

Since I installed Ad Block Plus, I don't see any Youtube ads anymore, which is really nice. But I do support eevblog with a small monthly Paypal donation (and I do this often for other projects as well, if they are interesting for me and if they have a donation button), so I don't have a bad conscience not watching the ads

[Dread]

You'd think that's the way the world would work, but sadly it doesn't for many people, as evidenced by several other threads at the moment (and plenty before that) of people complaining about content they don't like.
There are many incredibly selfish people out there who want ONLY the content they "signed up for" spoon fed to them. Everything else they deem as crap, a waste of my time, evidence of my "channel going down hill"/"not as good as it used to be" 

Anyway, as the content producer, that burden is mine and mine alone.

Dave welcome to the world of being a Celebrity.  If your doing this as a profession then at some point it's no longer just about what you want, it's more about what the viewers want.   You’re now treading in very treacherous waters my friend.
Give the Mob too much of what they want and they get bored. (AKA what's happening with Mythbusters and explosions)
On the other hand don't give them enough of what they want and they also leave.

[xrunner]

You're dealing with two camps who have different desires.

In the first camp you have the people who spend money to send in items for the show (like me) who kinda expect at least that they get some air time with their letter or postcard. I mean it does cost more than a couple of dollars to send a package to Australia. If it weren't for us there wouldn't even be a Mailbag show. 

In the other camp there are people who don't give a shit about the letters, all they want is to jump head-first into a technical dissection of whatever is in the box.

I would suggest that people just FF to whichever part you want to watch. 

[staxquad]

You're dealing with two camps who have different desires.

In the first camp you have the people who spend money to send in items for the show (like me) who kinda expect at least that they get some air time with their letter or postcard. I mean it does cost more than a couple of dollars to send a package to Australia. If it weren't for us there wouldn't even be a Mailbag show. 

In the other camp there are people who don't give a shit about the letters, all they want is to jump head-first into a technical dissection of whatever is in the box.

I would suggest that people just FF to whichever part you want to watch. 

The two camps are differing in size, 87% (a whopping majority) agree with you and the other unlucky 13% are either trolls, selfish or socially undeveloped, why else would they want just their interests to be represented and deny the majority theirs? 

[Redtailed]

I think Dave's charm is in his diligence and dedication to giving every piece attention.

When I saw my first "mailbag" I couldn't believe he was going to the trouble of opening the thing and reading the letters to us and going through the contents. My expectation (not knowing EEVBlog very well at the time) was that he would edit the video such that it would be "Here's a box, and here's a summary of what's inside."

I'll admit that sometimes while watching a mailbag I feel like "Just get on with it, already..." but that's why we have the position tracker: to jump forward or back.

My one suggestion would be that if Dave did want to get through the enormous backlog a little quicker to consider doing a summary and show the letter on screen for a few seconds. Someone said earlier that viewers who want to read it can pause and read at leisure. That would save a few minutes in the video perhaps, viewers get the full information, and Dave can get through more mail items.