Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

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I recently picked up a video series on Udemy with a 90% off coupon I found, and this is my exact problem. If I'm following along, I have to pause and rewind the video so often, and other times I'm flipping through reddit because he's dragging on about something or having technical difficulties while recording. Every time I need to rewind the video, it buffers for several seconds, or sometimes freezes and needs me to reload the tab. Never mind that I can't go back to a lesson and Ctrl+F to find something that was referenced later on.

It seems like everything I search for these days, I find as a YouTube video. Why? I was trying to take the center console out of my truck and needed to find out what size the bolts were on the back of the driver's seat. Only results were YouTube videos. So I'm sitting in my garage streaming a five minute YouTube over my limited LTE just so I can find out it's a 17mm wrench. Most of that five minutes is the guy telling me who he is, how to subscribe, what website he's with, and why I need to watch the video that I'm already watching. Google can tell me the up-to-the-minute March Madness scores but the only way to find out what size wrench is needed for a Chevy Silverado, one of the most common trucks in the US, is a YouTube video from a guy with an accent so thick I can't understand him.

Useless. Some days I feel the world would be better off without YouTube. Until the day when we can index and search video and voice the way we can text, YouTube is nothing but entertainment to me. Stop making "educational" videos, I don't want to watch them.

100% agree with this. What makes me really scratch my head is that I talk to people regularly who prefer this! If I have to watch a video to answer my question, I'll just figure it out some other way.

Completely agree with the above sentiments, but that's not the end of the idiodicy. There are people who will link a video to make their argument. Not only are they unwilling (and usually unable) to put it in their own words, they won't even link a text article that does it for them.

So they expect me to watch a commercial and 3 minutes of video, when all they had to convey was a very concise point like "democrats offered to make 90% of the requested cuts, and the other side is shutting down the government over the last ten." But I "absolutely" must watch the video, with no summary of the point because "[my congresscritter hero] totally proves you wrong".

... and have the full support of the other reddit posters. F--- that.

I prefer it. Here's why. When Googling for specific details of something, I inevitably end up with 1001 automatically generated pages from the wrong data which are plastered with ads and other crap. With YouTube, I might have to watch a video, but the interface is consistent and I know that in most cases someone's had to put effort into actually showing me the right answer. If the textual Web were all put together by humans with answers, it'd be better, but it isn't :-(

Of course, if the answer to something is on Wikipedia, it's a win. But Wikipedia isn't designed to be an encyclopedia of all human knowledge (sadly).

It depends on context.

First-order:

* At a computer ==> Text * Commuting ==> Audio/video

Second-order depends on things like type of content, cognitive load, etc.

Agreed that commuting (for some forms of commuting) text is suboptimal. I ride on a subway so it doesn't really matter to me but I can't read blogs while driving for instance.

we're a video culture - most people are consumers, and video is the easiest way to consume. reading takes too much time for most people.

I agree with the frustration, but we've got a system now that rewards video makers for this stuff, and doesn't reward people posting this information in text format.

While I agree with you generally on all the reasons video's worse than text, _some_ of this is addressable with an offline video player. This is why I download virtually _everything_ I watch (desktop) via youtube-dl (it's pretty much a generic video download tool) and play it in mplayer or Xine.

In theory, VLC allows queuing of online content for playback, though in practice it's flaky enough that it crashes, loses the playlist, and/or gets confused during playback. I much prefer mplayer as a general rule.

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