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Comment by 10000truths | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, technical content is best presented in document form. Easier for the user to search, easier for the producer to create, easier for aggregators to index, faster to consume/skim over irrelevant parts, and it loads much quicker than a video does.

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I generally agree with one exception: for UI heavy tools, screencasts are much better than docs. Rather than reading docs and trying to match content to the UI, it's faster for someone to just show me how it's done. I had to learn C# on Visual Studio a few years ago, and watching Pluralsight videos got me up to speed in 2 weeks vs. me struggling through the (rather dense) Microsoft docs and O'Reilly books. (this is partly due to the fact that Visual Studio is just that -- visual. A huge percentage of tasks are accomplished via mouse clicks.)

Even for something like Azure Devops I managed to learn much more quickly through YouTube than by reading the docs.

It's a akin to the difference between a book and a painting or a piece of music. A book -- or more generally the written word -- is really good until it isn't. Sometimes knowledge just flows more easily through other media.

I find that documentation that has relevant screenshots or diagrams or even GIFs can explain the topic well enough without forcing people to watch an hour-long video.

Though I do agree that GUI-heavy processes like AWS are better presented in video so you can find exactly what to click on and what happens next.

Creating screenshots and GIFs add to the production time. I pretty much never watch screencasts either (too long), but I understand why everybody makes them.

Cost of production is close to zero. Sit in front of a computer and talk while you work. No edits required, upload as soon as you're done.

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