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Comment by xeromal | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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 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"...

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

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