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Comment by bigstrat2003 | Hacker News Reader

bigstrat2003

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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