cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/3560540

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?

  • I like written-form documentation, it means I don’t need to play audio in our shared space at work. It’s also a lot faster to find what I’m looking for with written docs than skipping through a video looking for the relevant bits.

    Usually when I’m looking for docs, I find that the less time I need to spend in the material, the better. Videos are fixed length and don’t often come with a list of labelled timestamps.

  • Demo videos are not “documentation.” They are “demos.”

    If you want someone to repeat your steps, it should be code or CLI commands. You can write more descriptive text, but as soon as you reference pictures to show something, you’re introducing ambiguity that text/code can avoid.

    UIs change faster than videos and screenshots, as you said, can’t be searched, and are generally less accessible than text.

    The source files for documentation should also live side-by-side with the code in the repo. As soon as it goes anywhere else, it immediately goes out of date.

  •  popcar2   ( @popcar2@programming.dev ) 
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    1 year ago

    It really depends on what’s being taught imo. If it’s something purely text-based like programming then sure, I absolutely would prefer reading an article to watching a video. For most tutorials though I think there’s benefit in seeing things done visually step by step. Most tools are visual, so learning stuff like 3D modelling or video editing through text can be difficult, but seeing someone do it in front of me makes everything click since I know exactly what he did and don’t have to read between the steps.

  • Weirdly not many responses are talking about real workspace that much. While written docs are king, video has its own place. Recordings of technical meetings are very valuable and if spoken in english, tools like sharepoint are transcribing them, so you can search them via text. Most often those meetings material will never be written, so video is best second choice.

  • The one case where I prefer video is when I know next to nothing about the topic and the other choice is mediocre to low-quality writing. Most people aren’t great technical writers, and it’s easy to skip over steps either because the writer assumes too much prior knowledge or simply because it takes effort to put that information in. On the other hand, videos are the opposite where it takes effort to cut stuff out, so you usually get all the steps which is what I need when I don’t know anything.

    If I have the option of a well-written, step-by-step tutorial though, or if I already know the topic and have a vague idea of what I’m looking for, then text is much better for being able to search/skim/go back and forth at my own pace.

  • Unfortunately, trends are trends. I wonder if we can get people to use the open source live captions application that futo sponsored recently. At very least we can get reasonably high quality captions, as well as a full transcript automatically generated with each video. Live captions is done with a locally running AI so you don’t have to reach out to any third parties or share data to use it.

  •  Spzi   ( @Spzi@lemm.ee ) 
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    21 year ago

    I agree to pretty much all the previous answer (text >>>> video), just adding what’s missing from my point of view:

    Video can be fun. As irrelevant as this might seem at first, motivation is an important part of every learning process. If you can make the information easier to digest for some people, it can make their learning progress more efficient and effective.

    “Being fun” can relate to literal jokes (which I like much less in text documentation), presentation style, atmosphere. It can also help to address more sensory modalities to support learning (like audio, colors, or sometimes people just like having a face explain things to them).

    I also feel I need to focus much less to follow a video than I need to digest a technical documentation in text form. Yes, I might spend more time on the video to achieve the same understanding, but I can consume it in more situations. For example, when tired before going to bed, or while eating, I might still watch a video about something I’d like to learn, but rather not scroll through the corresponding docs.

    Ideally, videos would be additional to clearly structured and comprehensive text docs. But as much as consumers are people, producers are, too. If they happen to prefer video for whatever reason, and don’t have the resources to do both, video is what you get.