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Comment by gardenhedge | Hacker News Reader

I watched a few of the videos at random. Take the "perfect powers" with the guy with a banana pointing at a white board. Did I know that information before? No. Did I learn anything? Kind of but it's essentially trivial knowledge acquisition. I won't remember it in X hours, days, weeks. It's a waste of time.

And I especially won't learn anything from it after scrolling on to 20+ more videos all with their own hot takes and fun facts.

Another example: https://www.tiktok.com/@_hypedad/video/7079486996883983662 This is definitely pointless information and he concludes with an assertion that every film has been made already. If you look at the comments, the guy who made the tiktok is fighting with everyone.

This is that guys latest TikTok video: https://www.tiktok.com/@_hypedad/video/7193505278887808302

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> I watched a few of the videos at random. Take the "perfect powers" with the guy with a banana pointing at a white board. Did I know that information before? No. Did I learn anything? Kind of but it's essentially trivial knowledge acquisition. I won't remember it in X hours, days, weeks. It's a waste of time.

I'm an educator and content creator. Can I ask what kind video content you do want to see? What content do you find most useful for knowledge retention, and how do you prefer it to be delivered? 5m video? 15m? 5h?

For it to be retained I think it needs to be part of a learning stream or process. E.g. I am purposefully learning about unique number properties and the "perfect powers" video is part of that.

Edit: I just checked out https://upload.academy/ on your profile. Content looks awesome. Well done!

Thank you so much for your feedback. How do you feel about written materials?

And thank you! There's a big change coming to how we deliver our products, which will have a very strong focus on 1-2-1 mentoring and a private community and streaming content.

Not them, but I prefer written to video.

I can ctrl/cmd+f to search for what I’m looking for.

If you’re focusing on video, maybe having the content also written would help to find the video too thanks to having the text written and then it’s indexed better by search engines.

KhanAcademy is ideal for me.

Interesting. So you like the way Khan Academy delivers content via a continuous playlist of videos? I assume having the ability to "jump around" is attractive to you also?

I like the structure, the way it keeps track of the subjects I've gone through, the tests, and the slower paced lecture style that builds on previous videos. A lot of things that would be hard or impossible to do in a TikTok

Thanks for that feedback. Appreciated :-)

I wish more content creators would just write down what they want to teach. Instead of making videos.

It's much easier to absorb at your own speed (videos are usually tailored to the slowest viewer so it's toe-curlingly frustrating for me), easier to skip explanations of things you already know, and easier to jump from place to place without losing track of the overall narrative.

I do not agree with this. It's nice to have cheat sheets created, but video learning materials specifically exist along side text materials. If you're looking for text then you'll find plenty of it on google. Not sure why you'd want people to stop making videos. I like video learning.

That's true, they can coexist. I just don't like the way that video is seen to be the only way to provide learning content now. It's the most accessible to mainstream users but it's not the most effective for people with existing background imo.

My method is to use video to tell the viewer why they should care about the thing I'm about to teach them, and simply when a video demonstrates the idea clearly, such as running commands or using dashboards. Other than that, text is king on so many levels.

>15m but <1h IMO

Thank you.

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