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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

You can write a book, but odds are it won't be good or get traction. I think you're better off with video. Videos can remain indexed and accumulate traffic on youtube for years, whereas most books are forgotten/ignored. I have seen plenty of videos from 10+ years ago that still gets lots of comments and traffic.

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You can make a video, but odds are it won’t be good or get traction. I think you’re better off with a book. Books can remain indexed and accumulate readers for centuries, whereas most videos are forgotten/ignored. I’ve read plenty of books from decades ago that still get lots of comments and discussion.

not the same thing...billions of people use youtube. There is no library equivalent of youtube. how many use Google Books? Even then, you need an ISBN or a publisher.

Your audience isn't a billion people

When people want to find something or learn about something, they go to YouYube. That is where or how the majority of people find and consume content these days. There is also Google search, but again, these are not books. If your audience is limited, then target niche keywords. Same principle applies. Videos about even the most esoteric of topics still get traffic due to YouTube's popularity.

Youtube is completely owned by Google and their content can't be indexed as easily. "Books" also doesn't mean having an ISBN number, I think plain text should would count as well: blogs, comments, mailing lists, lecture notes, etc. One day Google will decide to scrub all the videos or it will be pushed into irrelevance and will become the Altavista of today. All the videos will disappear too.

unless you get the book in the LOC, it will probably be forgotten or have no trace of its existence. why would google scrub all the videos? that makes no sense. Youtube is worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

They can't make money off of them? It will get split up and youtube spun off and they'll have to cut costs. Some maybe deemed inappropriate in the future. We had Geocities, Usenet and other sites and companies which held content then disappeared. Archiving them might be nice? But what's easier to archive and index videos or text form?

One the other hand, books published over a hundred years are still here even though the authors and publishers may long be gone.

Per the Lindy Effect, a published book has a higher likelihood of still being readable centuries from now, than a Youtube video.

The solution is to write follow-up books.

Improve your writing and refine your perspective and gain traction through the friction attributed to this process until you stumble upon a successful iteration of the idea that you are trying to communicate or the principles that your are trying to remind others of and someone else takes notice and writes an article about it on their Substack, where prolific link distributor paulpauper will share it on Hacker News.

Sheesh, I think we are stuck with the literature we have now forever, and can never get new good books, now that you have published this comment...

Seriously, if no one ever tries, then no one can ever succeed.

> I have seen plenty of videos from 10+ years ago that still gets lots of comments and traffic

Sounds like survivor bias to me

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