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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing, but give me a long form write up and I can scroll or ctrl+f my way to what I'm looking for very quickly.

I suppose they can't force inject 5-15 second ads though, so maybe folks like us brought this on ourselves.

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Videos absolutely suck for transmitting information, compared to text. I estimate that I can read an article about 10x faster than an equivalent video, they aren't even in the same ballpark. It boggles my mind that so many people prefer videos, given how much slower they are. It's enough to make me cynically wonder if people these days are illiterate or something.

I suspect it's because they can't focus on text - their devices have 2000 notifications distracting them. Video is more easily engaging, they're less likely to switch away.

I daresay thee average user would be a lot better off if they disabled all but a very small handful of notifications.

The average user likely does not know, that even the option exists.

It's getting better. Apple's summarizing multiple notifications coming in 18.1 (you can try this in the beta today) and only highlighting "important" notifications by default. I haven't seen any evidence of them abusing this, either.

> I estimate that I can read an article about 10x faster than an equivalent video

Especially due to all the filler b/s that every YT video has these days, be it over sharing their back story, Like and Subscribe! (And ding that bell!), sponsored ad reads, here’s my ten other videos you need to watch, etc etc.

The only thing I’ll say in defense of videos (which I generally don’t like at all) is that when somebody makes a video, it does sort of force them to do the steps. I’ll definitely take a well-written set of instructions over a well-written video usually. But a crappy video might accidentally be better than a crappy set of instructions because the steps that the author didn’t think to include will at least be shown by default if they do it in one take with minimal editing.

>in one take with minimal editing

In my experience this is far more rare than a well written, comprehensive set of instructions.

Even the tiniest youtube channel with 3 digit subscriber numbers recorded on the owners phone will edit out the "boring" bits. At least for any task that takes more than 2-3 minutes. If the task is short enough then yeah, they will often leave in the whole thing.

>Videos absolutely suck for transmitting information, compared to text.

It depends on the information. For DIY information for example i find it much better to see someone show how to lay brick or frame a wall than to read how it is done.

I'd say that for mechanical topics (construction, car repair, etc.) a video can be very useful. But please, provide a written transcript, since that's at least searchable.

That's fair. Video games are another thing which lend themselves pretty well to video content.

More important than that is text lends itself to searching for possibly obscure phrases to narrow down the possible candidates before even having to "consume" any information whereas with video that is challenging and very inefficient (time and energy-wise).

Usually it is already very obscure, being presented with a video link in an debate at all. No thank you very much.

Where I like a video, is for example of a teardown of a device. HowTo videos of practical skills. Watching a professional use his tools.

But even then, I often prefer text with good pictures.

Videos can be great where it's the kind of topic where you'd watch the whole video.

Videos are terrible when you need a small amount of information that's embedded in a much longer video.

The second scenario is much more common for me than the first.

The issue is there is a huge monetizing platform for video, which has minted multimillionaires.

There is no equivalent for that for text, even though Substack is trying.

Discoverability is better for content creators on video platforms then text.

If I wrote an article, what are even my options to share it?

Video you, have YouTube, insti, tiktok etc to get discovered on and people can even find it.

Depends on what you need.

I was once able to fix my toilet watching an Indonesian video. I understood approximately zero, but I could still follow that guy's hands.

It is a different story with programming or other abstract/text-based tasks, but when it comes to anything done with hands, I like a video better.

3blue1brown videos on maths are beautiful as well. I wish I had them when I was 18.

Google has been trialing AI overviews of youtube videos, essentially it opens a gemini chat where gemini has been prompt-stuffed with the whole video.

A 12 minute "Here is my favorite method for unclogging a drain" video becomes a three sentence reply from gemini telling you what it is.

I don't know how google is gonna get this past creators if they fully role it out, as it is a massive shameless backstab, but at the same time it is wonderful for viewers who don't want to trudge through filler video after clickbait headlines.

Wow, it is a backstab! They force creators to make longer videos or they won’t get monitized and then do this. Creators get paid by the watch minutes.

They've been doing that for a while though e.g. a specific (say) 31s segment of a video will come in the search results rather than just a link to a popular video

Text -> video -> text

It's come full circle, just that the wheel now consumes orders of magnitude more power to churn the final text.

I'm always surprised at how many non-tech people don't know about their browser's ability to search in the page. I've been on multiple calls at work with researchers who have been in the field for more than a decade and they'll read the entire page instead of hitting ctrl-f.

I didn't realize how bad this has gotten until I was looking for a GPU undervolting guide

What could be a couple of paragraphs is stretched into a 5-10 minute video; most of which is explaining what it is, and not how to do it

> terrible at video scrubbing

It is partly the form, video, but more so the access method, the network. All networked video sucks at skimming through because the file isn't cached and takes a few milliseconds to several seconds to load the part you jumped to. The interface also doesn't help because usually they lack controls for skipping forwards and backwards and long jumps forwards and backwards.

yt-dlp audio only, and stuff that into whisper: video to text in ~30 seconds.

> I can't stand watching videos on something I need information for <right now>. Maybe I'm just terrible at video scrubbing

Do not worry: in a very short while we'll all have AI tools, running locally, that can summarize videos in textual forms in a split second.

Prompt: "Summarize this vid in five paragraphs. List specs."

It already exists. In a short while we'll all have this at home.

P.S: prompt: "Remove every single ad and submarine content too".

Replacing "downloading 2kb of text on a device with minimal technical specs" with "buying a top-end computer to download hundreds of megabytes of video & shove it into an LLM to mangle and hallucinate the message down into 2kb of text".

Thank god for progress. What would we do without it.

I'm waiting for it to become more convenient, but no joke this is what I've been doing. When I find interesting videos about software development, I'll often use Whisper to create a transcript and then upload it to Claude to summarise, then I can ask it questions about the content as well as explore related topics and ask it for further reading.

Of course, that assumes the AI won't just hallucinate and give you false information. Which is a major problem with current LLMs.

Oh, but they can put blinky video ads all over the page so no matter where you look there are things to distract you.

yeah yeah adblock pihole yes I know.

There must be a market for video information converted to text. It would be completely illegal, of course.

Well, there's a source if not a market - LLMs.

https://www.proofnews.org/apple-nvidia-anthropic-used-thousa...

The irony of serving a video, consumed by a robot, to serve a human text, rather than serving the text in the first place.

Sound like some sort of ADHD symptom where any video longer that a few seconds is perceived as too long, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't even remotely sound like such a thing.

Not really. Video just doesn't lend itself well to searchability (is that a word?). YouTube's "table of contents" feature helps, but only when the video's creator actually uses it. Even if they do provide a ToC, it still doesn't help much if you're trying to find a particular sentence, or brief mention of a particular detail. Perhaps we also need videos with an index, in addition to tables of contents.

Right, but as I see it, there are multiple kinds of videos. Some are made specifically to be a vehicle for ads. You know what I mean, those 10+ minute long videos on simple tricks, where a short clip would suffice. They also usually lack any markers or chapters which makes skipping through them infuriating. I understand the rage here, I hate those with a passion, too.

But some long videos are excellent, well-made and informative.

Perhaps when the OP needs the info right now he may be more stressed and less in control of himself?

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