Hacker News Reader

Comment by trog | Hacker News Reader

I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content - the stuff that will be on this sounds broadly interesting to me but I'd rather read it in article format.

I understand video "performs" well in a lot of contexts (and thus is of particular interest to marketing people) but I am always surprised when content targeted broadly towards the technical community is done in a video-first manner. I know a few other people that feel the same, but I can only assume that Cloudflare have done some research on this and figured out that we're in the minority, and there is enough of a technical audience that would prefer to watch this kind of stuff than read it.

I know it's a lot of effort (although maybe automated transcription tools have simplified this?) but it would be awesome if text transcripts were made available of some of this content for the weirdos like me out there :)

View on HN

I've noticed certain communities that live on the edge of tech-savvy do this a lot. In particular emulator and jailbreak communities for video game consoles refuse to keep up-to-date text guides on things. Everything is done on YouTube which is such a terrible format when you need to follow 30-step lists and pause to click on many links throughout the process to download software, firmware and exploits.

Honestly, a hard to follow YouTube video is better than digging through hundreds of pages of forum posts in attempts to find the right one. Of course clear, concise, and findable documentation is always better, but at least if someone is doing it on youtube there is demonstrable evidence that the process functioned once.

You are comparing a video that you already found to a forum that you need to search first.

Well edited video is the most time consuming content to make, unedited video is the least time consuming content to make.

Keeping an article up to date is the reason wikis were invented

This right here is why Youtube is my first choice. I've had too many run-ins with bad documentation and some of them are just about nightmare-inducing. Youtube has an awesome advantage that I can see the whole process (which sometimes includes minor things like using specific flags or config changes), I can see that it worked, and I can create my own documentation based on the success/failure of following that guide.

in such cases you have to compare it with digging through hundreds of pages of shitty video tutorials to find the good one

I think Youtube's monetization does it... they want to earn cash from their guides.

Is there any money in "Youtube for Articles?"

Yes, but not as much I suspect. Blogs with some ads were the thing, but most people in tech will have an ad blocker or ad blindness, so that's not very effective.

Some people will write a book about a subject, but I suspect that's hit and miss as well.

There’s Patreon, but it really only works for people consistently writing articles (like The Digital Antiquarian/filfre.net which appears often on HN)

OTOH, YouTube now has a fairly high bar for monetization (1000 subs, 4000 public watch hours over last year)

"YouTube for Articles" used to be blogs.

YouTube for tech articles, circa late-1990s, was ZDTV / TechTV.

A format that seems to work well with non-article is {topical content} + {multiple knowledgeable hosts} + {free form talk format with some segments}.

Early-MTV, the Screen Savers, and Car Talk were all essentially this format.

Good background noise to have playing while working. And the host-host, informal interaction makes it playable for longer than a pure just-the-facts source.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=soK1_DaFym0

Medium?

I'd think there's money there, just not sure for whom.

I'm actually surprised they don't introduce unskippable ads into articles to let content producers monetize their articles. Rather than the static ads and paywalls you can have the intro paragraph visible and then a "watch to unlock article" ad. Just like youtube with their 10min requirement, Medium can make requirements like the article needs to be more than 1000 words for 2 ads or something like that. Granted, this would lead to a lot of useless fluff just like SEO has produced and pushing the meat of the content to the very end to get people through the ads. However this happens with video yet it's still popular.

See, I think people will tolerate ad breaks in video much more than e.g. full page takeovers in the middle of reading. They're used to it from cable TV, and there's the option to skip it, and an indication how long it is. And it's consistent because of Youtube's dominating position in the video market, unlike websites where every one would have a different 'takeover' format.

Are youtube ads really unskippable with youtube-dl, VLC, and other similar tools?

Much like DVD ads used to be unskippable, but only for the non-tech-savvy.

> Are youtube ads really unskippable

No. I never see ads on Youtube on my own devices, and that barely requires any effort.

I had to jailbreak my iPhone in order to not see Youtube ads. That qualifies as some (small) effort.

I use youtube.com (desktop version) in Mobile Safari and get adblocking without jailbreak.

I prefer the desktop website because it lets me watch the videos in better quality than the mobile website. m.youtube.com seems to limit the maximum bitrate and/or resolution of the videos. Did anyone else notice that?

I use Lockdown in my iPhone. It reduces the problem for now although I already see YouTube working around it some of the time.

