I used to really like youtube for all the interesting content - especially tutorial videos of all kind. Lately I have become very tired of watching moving images for content that could be delivered in text form - where I can choose to read and take it in at my own pace, in silence.
I agree that not all content can be delivered in this way, videos are incredibly helpful with a lot of stuff, but I wish more stuff could be (also) readable instead of watchable, or even listenable. Is in part an autism/accessibility thing, but also plays into my thoughts about the appropriateness of resource use for information recording/presentation/transfer from an Solarpunk computing perspective.
What do you think?
I’m of the same mind. My entire region lost internet the other day, so I was reduced to my mobile data, which was quite expensive to use with the plan I was on ($5 per GB). Being forced to be acutely aware of my data consumption, the sheer inefficiency of video became glaringly apparent. While it’s possible to lower the video quality, it’s still something I had to look at sparingly, but as you say, so much interesting stuff is only in that format.
Maybe the issue is that we struggle to find purely textual resources of the sorts of topics that video creators fulfill? Or is there truly just less people writing long-form textual stuff in a world that rewards video formats more than text?
One thing that is perhaps more difficult to convey in text is personality. Without a really strong grasp of how to convey your tone, spontaneity, your whole person in text, it’s probably harder to connect with people over the wire. Video just makes it so much easier to feel like you ‘know’ someone, or appreciate someone’s way of conveying information. A lot of creators I watch, I watch because of that, and something would absolutely be lost if it was a text article.
But still, having it as a secondary option, for times when you prefer it, or to more easily search for specific things within it, would be rather nice.
Back when I forced myself through the first half of an EE bachelor with a lots of heavy maths and physics and computing I relied on youtube videos almost completely - whenever one of my profs couldn’t deliver stuff in a way I could understand it (or when my autistic ears couldn’t cope with the room acoustics plus their voice) I skipped class and went to youtube for help. I could not have done it with books, honestly. I needed both a human of my preference plus some well made graphics and diagrams - and then I could make sense of the concepts in the book and memorize them. Found a treasure of wonderful lecture series that had mediocre me surfing smoothly through my course before Covid put an end to it. So I guess for complex stuff videos can be great, but I’m picky and want my preferred level of information density.
These days I look up quite a range of different things: computer stuff, plants, gardening and animal stuff. Especially for the outdoor stuff there is an enormity of content online that is either in video form - so personality is quite a thing there, but I really just would like to know if I can feed plant A to animal B, or when I should seed my herbs - information that a tech person could put quickly in a table, but which some people on youtube can spin up to a 10 min video. For the computer stuff, videos can be helpful and to the point, but I would still prefer a text with images.
But yeah, it’s a little frustrating to know that the content I seek is in there somewhere, somewhere in a video between walls of spoken text I cannot search in.
Same boat… but in my case I live in that boat. This thread covers how to disable the media. If I want to watch a video I do that at public libraries. If you have some confidence in advance that audio alone is sufficient, you could visit the YT link on an Invidious instance and opt to download just the audio.