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?

  • @[email protected]English
    10•1 year ago

    100% agreed. I can read much faster than they can talk, and there’s no good way to skim through a video without lots of disorienting pausing and waiting, and no way to ctrl-f for specific keywords. Whether it’s a tutorial for building something or a videogames walkthrough, I almost always find myself impatiently trying to find a single specific piece of information.

    I think I get the reasons - there’s no money in text guides - YouTube defends the ad revenue better than the kind of banner ads you add to websites. Maybe patron but that requires I think a different use case from the kind of video someone only tunes into once when something with a specific product number breaks.

    To make things worse, some tech support sites have started populating their content with AI articles that sound plausible until you try to follow them and realize that menu doesn’t exist etc.

    Not sure how to fix any of this but I’d love to find a way

    • schmorpOPMEnglish
      4•1 year ago

      I almost always find myself impatiently trying to find a single specific piece of information.

      This a thousand times. Can’t really skim a video. Also, written text doesn’t go “HALLOOOO, noiseeee Intro music this is YT-DUDE!!! more noise wild animation your friendly tech help guy, sponsored by [brandTM]” at you right on the first paragraph - must be that personality thing. ;)

      There will be soooo much AI BS on the internet, I’m prepping by collecting books like a madperson already.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•11 months ago

      Not sure how to fix any of this but I’d love to find a way

      Possible fix: someone uses #Invidious or #YoutubeDL to fetch a video file (in fact, Invidious enables you to fetch just the audio stream). Pipe that into a speech-to-text tool. Then ideally you should be able to edit it to make a readable abstract/truncated transcript.

      In a perfect world™ you could post that to the Invidious page for that video to help others. But that’s not reality at the moment. Someone should submit an Invidious feature request so volunteers can share their text extracts.