There's no excuse to get such a bad quality for even low-res videos. Imgur,
gfycat and Youtube manage to stream higher quality video faster on the same
device on the same connection.
I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain
bitrate, I'd sooner have a video buffer for 10s than end up with something
that's unwatchable because the resolution is like 10x10.
And I'm barely exaggerating, I don't have an amazing connection but I can stream
Netflix and Amazon Prime in 720p without any issue, yet I just got this on
Reddit:
imgur and gfycat directly stream a .mp4/etc file, the opposite of what reddit does.
Many uploads on reddit are also repeated re-uploads of compressed and then recompressed ad nauseum videos and stolen content, so I wouldn't be surprised if a fairly significant amount of the uploads started at 360p or less, downloaded from a phone.
> I also think they shouldn't even attempt to stream video under a certain bitrate
You are not the target demographic; the target are mostly on phones, where rapid start and 360p is not a huge deal. You don't get 1080p or 720p from snapchat or instagram. In super blunt terms reddit would rather not want you, they'd much rather have someone with the app downloaded, all tracking on, with push notifications on and the impossibility of ad blocking.
In your example, the video thumbnail implies that this is a recording OF a recording - this is someone that has already uploaded a compressed version to Twitter, where it has been further compressed, and then recorded and cropped on presumably a phone screen, then uploaded to reddit.
If I google the text, the first reddit results are all natively in 240p uploaded original.
Those excuses don't really work for me. At some point you can come up with all kinds of justifications, it doesn't change the fact that from a end user's perspective it's crap.
I activated throttling in Firefox, setting it to "Regular 3G". I went to Youtube, selected a random video I had never watched before (so no cache): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mMIOhoUcCM
Note that in the "optimal" version of the video the text on top is perfectly sharp.
So you can spin that any way you like, doesn't change the fact that Youtube performs vastly better in the same degraded conditions. But maybe the target demographics are people who have a fetish for ultra blurry video?
I'm not making excuses - I am not a fan of reddit and I hate their godawful business practices :)
They have two completely different use cases - reddit is garbage that you infinite scroll through on a mobile phone, YouTube is content you watch. YouTube also generally has higher/better uploaded source videos, while reddit is a mess of reuploaded deep fried memes.
The use case for this, scrolling and keeping attention and continually pushing new content in, loading for 10 seconds is a death knell and entirely unacceptable.
Works great for Twitch-length stuff. For a 10 second gif-equivalent, you don't get enough scale up time.