As far as I understand it is a creative hack that use a local VPN server or something to block ads.

Can't you use Firefox with uBlock addon on an iPhone?

No, the iPhone is locked down too much for this to work. Browsers in iOS are basically just skins on Safari/WebKit.

iOS does not allow "real" alternative web browsers with their own rendering and JavaScript engines, so Firefox on iOS is forced to being little more than rebranded Safari.

Firefox on iOS does not support add-ons.

I pay for youtube premium, or red, or whatever it was called, since I was grandfathered in by google music. No ads.

You must be using the app?

Yea, I'm using the app.

I think it has more to do with how close to the topic you are researching you already are.

I had to fix the motor of my vacuum, for that I preferred a youtube tutorial because I want to see someone do the things I an about to do.

If on the other hand I am trying to do something in Blender I usually prefer a text tutorial to get the exact bit of information I am looking for.

Compare it to conventional teaching. You usually don't throw pupils a book with all the knowledge the could need once they can read and call it a day,but you try to ahow them how things are done.

Ironically (given how anti-video-tutorial I generally am), I've learned to appreciate Blender-related videos. Not for everything, but for the things in which the alternative would be a lot of screenshots glued together with a bit of text. Some things are really best seen being done directly.

I think it has to do with how much tacit information is embedded in your activity. Blender or vacuum motor repair videos? Yes please, because the problem domain is such that I actually need to see all the things that happen in the background of the main activity, just to reassure myself I'm on the right track. Coding? God no, typing text into computer is a very constrained activity and you gain nothing by showing it on video vs. just making an article.

I don't think it is just how close you are, but what you are doing. When doing engineering projects I still like to see what someone is doing because there tends to be things that they do that aren't discussed and change how things work. You also can learn neat little tricks this way too.

But code, I generally like reading because most of it is abstract and in your head anyways. So I think the best media depends on what you're doing and what type of learner you are.

I'll add that sometimes I read a dozen articles and just don't get it. Then I watch an OCW and everything just clicks. The reverse also happens. Sometimes you just need a different format and/or a different voice. More options only helps.

I suppose that this makes some important words they say hard to search for, and thus hard to automatically detect and file a DMCA or copyright infringement note.

So it could be some security via format obscurity.

Why do you expect better docs from free projects? You could certainly try to be the change you want to see, but you'll find it is not easy to create comprehensive documentation for these projects, and then dedicate yourself to keeping them up to date.

That's fair actually. I should appreciate that these people are all doing this on their spare time. I had considered updating a GH repo with what I learned about the Switch Android install process but was quite exhausted after spending the full day finding and implementing the up to date YouTube guide.

I'm sure that's the case for many people. There's also a much broader audience of people who want to do these jailbreaks than programmers who are used to reading documentation. I imagine videos are drastically more accessible for them.

The worst is when you do write up docs, there are links to the docs, but then people ask questions answered in the docs, and then fail to even really attempt to read the docs after you tell them it's in the docs.

Often people want a quick fix designed specifically for them, and do not want to read even a few pages of docs.

Yeah there's definitely a lot of entitlement from people in open source/volunteer projects. I will just say that as programmers we're far better equipped to handle the frustration of errors and have the patience to solve problems on our own. These things do often get out of hand though as I've seen in many GitHub issues.

On the contrary, most of the emulation community looks down on YouTube videos as an out-of-date source of incorrect information contrary to best practices.

I think you'd be surprised at the wide availability of written information and guides for emulation.

To be clear, I should have specified this was _only_ the case with cemu which is much more experimental and likely to need more obscurity from Nintendo than others.

Other emulators, dolphin in particular, are fantastic in this regard.

Especially jailbreak for consoles do have youtube tutorials, but its advised against as those are usually done by amateurs and outdated as soon as they hit.

I’m much the same ... and I’m saying that as someone who trained as a TV journalist, once hosted his own tv show, put out 134 weekly episodes of a business video series, and even now focuses on putting out 1-2 videos (on businesses <500 staff in this economy) each week.

As a creator, it’s laziness - I can produce a video in far less time than a quality article. As a consumer, I’ve started watching a few more video channels to learn from others - but would much prefer and retain information from the written word.

The compromise I’m approaching: YouTube do a pretty good job of automatically creating subtitles. These are readily formatted so I can add punctuation, edit, and polish into something readable (and searchable).

That also provides a text transcript!

