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Arcade looks genuinely great, so thanks for posting this question.

Several folks have already mentioned that the real value of screen capture tools is to create assets that can be used by a person whose job it is to explain abstract concepts to an audience. I would go so far as to say that if you're a founder, hiring someone who is really good at product videos is something you should 100% outsource even if you're talented with storytelling and motion graphics. It's a distraction from your key priorities, and you don't have enough distance from the subject matter to be objective about what's okay vs great.

I'd like to add that it's really debatable that a video where someone rapidly zips around an interface that they haven't used is actually something people want to see. I suspect that on its own, such a video is often not the huge win that it might seem.

Also, if a process is really easy (press a button, enter a credit card) then you can bet your ass people will soon be tired of seeing the same presentation with different marketing copy.

Things that were absolutely novel at one point include: agent chat widgets in the bottom right corner, presentations that tween and zoom on every slide, infinite scroll newsfeeds, captchas. All timeless things people love more and more every day, right?

I actually do that as a service for companies:

https://syntaxcinema.dev

I think that product tutorials are somewhat of a black art. On the one hand you have:

1. Keeping the flow moving and the video fast-paced and interesting

2. Adding aftereffects and other visual niceties

3. Pointing out the relevant bits with zooms, highlights, etc...

But on a deeper level, you also have questions of:

1. Am I using the right sample app to demonstrate my use case?

2. Is the feature I'm using bulletproof? Do I need to change something in the DOM of the application since that feature is not 100%? Do I need to not show a piece since it's irrelevant? Do I need to speed through or flip over from things while they're running / fetching / compiling / generating etc...?

3. And, maybe most importantly, what is the message I intended to deliver? Is that a product overview? A documentation-oriented video? A demo for a conference or a customer? Who's my audience? Am I speaking to them?

I've been doing videos for a while, and I found that the second part of the problem is actually not as easy as one would assume.

I applaud great YouTubers for that - they cracked how to do walkthroughs of products that are not only technically interesting, but also visually pleasing.

I'm a bit of a video nerd, I guess. I started out way back when doing these little nuggets of absolute terribleness (oh my god the thumbnail) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlM7w0mARnn4ytxM6s-0b...

And happy to say I improved a little bit from then :)

(that website's pretty new, comments more than welcome)

At what point in the process do I tell you I read somewhere that lack of pricing on a website sucks so give me a discount?

Some point before we've bargained on the pricing, or after? :-)

Right here in the thread so everyone knows that I offer discounts, clearly! :)

I love everything about this.

Your site looks great. Your service is very needed.

My only advice is to stop apologizing for not offering pricing on your website, both here and on your website. Seriously: cut it out. Go right now and remove those <10 words that imply you have something to explain. It's completely normal to have a conversation about something like this before you commit to building it because if you don't have chemistry, you're not going to take the gig.

What you do is the literal best-case scenario for value based pricing. After having read "The Win Without Pitching Manifesto" by Blair Enns, some of the comments on this thread feel like mosquitoes trying to get in between your toes.

If you absolutely must, you can say something that alludes pricing that won't get you fired by your board. However, even that is too much word, because what you do only "costs" money until it either a) launches the company or b) keeps a failed company from having spent way, way more.

Okay, maybe I do have a 2nd suggestion. It's not as urgent: consider morphing the 3/5/7 minute "products" into "products" that reflect the typical reason those lengths work eg. "The Product Video", "The Explainer" and "The Demo". Even in this thread, people get hung up on the length instead of the goal of the outcome.

It's much more useful for all parties to think of them not as lengths, but formats.

TL;DR: stop apologizing, consider doubling what you charge

Love this - went ahead and implemented the comments with a few extra niceties.

Thanks brother!

still, give me a ballpark for pricing. is this a $50 thing, $500, or $5,000? how many videos so I get for $50,000?

that looks super neat and I'd love to do those for people. if there was a way to get those kinds of jobs, one-off, I'd give it a try. RIP taskrabbit.

