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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

> video-only

Videos are a lower-bandwidth medium than text for explaining things. I can read a lot faster than I can listen to a person talk.

Seriously, this website doesn't realize that?

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#1. A commenter is not a website.

#2. There are a lot of considerations apart from bandwidth when it comes to disseminating information. For eg., having to use speakers or even reach for a set of headphones is reason enough for me to skip to the text.

I think csense meant bandwidth in the sense of rate at which the audience takes in the information, not network bandwidth. You're in agreement with one another.

Yes, by "lower-bandwidth" I meant "video usually [1] takes more of my time to transfer ideas from the author's mind into mine than equivalent text." I wasn't referring to bytes-on-the-wire [2].

[1] Sometimes video is more efficient than text. E.g. with respect to video games, gameplay videos can convey a lot of information in a short time. Basically if you want to teach someone about some system that changes over time, showing how it changes in video is often a lot clearer and faster than trying to describe it with words or static diagrams.

But a video that just involves listening to a person talk -- or, worse yet, read slides from a projector -- usually just ends up wasting my time compared to equivalent information presented as text.

[2] It's obvious that video consumes way more bytes-on-the-wire than text.

I see. Yes, I misread your comment. Apologies. We are, as another commenter eloquently put it, 'in violent agreement'.

Offtopic: A great word/ phrase for describing this situation, which I'd like to see become more popular. "You two are in violent agreement."

Excellent phrase - I'm joining your campaign to popularise it.

You're agreeing with csense without realizing it. He said "this website" to refer to the site with the videos (not the comment above him), and saying video is "lower-bandwidth" to mean that is less quickly communicative, not that it somehow takes less internet bandwidth than text.

Well I know of a few people who are really interested in seeing what these hacker people are like. Are they raving maniacs? Timid hermits?

Video is a good format to get people who do not normally browse source code or read specs interested. I'd rather send my curious-but-not-technologist friends a video link than a protocol design page from a wiki which they'll never read.

And a proper transcription encompasses a fair amount of work. So maybe the authors found that that would outweigh the benefit of pleasing some of us. I'm still happy that someone is creating these videos (and is not putting them on Youtube but is self-hosting them, with WebM HTML5 video).

I'm not saying that video doesn't have certain advantages. I think that some people -- even some people who consider themselves hackers -- may even prefer it.

I'm just saying that I personally prefer text, and explaining why I prefer it.

Well, actually I can listen to someone talk faster than I can read. Though, people can't talk as fast as I can listen to them.

Have you tried speeding video's up?

Other problem is when I read, I will often skip backwards and forwards and backwards again, re-digesting sentences that didn't quite make sense and cross-referencing especially within paragraphs. When I'm listening, I have to depend on my auditory buffer, which is only a couple seconds (or) one sentence long.

I read 5-10 times faster than I can listen and with much greater accuracy.

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