Who in their right mind would think that video could be a productivity tool!?
Unless it's a fiendish plot to sell LLMs to prepare summaries of the videos. I'm at Google Next 24 and today's keynotes were pretty much AI from start to finish.
I love long form video essays. The longer the better.
Where for a off the cuff article I find I'm much less likely to read the whole thing unless it's really piqued my interest. Note that I'm not an especially fast reader.
These are very intelligent people, it's just that my generation is moving away from reading.
I've had discussions with friends who think academic papers should be replaced with videos. They find writing so time consuming and difficult that they think that an informative, animated video could be made with the same amount of effort as an academic paper. They also say that they're frequently distracted from the content due to the effort of reading itself.
I've been surprised by the extent to which people use "person talks to camera" style videos for revision and re-learning, rather than reading condensed notes. They are significantly slower, you can't scan through until you find something you're unfamiliar with, and they're just plain dull. Despite that, they're one of the most popular ways to revise. Perhaps it's because you can zone out of videos, convincing yourself that you're learning without actively engaging with the content. Again, I don't mean 3b1b style animated lectures, I mean someone essentially paraphrasing the textbook to the camera.
An similar phenomenon that also worries me is the lack of distinction between how people speak and how people write, and not in the "use straightforward language, not purple prose" way. People comma-splice entire paragraphs (if they use paragraphs at all) in a stream of consciousness rather than organising their thoughts.
It really depends on the video. A bad porn movie "captures your attention far better" than a corporate training video.
| Who in their right mind would think that video could be a productivity tool!?
They are also good for some classes of front end defects. Easier to see it in action some times.
Searching within videos is a solved problem for Google.
Yeah, we'll just never get to use it.
I mean videos can be great for educational content. But the putting out a video takes significantly longer than watching it. And theoretically you could make it just as searchable as anything else.
The problem is that people suck at communicating clearly and concisely already, add to that a narcissist guy who likes to see himself talk and you got a recipe for a major pain in the..
I am afraid the same people who really like to record voice messages will flock to this like moths to a lightbulb.
In that sense it may act as a filter to help remove low-effort content from other channels I actually use (ie. not video).
It's right there in the title, sir. /s
Ah, and Microsoft. Management _loves_ video trainings.
A paragraph on the internet doesn't show you step by step visually how to do something.
Short form video, if you haven't noticed, is absolutely dominating social media and google has good reason to bundle and theme it for the workplace.
It does, images existed long before YouTube, and plenty of tutorials used them
Social media domination is usually associated with less productivity, so that's a negative factor
And since we are doing half-assed attacks, yours is a very naive take. Setting aside that most “short form video” on social media is not even used to actually convey information (as in the “productivity/office” sense of the original article), the reason video is dominating social media is because 1) advertisers pay way more to have ads shown before a video than among static content and 2) it is much more complicated to do Ad Blocking on video than on static content.
At any rate... We can have both written text and video media. And we will have both.
It's pointless trying to present one as better than the other. They will exist in parallel.
There are troves of information in short form. Information spreads among young people who own phones more rapidly than ever before.
Not sure what to tell you. Maybe scroll some tiktok videos about programming and find out.
There are few to no written words in their instructions so no translation is needed between languages. Only numeric quantities and part identifiers.
It basically already is a slide show. Add some chapters and it'd be fine as a video. Pause and unpause as you progress.
I’ve use video tutorials for everything from home renovations to cloud certifications, Minecraft builds, woodworking projects, software dev, and my graduate degree. This is kind of absolutism towards video is absolutely a get off my lawn take, regardless of your industry ties.
I think it’s especially ridiculous to pretend that the current state of most written media on the web is dramatically superior. I wish people ITT could just accept that they have a bias towards the medium they’re more comfortable with instead of pretending there’s some objective fault in things other people prefer.