Oh definitely low four figures. Can’t imagine doing it for five figures (maybe I should imagine harder) and for less than that it’s just not an interesting pursuit financially for me (given the amount of work required and how much I think my time is worth).

Low four, so say like $2,000 for a five minute video? Why not list $1,999 for a five minute video on your website? For an open source side project, that's maybe out of reach, for a company, that's peanuts (so they'll readily pay it). Or; how much haggling do you do? It's a very neat product, but how much time do you spend on sales emails to get to a price?

Because every project is different.

Because the first person to say a number in a negotiation tends to lose.

Because maybe they aren't selling five minute videos. The point is not ever to create five minutes of video. The point is to clearly explain what a product does, and that process is going to be wildly different depending on whether the product makes any fucking sense. You usually don't know if you're going to be able to work with a client until you talk to them.

If someone is sexy and charming, you'll probably go home with them for free. If someone else is neither sexy nor charming, they better be prepared to put something pretty amazing on the table or you're going to pass.

Oh, I should have 100% said this instead.

Yeah, yeah, scrap what I said - let's go with Pete.

He's hired! :p

All of what Pete says is true. I'm just putting forth that having a ballpark number is useful frame of reference because you don't know how many people aren't calling because they don't want to engage with the unknown so I think you're losing more business than you think. But, it doesn't sound like you're short business in the first place, so what I'm saying isn't relevant.

Can one ever really be long on new business? :)

As the greatest singer in our generation said so succinctly in one of her latest hits:

Yeah, my receipts be lookin' like phone numbers If it ain't money, then wrong number

It's kind of like that for me, if phone numbers were five digits!

Oh, half the fun is the sales calls. It’s very much something I can delegate off to a person on my team, but this is relatively new and so the volume is not that large yet. I also really enjoy them!

I treat these more as discovery sessions than anything else. It’s also how I’ve landed on the exact pricing points I have - talking to people, especially when early, is a great experience.

There’s also something to be said about showing prices only in calls - people hate it here (or in general), but there is value to showing the price at the end of the call and not at the start. You get to show the thing to the person, get them excited, and then the price point looks a little different.

The trick is tailoring the sales call to the person - if I can convince them that they should keep me around since I provide a good service, they might pay the price.

Also, there are always discounts as the guy above mentioned;)

As an aside, what I normally do is reply to each form submission with a personal video and an overview (albeit a short one) of what I think the project should look like given their demands. I then drop a price and get on a call, if they want to.

Many do! And the ones who don’t still get a taste of how I think like and perhaps want to talk some more about other things - this is a side-business productized service; I mainly contract with technical startup companies to do their GTM.

It’s actually looking like it’d be a pretty decent lead funnel for that too!

Man, going out on my own was a great fucking decision.

Btw for Arcade - you can implement agent chats with our Intercom integration: https://app.arcade.software/share/B0jj3mbbJOWUrWvmzY2a?ref=s...

To miss the sarcasm:

If the agent chat actually works, I like it.

For me it never does. Always throws me to a human agent. I haven't had a single case where a bot solved my issue.

The other day, the Synchrony chatbot was able to remove a fee that they had previously agreed to remove (delays on their end created a late fee on my end). I was shook.

But yeah, 99% of the time the bots are as useless as IVRs. "Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed. For quality assurance, your call may be monitored or recorded."

I think this is the biggest shift that us technically inclined people will need to make. Bots are becoming useful.

That one is ScreenStudio - it's a great product!

I'm a founder at Yarn (YC W24) – we're building in this space and launching on HN soonish.

We often see teams combining ScreenStudio with products like iMovie, AfterEffects, or Veed. Other products in the space to check out are Tella.tv, Kite, or Descript.

For more advanced motion graphics, you'll often need a freelancer or agency.

Feel free to drop me a message (email in bio) to talk through options!