> As a creator, it’s laziness

Perhaps a tad self-effacing but the sentiment reveals a core truth: publishing a stream-of-consciousness video/audio artifact is easier than releasing a carefully planned and/or edited version.

What we seem to be missing is the processes/norms for annotating, enhancing, indexing, editing these rough digital artifacts.

I’m not sure what the value add of Cloudflare‘s scheduled content is. Some events, like press conferences, are one time occurrences. Some events, like Zoom or YouTube Live, involve multiple contributors or audience participation.

> As a creator, it’s laziness

You can see this when you watch a short video or segment and the presenter stammered or misspoke and they couldn't be arsed to just do another take to fix it. As someone who had a bad habit of not rehearsing presentations before giving them, I now can't unsee that bad habit in others.

> That also provides a text transcript!

As someone who's used the text transcripts to "search" through Youtube video content, I'd say you're on the right track.

Thanks for that.

Here’s an example of what I’ve done - as ‘simple’ as copying the text into my CMS (Wordpress) and then polishing as I read through it with some headings and graphics to make it more readable - https://jacobaldridge.com/dont-waste-a-good-recession/is-thi...

Still a 30 minute exercise, but that’s now a ~5,000 word article on the subject plus graphics plus a video.

Why for the last 10 years we’ve invested so much in https://blog.cloudflare.com. I’d think of this as supplementing that, and allowing you to interact live with many of the blog’s authors, rather than replacing it.

Thanks for the reply - I have been subscribed to the Cloudflare blog for years and really enjoy reading many of the in-depth technical articles that are provided by the team. I have shared many of them both internally in my workplace and on a few other channels.

I think I have interacted with authors on the blog a few times via comments - for me doing it "asynchronously" is probably going to be more applicable to me anyway.

I'll definitely check it out as time permits but just wanted to mention my preferences are definitely more on the written side :) Thanks for reading & again for your response.

I'm also in the camp of people who almost always prefer written text for consuming information, especially technical ones. If a video has transcripts, often I read that instead of watching, since I can skim, skip, find the best parts easier.

The Cloudflare blog has excellent content, I've been a long-time fan and have shared links to it with colleagues.

All that said, I feel that Cloudflare TV is a brilliant concept. The fact that such a fresh creative idea was embraced and implemented, I can see how the company culture encourages and supports collaborative innovation.

Looking at the listing of shows, I remembered my teenage years, like how I enjoyed the variety of creative talents on early MTV. I'm excited to catch some of the Cloudflare shows live - I'll probably use the picture-in-picture feature of the browser, to have a permanent window on a corner of my screen, with the live streams.

Thank you for the work you guys do! This is nice.

I'm a dev and enjoy my articles too, but I'd say I perform better with videos in some domains. The first one to come to mind if mechanic work. If I want to learn how to change a mass inflow sensor, it's way easier to watch the job be performed than to read a description, even with pictures.

Once you understand the basics a high quality factory service manual is tough to beat. There’s plenty of low quality FSMs though, and most aftermarket repair manuals are awful. Videos can be helpful for learning fundamentals, but when I’m stuck on a specific problem not covered by the FSM, finding a hint or workaround happens fastest by searching forums rather than scrubbing through YouTube videos.

Not sure how to describe it but I cannot envision things at all while reading technical instructions. I own a few Haynes manuals and they do nothing for me no matter how many times I read them. I have a very visual memory. I managed to add a lift, change my CV shafts, lower control arms and a couple of other linkages by watching youtube. After doing it once, I can replay it from memory but that's not something a book can give me.

You really need a service manual from the engineering team who built the vehicle. Haynes and Chilton are remnants from an earlier time, before normal people could obtain real factory service manuals. You’re definitely better off with YouTube than an aftermarket manual, but that’s not a high bar.

To be fair, learning many mechanical tasks for the first time is really a combination of fundamentals and application specific details (this can apply to most fields outside your expertise). As you mentioned, you can repeat the same task again mostly from memory. You could then extrapolate that knowledge to a different vehicle by referencing the application specific details in a quality service manual.

Videos are helpful because you lack the fundamentals, and they can be great for that.

Yeah, that's actually what I said in an earlier comment. I said a lot of people who instruct forgot that certain techniques they do are actually part of the process but it's so automatic to them they gloss over it.

Agreed with you that I rely on videos less and less as I go. But I just kind of tinker with stuff until I figure it out.

