You probably have already noticed that nowadays it’s becoming fashionable online to share technical material via videos (eg YouTube.)

I somehow can understand the appeal of creating videos for sharing thoughts/news, esp b/c it takes way less time and focus compared to writing things (just hit the record button and go.)

But videos are
👎 not index-able (at least locally)
👎 not searchable
👎 not copy-paste friendly if at all
👎 impossible to skim through
👎 a major distraction from the train of thoughts

IMO, in most cases, the more effective and impactful medium of technical comms is the written form: a Mastodon toot, a blog post, a gist, a Pastebin entry or even a Facebook post!

What are your thoughts?

  • NaN
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    141 year ago

    The best I’ve seen include a transcript, even better when it is clickable and updated the position of the video. Pure video isn’t great, lots of wasted time. Pure text is better, but also takes a lot of attention and focus. For very in depth information text can’t be beat though, unless they are making a ton of separate videos which also gets cumbersome.