I’m a dev lead who is a rusted on Linux user, I’ve always hated that ScreenStudio is Mac only since it’s a great product. Any plans for Linux support? I would love the ability to dem stuff and have it actually look pretty.

The problem is that a lot of the details requires macOS accessibility permissions (identifying active window, measuring cursor movements), so there's non-trivial platform specific code.

For product demos specifically, best bet might be a Chrome-extension-based product like Arcade!

This would be difficult because mouse and window controls are different in X11 and Wayland.

ScreenStudio is really good, I use it for all of my capture. Main feature I find missing is ability to reorder or combine multiple recordings into one clip, or add audio from within the app.

You can do that with ScreenRun (which I developed) https://screenrun.app/

ScreenStudio looks nice. And thank god a pay once app.

Yep although to be precise it's a pay-for-a-year-of-updates model, and the underlying macOS APIs in this space change significantly between minor and major macOS releases, so ymmv in terms of "pay once forever". (For upcoming features like shareable links, they'll presumably move to a part-subscription pricing model.)

Agreed, as far as I can tell, this is the only one in the space that doesn't insist upon a monthly payment.

+1 for ScreenStudio, use it and love it.

A lot of fragmented promise for video editing amongst these different apps. Hopefully someone will make a comparison chart for these. Good luck on your launch!

I'm baffled why you'd name your product in a way that conflicts with a heavily used front end tool.

Another +1 for Screen studio. I use it legitimately daily in my Product Design job, and not just for customer-facing demo videos.

Mac only?

Many of the apps are macOS only unfortunately. For Windows, there's Descript or Camtasia. Linux not sure, but Descript and Veed are browser-based.

Unfortunately this is one of the places where Linux really doesn't have any good options. While there are definitely raw capture options for Linux, there isn't anything as nice as Screen Studio or Screen Flow or Camtasia for quick, short videos with basic editing.

Yes, I use Camtasia for over a decade. It not only solves screen recording but also most other tasks you would need cutting video and sound.

On Linux I've used SimpleScreenRecorder. Can invoke ffmpeg to screengrab too.

I chuckled when you said you weren't sure about Linux tools. Real Linux users code all their sleek demo videos inside emacs in hex.

I work for https://www.canvid.com, and we recently released a beta version of our product, which is similar to Screen Studio but designed for Windows. If we see enough interest, we may even release a Linux version around Q3.

ScreenStudio looks amazing, thanks for sharing

How long is the Yarn wait list?

Not sure. Hopefully next 4-6 weeks. Building as fast as possible with current teams – but lots of tricky webGL, Swift, and headless Chrome involved.

My 2 cents:

I really don't like these demos, they are really nauseating to me.

As I generally don't like videos with many/fast transitions like many popular YouTube videos and movies are, I'm probably a minority in this regard.

This one was quite pointless. It's someone scrolling some web page from top to bottom, with a few gratuitous zooms and some mouse pointer movement. What am I supposed to take away from this? I can't even read all the text, and there's no voice-over, so really all it communicates is "we have a web page that says supercharge your growth with AI"

Yeah for this particular example a link to the website would be way more informative/helpful than the video.

Others mentioned ScreenStudio (which is awesome), but if you don't need all of its features (or can't afford it at the moment), I've found ScreenRun to be a great alternative: https://screenrun.app/

It's browser-based, but there's a Mac (and Windows I think) companion app that records the screen with click-tracking for zooming (as it's not possible with browser screen sharing just yet). It's somehow limited compared to ScreenStudio, and the interface feels cheaper compared to a native Swift app, but for my needs it gets the job done.

Thanks happy you like it. Send us feedback for new ideas

Hi everyone! I'm the CEO of Arcade (who a few people have already mentioned...thanks!).

+1 to that being ScreenStudio.

Sometimes people import ScreenStudio videos into Arcade to add branching, annotations, and get analytics about who is engaging with the tool.