This is a good point, I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair because its much easier to watch someone do and describe each step of a task than it is to decipher a service manual. Our language is severely deficient in ability to precisely describe physical, tactile, geometrical relationships of small parts and manual tasks.

I think ifixit.com does a pretty good job for all the electronics (okay, mostly laptops) that I've repaired so far.

> I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair

This might depend on who you hang out with. I'm a tradesperson in the steel fabrication and construction industry, and I think a lot of people in this area have a propensity to want to fix and / or build pretty much everything themselves. From this perspective, with YouTube and online written guides, DIY repair is stronger than ever.

> I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair because its much easier to watch someone do and describe each step of a task than it is to decipher a service manual.

I recently tried to DIY repair a HP 12A toner cartridge. The Youtube videos in the DIY space are a wild mixture of shoddy camera work (bad quality cameras, bad lighting), language issues (I don't speak Russian nor Hindi) and, honestly, bad quality - there is one specific step involving a specialized tool that can be improvised by a screwdriver and a hammer, but all videos I found it simply went over this crucial step in a second without showing or explaining anything. And this is the case for many DIY videos.

A manufacturer-produced service manual or an iFixit guide however? Crystal clear photos that can be zoomed in, legible English (or at least you can copy and paste stuff to Google Translate!), links to "where to buy spare parts"...

Yeah, it really does. There's also a lot of nuance in repairing something and I think most people gloss over things they've learned over the years. They forget all the details when writing out how to do something but the video preserves it. You see tricks they don't even realize they're doing.

YouTube is the place my father always talks about to get quick guides on repair work from. It's absurd the depth of knowledge YouTube can contain.

I feel like an article with GIFs would strike the right balance here.

I'm not interested in video content either. But in recent years I've found that some people respond much better to it.

Anecdotally, it seems like every student on /r/programmerhumor got through their CS degree with the help of algorithms videos on youtube. Despite having trouble understanding the accent, they found it much easier to learn from the video than the book. I prefer the book, even though I would have had no trouble understanding the accent in which these videos are apparently made.

My partner is the same. Finds it difficult to concentrate on a textbook, but easy when it's people talking. I'm not wired this way, and I don't understand why others are wired differently from you and me, but I do accept that it works for them.

The consensus Hacker News would have you think that plain text is the pinnacle of human communication because it's searchable, copy-able, skimmable etc. But many people feel differently. Cloudflare.tv is for them.

> Despite having trouble understanding the accent, they found it much easier to learn from the video than the book.

In my experience, a video and a textbook will often present content radically differently - even when they're both by the same person and for the same audience.

You give a CS professor a blackboard to explain a binary tree and they'll explain it to the level of "and three is less than five, so we go left at this node"

Ask the same professor to write a textbook, and they'll instead start writing ∑ and ∃ and defining what an integer is.

In my current experience blog > video > book. There were only books when I was a student. The only chance I got to study on videos were some MOOCs years ago but there were no books or blogs to compare them too. The experience was mostly ok but unfortunately I often had to pause the video to read formulas and sometimes go back to listen again to some explanations. Written text is much better for that. Furthermore one hour of video is one hour of time and it's not easy to get an idea of what is coming up in the next minutes. Text makes that easy.

Having people read the symbols to me is much, much smoother than trying to decipher them myself. They read it to me in English. The writing is in super-compact squiggle-squiggle. I prefer English.

[EDIT] for math-heavy content in particular, that is. In general I don't like video very much.

It's somewhat simple: we have a lot of processing power dedicated to communicating with people. We also have a ROM + BIOS in our brains for caring about other people and liking to interact with them. Reading and writing are quite unnatural, in comparison.

Text is important because it’s searchable - the fascination with zoom and video/audio communication makes documenting and finding knowledge so much harder. This is a problem for me at work, too.

Google automagically captions all YT clips, in addition it OCRs every bit of text in them just like it does to images. You will get those YT clips and images in results to text searches.

Also if you're going for text, please put IDs on all of your headings so I can bookmark the section I care about.

Thank you on behalf of everybody.

Its a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, where people who prefer one type of communication channel will engage mostly with people who engage with $CHANNEL, eventually ending up with the idea that 'everyone uses $CHANNEL'. Like Facebook, pod casts, web forum d'jour, and probably going back in time to Usenet, IRC, Email and maybe even the telegraph.

