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Comment by knowhy | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that video will become the modern equivalent of the book. Written text is still the best medium to transmit information. For entertainment purposes sure. But video probably already dominates that domain since we have more than 3 TV channels. Electronic repair might be a special case but I claim that a blog post with a bunch of annotated photos makes a more practical repair guide. People make YouTube videos nowadays because they can be better monetized. I agree with you, it is not a nice development, but I don't see free speech endangered because of that. (Google dominance in the search market is of course another story)

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Electronic repair is not a special case — learning how to do just anything practical is better done with video. When trying to make or repair anything, it is WAY better to watch someone actually do it, rather than read blog posts with photos.

Before I renovated my house, I might have agreed with you. But leaning building, carpentry and plumbing by watching is by far better than reading.

Did you consider the fact that writing a good blog post with a ton of photos is going to take much longer than shooting and preparing a video?

You need to write, edit, and proofread the content, while you can just speak as you go while shooting a video.

You need to sort through a ton of photos and annotate them, while you can do with a worse quality video, because the motion helps perceive the details in imperfect conditions, and annotate much of it by voice?

Some tricky parts of repairing stuff can be more easily shown in a 20-sec video clip than by 15 well-made annotated photos, the latter taking way more time.

I think for certain areas, like the electronic repair stuff, video may be not just the most adequate medium we have, but also the fastest and easiest-to-produce medium.

I think you're mixing everything together.

>you can just speak as you go while shooting a video

You're comparing a "good blog post" with a unscrippted/uneddited "video log".

It's not the same - it's comparing Louis Rossmann VS iFixit. One is a form of educational entertainment, or entertainment, other it's a guide. You can learn from L.R., but it's not a step by step guide.

You don't need to go back and try to find time stamps, you don't have issues of not understanding something that got muffled by him moving, you can miss a reference, etc.

If you're talking about video guides, then they are scripted and will for sure be harder to edit than a blog post.

There's a place for everything, and production costs (SHOULD) reflect on quality - the medium is irrelevant.

When you dig into the amount of video editing work required for a half decent youtube video, even when you include the 'guy babbling while pressing the record button' genre, it can be a lot more work than you think it would be. While writing and taking a few photos is relatively less.

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