We're about to announce a big release on May 17th which will be very relevant - we're going to show how you can capture beyond the browser and get even more powerful analytics (https://www.linkedin.com/events/7189307779977818112).

Happy to answer any questions here as well.

It's live! Check it out here: https://www.arcade.software/build-like-its-2024

Hey mister Arcade CEO, from a fellow entrepreneur and extension developer (there are dozens of us!), have you found any pros/cons of building in the extension space versus a typical web app?

I basically exclusively build extensions because I strongly believe most startups and devs overlook the space

Sorry for the delay here. Extensions are great. There's plenty of examples in this space that have become big companies (Loom, etc.) Chrome also has the highest market share, and even upstarts like Arc Browser are built on Chromium so they work on those platforms. The only real downside is that they're difficult to test and deploy frequently (there's always a lag between pushing a new update and it being deployed, unlike when you own your own release schedule) so it's annoying to constantly have to discover when your extension was updated.

P.S. It's ms. ceo ;)

Thanks for featuring Intercom in your site :-)

Hello Des, I recently watched the intercom video series that kicked off about AI. I thought it was absolutely terrific! Great production and content.

No specifically for video, but I've always had a soft spot for this site:

https://tiffzhang.com/startup/

It semi-randomly creates the site of a recently-launched startup. It is nine years old now, and completely nailed the overused style of the time.

The company names are also excellent. I wonder how many accidentally became real.

I like how the current customers exist within the same fake startup universe

CEO at Kite (YC S23) here, thanks for the mentions!

Like Screen Studio, Kite lets you record your screen and automatically zoom in on the action.

But with some key upgrades:

- Combine multiple recordings

- Add text scenes with animations

- Place your recordings on a 3D device like a phone or laptop

- Add music and AI voiceovers

With lots more in the works.

It's still early, but we have lots of startups using Kite regularly for feature-launch videos. We're live on Mac OS and have a waitlist for Windows.

Get in touch if you have pain points in this space. Happy to chat any time!

https://kite.video

> Place your recordings on a 3D device like a phone or laptop

What does this mean?

I'm guessing they mean overlaying the screen recording on top of a 3D render of a phone or laptop to show them being used "on device" instead of just as a flat screen recording.

Yep, exactly that! You can show the recording on the screen of a phone, laptop, monitor etc to add more context than just a plain recording

I made the demo video for https://plandex.ai myself using CleanShot X (https://cleanshot.com/), Adobe Premiere Pro, an effect I bought in Adobe's marketplace, some AppleScript automation, and music from SoundStripe (https://soundstripe.com/).

It was my first time using all these tools. It took me a couple days to make the video. Premiere is a bit of a beast, but by just asking ChatGPT how to do everything, I was able to get up to speed with it pretty fast.

CleanShot is also included with SetApp

I find it kinda funny that the 'sleek demo' above is just zooming around their landing page.

It's also kinda sad we're at the point where a video of someone scrolling a webpage with an oversized mouse is considered a 'sleek demo', it wasn't even a smooth scroll at that.

It’s obv a person manipulating the mouse and scroll. It’s very uneven and jerky.

Do these tools provide HMI automation, where you script the mouse movements/clicks/scrolls during the recording?

No, but Screen Studio does allow you to tweak how the mouse appears to move, in the sense that you can make it move more smoothly or quickly.

To be fair, I’ve seen plenty of screen recordings which are far worse

Now I wonder if asking about the tool is a red herring to make us watch the video...

>my demo would be much better guise --tips fedora--

https://asciinema.org/

We use this for really nice terminal only demos. Highly recommend even though there are some minor rendering issues if you are using special fonts.

I'm a huge fan of charmbracelet's vhs:

https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

I have a gitlab CI job to update my demo .gif's every time I update my application; always ensures that things are up-to-date and provides gif/video recording that I've ran specific commands (perfect for auditors!)