I don't see subtitles (back to the 80s of accessibility), but it does have playback speed so you can skim and claw back some information bandwidth.

I recently started learning React for a side project I'm working on (in my day job I have more of a machine learning/backend role). There are a ton of coding videos for react. I never understood why people are watching these kind of coding videos, if you can get the same information much more efficiently in text form.

However, I ended up finding a use for them. I've been watching them at the end of the day when I was too tired to do any more coding work. Instead of wasting my time on YouTube, I ended up learning a lot.

I’m pretty much in agreement with everything you said, but all I can think about is how even the worst video is almost certainly better than someone’s slideshow from a technical talk shared online with no transcript or other context. I’ve seen these shared quite frequently from tech conferences, and I fail to see how anyone gets any value from those things.

I imagine they are mostly for people who saw the talk and want a reminder or follow up?

I'm in the same boat. I can learn by reading faster than I can watching a video (I tended to skip lectures at university for this reason). Also, often I have partial understanding of the subject already and need clarification of certain points, and it's a lot easier to skim a text and find the information I need than trying to skip through a video to find what I need.

I'm mixed. I enjoy programming video tutorials, but they are often too slow and padded with non-essential and repetitive information. Unless there's a transcript, searching for a part that you need a recap of isn't much different than information retrieval from tape drives in the 60's. The best video tutorials have include a transcript and a github repo.

For graphics programming tutorials a video is a huge help. The huge problem with text articles about complex dev topics is that errors compound - if you're following along and you make a mistake early on you won't necessarily know until much later, by which time it's a lot harder to figure out where you went wrong. Being able to see what was supposed to happen at each step makes it much easier to follow.

Also, with a live stream in particular, you frequently get to see the author make mistakes and stop to figure stuff out rather than just the edited and polished perfection of a published article. I find that really helps to humanize the author, and gives me confidence that even though I'm making a lot of mistakes I'll be able to get to a finished product eventually.

I also love the observe the whole process rather that the pieces a blog post author thinks is important.

The two formats definitely complement each other, they are good for different purposes.

Text transcripts should be available out of a11y concerns alone

What are those concerns?

Not OP, but I’d bet they meant that deaf or hard-of-hearing people should be able to enjoy the programs

> deaf or hard-of-hearing people should be able to enjoy the programs

This is really important. I have moderate hearing loss but can hear 'okay' with a hearing aid. I place where I worked had a lot of mandatory training that involved video presentations. They introduced one new video and I realised that there was one bit where some important info (it was needed to pass the post video test) was only presented in spoken form, with no transcript or captions. I could follow it but a person with profound hearing loss would have struggled. Because I am sensitised to accessibility issues I decided to make a fuss about this.

In a superb piece of irony, the subject of the training video was actually diversity issues in the workplace. I therefore contacted the training department saying "Did you know that your diversity training discriminates against deaf people?" To give them credit, they said 'oops our bad' and quickly added captions.

That sounds very frustrating. More frustrating than me explaining to senior mgmt why we need to spend money on a11y.

Your example is a great one, but aside from audio and visual problems, a11y covers things like cognitive deficits, which, for some, make watching and learning from videos difficult.

> I decided to make a fuss about this.

Good on you, more people need to be making a fuss about this.

I actually wrote Chris Croyier about a small snippet of example code on his site (CSS-Tricks) that didn't follow a11y best practices. He replied, and updated the code! Nice guy.

That and high traffic cost in developing countries also falls into accessibility category.

Yes, thank you. Anyone that uses assistive technologies.

Or anyone that might want to watch without sound, also falls within “accessibility”.

  len('accessibility') == 13

So a11y stands for "a word starting with 'a' then 11 letters then ending with 'y'".

Compare to i18n, l10n.

I hadn't seen any of these before, and the first word I found for i18n was "iodochlorhydroxyquin". Seemed somewhat unlikely.

Wow, I'm amazed that any HN reader has not seen at least K8s for Kubernetes before... still, xkcd 10,000 strikes again.

I assumed "k8s" was so named by skipping out the syllables "ubern" and slightly mangling the rest.

Fortunately I work in the privileged position of never really needing to consider questions of deployment, and I am extremely happy to keep it that way.

internationalization

The use of a11y-style acronyms fails for r9y reasons.

