Can I just say that as someone who generally finds it 10x easier to learn new things from a well executed video than from an article that I'm really tired of the category of posts that are basically "who wants to watch a video just give me text amirite lads lmao"
Me. It's me. I want to watch the fucking video, actually, thanks
If anyone feels personally called out by this post please be aware this is a longstanding pet peeve for me both as a person and as an educational video creator and that I saw no less than 3 versions of this take on the feed while scrolling through my backlog this morning
@eniko I think my only preference of articles over videos is skimability and audibility. Videos are so much better when they have as many as possible of: chapters, subtitles, transcripts, and a good description — it makes it so much easier to find what you want in a long video without having to watch the whole thing
@bnut fwiw, and i dont know if this is different for partners, but video creators on YT don't actually control chapters at all. YT just... generates them. or not, as the case may be
@eniko It's because creators were already putting these time-stamped lists into their descriptions, and YouTube retroactively wrote a parser that turns them into chapters.
It's like how Twitter implemented retweets after people started quoting tweets and put "RT" in front of them.
@eniko As with many strange computer things, it sort of makes sense if you followed the developments from the start. But if you get on board later, it's all utterly incomprehensible.
@eniko as someone who's definitely been guilty of making this hot take, I do think there's a difference between videos that educate on a complex topic vs ones that are effectively just answering a question or acting as a substitute for written documentation.
If I have to jump to a particular place in a video and pause it so I can copy down a line of code that was the only thing I needed from the video, or skip to the end to get the answer I want, it's the latter.
"Oh but there's a lot of badly produced drek out there in video land!"
Sure and I never* come across some useless article that doesn't solve anything and is badly produced, possibly even by AI now, and which utterly wastes my time either.
@eniko as someone who can see both sides of this, I do find it easier to blast through a worthless text post by skimming. Identifying useless video wastes a lot more time, and thus when I consume educational video content (which I also enjoy!) I tend to go to people I already trust, as opposed to searching.
(I find that when you scratch the surface, what you find is that people are specifically missing GameFaqs text posts, which I also miss, but were never economically sustainable)
@eniko I wonder if the “well executed” part plays a role here.
Basically a good video is better than a bad text. A video is a bigger commitment in time and attention, so a bigger risk. It’s easier to skip and skim a text.
I think I’ve watched 1 or maybe 2 of your educational videos. Are you sitting on more than I could go and enjoy?
"Oh but there's a lot of badly produced drek out there in video land!"
Sure and I never* come across some useless article that doesn't solve anything and is badly produced, possibly even by AI now, and which utterly wastes my time either.
@eniko the important caveat is: “well executed video”. Too often I have to watch 2/3 of the video which is to me simply ‘noise’ vs 1/3 content I am interested in. With text I can much easier skip to the part I am interested in.
But: for many things (code stuff) I still prefer reading. Might be a generational thing (I am 56)
@eniko I generally assume those people are referring to the “online recipe”-style videos where two seconds of instructions are somehow stretched to over 15 minutes because… ads I guess?
To me (personally):
video isn’t documentation, but text isn’t demonstration
and when one is used as the other, it fuckin suuuuuuuucks
(SDL and OpenGL, i’m looking at you specifically here)
@eniko oh yeah for sure, a well produced video is absolutely phenomenal. I just think a lot of them are referring to the seo bullshit but I also do prefer a well made video / series.
I guess good example for me is: text for SNES HDMA and mode7 stuff is absolute garbage, especially when compared to RGME videos. BUT, I would rather pull up a documentation sheet on the 65c816 opcodes than have a 45 minute video “documenting” the opcodes.
@MrL314@eniko I think videos have their place, especially if I'm watching it e.g. over dinner and it's teaching me something I didn't realize I wanted to learn. But if I'm seeking out how to do something in assembly or output MIDI in DOS, give me text all the way.
@dougbinks@sinbad@eniko I'm one of those who prefer's a textual step-by-step guide which I can follow by reproducing those steps myself, and being able to step-debug through the code I'm building iteratively following the tutorial.
Somehow, just watching a video or reading text "passively" doesn't stick. It needs to go through my hands into the brain ;)
@floooh@dougbinks@eniko I like learning from videos occasionally, but crucially only once. Then I want a good reference of everything that video covered. That’s what’s missing most of the time these days
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