Woah, great suggestion! Gonna dig into it and see if I get a similar setup as yours.

If you use Nerd Fonts then you can select this on the recording settings page, or globally in your user settings.

https://arcade.software is a different solution in the same category.

The carousel on top does some weird flashing on Android Chrome.

lakomen, can you email me at caroline AT arcade.software with a video with more details? The team can't easily repro this on their Android.

Thanks for mentioning - we're going to take a look into it

Very good alternative, thanks for sharing

Happy to answer any questions about Arcade!

Sorry to be that person but are there any free/OSS alternatives to the ones mentioned here? Mainly for macOS?

I'm linux-only so can't say for macos, but I use OBS to record and Kdenlive[1] to edit. It will take a bit more effort to get some of the effects like the zoom as Kdenlive is full video editing software, but it's a skill that IMHO is well worth the 45 mins to an hour it takes to get comfortable.

[1]: https://kdenlive.org/en/download/

Free like QuickTime to Record/Capture Screen contents and iMovie to modify the material?

Not a direct alternative per se, as it is meant for coding, but https://syphon.github.io/ - I used to use this years ago and it worked great then for screen captures.

Remotion is the best alternative imo

Hey, while being on that topic and somehow related. There seems to be kind of a default company that creates those catchy tech marketing videos, explainers etc: https://sandwich.co

Examples you may know:

  - https://sandwich.co/work/playdate/
  - https://sandwich.co/work/auth0-2/
  - https://sandwich.co/work/slack-wfh/

Recently I was preparing video for my YC application [1]. I've used RecordOnce[2] and actually it worked pretty great - I've recorded my actions together with voice. It transcribed voice to text and then used text to voice again to render the video. For me, as a non-native speaker, this was really great. And I could edit voice description of my actions post-recording - worked like a breeze. It still rough around the edges, but nonetheless I highly recommend it (for reference - until now I've used Screen Flow for multiple years)

1. https://humadroid.io 2. https://recordonce.com

I tend to use TechSmith Camtasia. It will do all that stuff, and also lets you add all kinds of active overlays and effects.

ScreenFlow is also good.

But it's still a lot of hard work, making these. I suspect that AI tools can help, but, in the aggregate, it still needs a skilled eye and hand, to make stuff look good, and not obnoxious.

I use screen.studio

Side note, but I see two YC-backed startups mentioning themselves in this thread:

Yarn - Make Videos Like The Best (W24) https://yarn.so Kite - Product Videos Made Easy (S23) https://kite.video

It's sort of crazy YC is backing so many hundreds of companies that there's this level of overlap. I assume one pivoted into this?

Still, crazy to imagine all the YC companies competing with each-other these days. I've even seen YC-backed 'incumbents' being disrupted by new YC-backed startups.

Value isn’t zero sum, or more accurately, most spaces are not winner take all so there is room for multiple great companies to be built. Every company I’ve ever started, I even make a point of reaching out to the competitors in my space to meet the founders. These frienemies are often some of the most fun people to compare notes with. We generally don’t share everything but enough for the conversations to be productive.

Lots of good tools for this.

One way to do it completely free is OBS + Kdenlive. The interface for both leaves something to be desired but both open source and have all the features you would want (though sometimes buried in menus)

That one is screen.studio

Yup. screen.studio is probably the most popular one out there. And it's nice that it's a one time license purchase instead of a subscription.

For the hackers looking for ways to do it with code there's Remotion

https://www.remotion.pro

For a website only, if you record the browser tab, on Mac this is pretty trivial with the trackpad.

You can do similar with more effort video editing software like DaVinci Resolve

I've used Keynote to add some basic 'special effects' to videos. It's not super fancy, but you can do quite with just iMovie + Keynote! [1]

1: https://medium.com/hackernoon/adding-visual-effects-to-your-...

Really great article! I'm definitely going to use that in the future. Thanks for sharing.