It sucks for onboarding new devs, but I've worked at companies where I did a11y audits for high-traffic e-commerce sites. The the amount of times I didn't have to type those extra 9 letters must have saved months of my life.

Maybe this is just because I learned to touch-type rather early, but (1) typing "accessibility" is far faster than typing "a11y", because it doesn't require reaching as far from the home row and (2) it is rare that the limiting factor is the speed at which keys can be pressed, rather than the speed at which correct and accurate words can be chosen.

Text is meant to be read, and not just written. I'll agree that there are chunking benefits in acronyms and abbreviations when working in a shared context, but outside of those shared contexts, the abbreviations severely impede communication.

I'm not so sure that we're in the minority, those of us that prefer text over video. I just think that it's a lot easier to sell video than text and that subscriptions to learning services are the tech equivalent of Gym subscriptions.

I have a Linux Academy subscription and I find that the labs are really useful (they do range in quality to be fair) and that the courses are next to useless but, and this is a big but, the text content that the courses provide gives you, with the labs, probably as much as the videos.

Idk, maybe I'm doing the videos wrong or have the wrong expectations.

> I'm not so sure that we're in the minority, those of us that prefer text over video.

We are. Just the fact that every modern OS uses GUIs should tell you something ;-)

That’s an “it depends” for me. I do always want the transcript, but let’s appreciate that a competent lecturer brings a topic to life. You don’t have to be Richard Feynman, but you do have to reveal and conceptualise at a pace an informed and inquisitive brain latches onto.

Most video content is not at this level; it’s often either glibly oversimplified (content marketing), bogged down in minutiae (how-to guides), or buried under irrelevancies (what’s up guys).

There is something I’d often prefer to consume as a AV recording, and that is interviews/panel discussion. The nuances of articulation, even body language may be informative. Compare and contrast the transcript with the video at https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/let-s-talkconcurrency-... for example.

A good lecture is a good lecture but that is subjective because it depends on the level of knowledge each listener has. Whereas if I am reading I can easily skip the parts that seem too elementary to me, and read many times the paragraphs that seem difficult.

A live lecture is better than video lecture because you can ask questions.

Personally I prefer written content because I can pace it myself. I can skim past stuff that I already know, jump to a different section quickly, and reread complex content. You can play a video at 1.25x or 1.5x but sometimes that can be hard to understand and skipping and finding a section in a video can be time consuming.

Videos are great for motivating me to dig into a topic, but when I actually have to apply that knowledge then I get quite frustrated.

There's really no good way for me to make a bibliography of videos. And even when you do find the bit you care about, the presentation is rarely at the speed of absorption, so you end up pausing and rewinding a lot (and sometimes, there simply is no rewind button, and jumping back 15 seconds in an hour video? forget about it.)

I recall during the dotcom boom someone discovered that there was just a little bit of unused bandwidth in TV signals and wanted to earmark it for adding hypertext to the video, so that with a smart tv you could jump to further reading on a subject. This seems like a best of both worlds situation and I was disappointed to see it go nowhere.

I wonder if there's a way to do something similar with the CC data in videos...

I'm one of those people who feel the same. I'd rather read than watch.

It really depends. I can watch faster than I can read, at 4x video speed.

> I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content

There are many good videos lectures available on YouTube from Stanford, MIT and other universities. You also have student questions on tape, very much like sitting in the real lecture. Could you explain what exactly makes the content uninteresting, when it is in video format?

Whenever I see video content I automatically think "I do not have time for this".

Text lets me efficiently skip through most of articles if they do not get to the point, or if they linger in ELI5.

The more I know about a field, the more I want to skip bits, because I don't need to be explained the basics over again.

I am perfectly capable of skipping the video forward until it gets interesting for me, same like a book. Sometimes you even have skip marks provided by the uploader or user comments where you can jump right into the interesting chapter.

I like both, video content on fields/interests related to stuff I'm interested in is great if it doesn't require really deep focus, often I watch those at 110-150% speed.

If I'm really trying to grok material a quiet room and a book is still the best.

So it's a case of the nature of the content fitting the form of the content.

> we're in the minority, and there is enough of a technical audience that would prefer to watch this kind of stuff than read it.

Note, you can be in the vast majority and the second half of the sentence can be true. A media channel that only reaches 10% of your customer base can still make sense.

I think this kind of stuff would be nice to tune into the same way that I look at HN. I don’t think it’s great for targeted watching, but good for discovery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com