I know nothing about business, but that demo didn't seem that exciting. It mostly showed the website rather than the actual product.

For product videos I used OBS a lot: https://obsproject.com/

I haven't used Journey, but it seems promising for product Tours: https://www.william-troup.com/journey-js/

Presentation is close to entertainment business, a whole domain in itself. Takes time to master the craft but you can take inspiration from parody bits like "Every BBC series about the universe": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOA5vnUt00c

We love love love https://arcade.software/

That’s probably Screen Studio. I use it a lot to create feature demo videos.

For more sleek promo videos, I would work with a professional.

For example this one is probably better for ad etc:

https://x.com/bolt__ai/status/1786058021531238661?s=12

From the linked video, I saw video panning with mouse movement and zoom-to-clicks ... I think Camtasia can do those? For sure on the zoom, less sure on the panning. Camtasia is commercial and cross-platform.

Added benefit is that I think Camtasia is relatively easy to pickup compared to other tools I've tried to use.

I use Camtasia and it's pretty good. It also does a lot of things related to audio/video, not just recording.

https://www.screen.studio/

It's most definitely ScreenStudio. I recently used it to create a demo for Upscayl too! https://twitter.com/upscayl/status/1784705006500733382

This Twitter thread was great recently on this topic, lots of useful software to consider: https://twitter.com/igorexit/status/1785288743802609993

I don't have a Twitter account, where are the responses?

When I started creating demos for our startup, I started with Shotcut, it is pretty awesome and simple to start with. VN editor is also a good option if you are just starting your journey. And combine your screen recording with some animations and images. Hope this may help you.

Anyone a recommendation for Windows? Something simple and lightweight? (Screenstudio is Mac only)

I record these videos for my workplace on windows.

We use Loom + Davinci Resolve - it's nowhere near as smooth as screenstudio

With which of these 2 software can you do the "zoom in", "move mouse cursor", and "zoom out"?

It's done in two steps, first use loom to record the mouse movement in much higher res than needed and then use resolve to zoom, follow and frame as needed.

> to record the mouse movement in much higher res than needed

how can this be done? if the monitor resolution is say 1600 x 900, how can it record the frames and/or mouse movement in higher resolution than this?

I've a 4k monitor and we publish 1080p videos.

Record at 4k with loom - that gives you mouse cursors. Then edit in Davinci to get the zoom effect

We're actually working on something similar for Windows and also hope to release on Mac - https://canvid.com

We've had good success with Kite. Plus the free tier doesn't include a watermark

This is less of a video grab tool and more focused on making a CLI tool/demo look more slick: https://github.com/BuoyantIO/demosh

It's not a technology problem, or at least only partially a technology problem.

Blackmagic Atem Mini:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/atemmini/techspecs...

And some hdmi cameras

not sure what you are proposing here? a hardware device that can zoom on a cursor?

The Mini wouldn't make anything like what's in the demo. It's good for multi-camera-angle, one-take videos. But it would also require cameras, lights, mics, etc. And you'd want at least a Mini ISO so you can fine-tune everything in post.

It's a live video mixer that you can use to switch between various sources of input - say, a demo device (or, in my case, a device under test), a front camera (or two) facing the presenter, a top camera showing how the presenter interacts with the device... supports a bunch of transitions, and if you get yourself the ISO variant, it records all audio and video tracks uncompressed together with a bunch of metadata that allows you to import the exact same cut as it was broadcast, and fine-tune aspects of it in post to get a refined video.

I'm saying I've used, and seen used, this tool to make very cool investor pitches and videos. It's not specifically the mouse zoom thing, but more generally a great way to make super high quality, professional looking pitches when you need to show things that are live.

I don't know about other demos but that one in particular would be trivially easy to create using KDE's desktop effects zoom feature and OBS screen recording (tell it to record a specific window).

https://rotato.app/ Is another option if you’re looking for something more 3D

A worth mention, thanks!

but do you pronounce it rotayto or rotahto?

Highly recommend looking at Kite (https://kite.video), YC company.

Easy to make these videos, edit, match music to it, etc.

My cofounder and I are looking at using a YC company called Kite: https://kite.video

This is probably a screen recording with a bit of video editing on top. My fiancée does this sort of thing on a contract basis sometimes.

We use https://kite.video for our demos and it works great for that style of video

Supademo is great for creating interactive demos. You record your screen then script out the actions a user would take. Super simple.

ScreenStudio and Arcade are great. If you're looking for an in-product demo/tour, there's driver.js

You can make a video like that with OBS and Kdenlive. The main thing is having the skills to edit a video.

I know you are talking about a one off demo

But if you want a nice 90s edit of every 1h sales demo meeting check out DemoTime.

Anyone know an app that does this for mobile devices? Specifically iphones

Screen.studio can also record your iPhone’s screen if you connect it to your Mac with a cable.

seconding this

How do people make those animated videos like AWS use for their products?

The flat 2d animated diagrams?

Yes

What's the one that has the rainbow line cursor option?

Screen studio is amazing for that; Loom is also pretty great

the biggest pain for product demo is to have fake user data to populate the UI.

This is the main problem we are facing right now.

We are looking for tools that can generate fake data(may be based on our small set of data) for live demo setup.

You could try using something like Synth[0]! You can hook it up to a database, it'll generate some json describing the shape and types of your data based on your database (or you could write the json yourself), then you can use Synth to generate fake data and directly insert it into your database.

Full disclosure, I'm the maintainer, but it's not like it'll cost you anything.

[0] https://www.getsynth.com

Faker.js works pretty great. You can also just set up the fake data yourself in the database.

we record our screens with screen studio and they go pretty viral

I'm trying to do this exact thing, but I want it to be in vertical video format for Instagram Reels. Do any of these software allow you to record screen captures so it will fit nicely in a vertical vid? i.e. not a horizontal video with black bars and below

https://www.yarn.so/

Outsourcing is the simplest thing that might work. There are probably better uses of your time. Good luck.

A video of someone scrolling through their website is a sleek looking demo?

smdh.

Capcut

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I would prefer the version of this comment that lacked the excessive condescension. You could communicate the idea that you wish tactics like this wouldn't proliferate without denigrating the people you're talking to.

I found the comment to be informative and the condescension thought provoking. I guess it’s because the disparagement cuts both ways. There is criticism for the marketer who uses these techniques as a cheap ploy and for the consumer who lets the Trojan horse enter because “ooh a horsey”. Obviously the post could have been more pragmatic, but then bland? Not everyone enjoys onion even though the flavour is remarkable. But in a way the “denigration” is like the pretty demo effects. It dresses the whole comment up in something that pops out and here we are having been derailed from the op subject

Calling people "the chimp troupe" with "3 inch brains" is not a good way to communicate your ideas. For sure not to the people you're calling chimps, but also not to anyone else except people who both agree with you and have similar contempt for others as you do.

You can also read it as ironicaly self mocking, as the commentor him or herself is also included in the chimp group.

I thought it was so over the top it transcended condescension and was firmly comedic. Gilfoyle from HBO’s Silicon Valley could’ve written that.

I'd like to follow you. Do you capture your ramblings somewhere?

Wow no stranger has ever said that to me before and I really liked it, thank you! /desperate acknowledgment I don’t write, no social media either. Just staying in my place, a lurky digital hermit since the 90’s

Ah yes, the days when it doesn't even suck was high praise. When men were made of cardboard rather than rice paper.

I came back specifically for the comment to find it flagged.

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He’s asking for the tool that everyone uses. Not a pompous lecture.

It’s called screen studio.

Screen studio is Mac only so no one will use it, apart from few die hards.

[flagged]

Very thoughtful. Thanks.

…what? Did you read the post?