I see this opinion voted to the top of Hacker News all the time. People seem to forget that watching something in video format is just so damn convenient, and requires little effort.
If I'm browsing the web, I'm already reading textual content so reading is about as low effort as can be. Watching a video means "context switching", reading to watching, along with making sure I've got headphones on, pausing any music I'm listening to etc.
That's not to say the above is true for everyone, but for some people, watching a video is substantially less convenient and entails more effort than reading text.
I wish there was a more fluent way to control the playback speed (Fn Key and Mouse Scroll) but otherwise it works well.
Really handy for podcasts that while interesting tend to be a bit slow.
EDIT: Just checked new version, you can display the speed bar by showing status bar, clicking it and then hovering cursor and using scroll wheel, missed that before.
In contrast, lectures accompanied by well-produced written material allow me to skip areas I have a grasp on, or provide a resource to reference much more quickly when I need to review a topic. Having to guess which lecture, and where in that lecture, a comment occurred is a significant spend of time.
Similarly, when I'm reading text and a message (e.g. email, IM) comes in, I can switch over to the other program, reply to the message, switch back to my browser, and the text is right where I left it. With video, there's no such guarantee. Also, I've never come back to a text document and needed to sit and wait while it buffered again.
I can easily alternate between four or five different text documents, taking each a paragraph of two at a time, and still follow what it happening in each one. This may be a personal deficiency, but I've never been able to do that with videos.
But so many videos are unedited. Some guy rambling about stuff, advertising himself or his social media presence, while slowly setting up whatever the actual point of the video is. Possibly this is because editing takes skill (which most people don't have) and tooling (video editing software is hard and/or expensive).
The last time I had to get information out of a video because there was no other source was for a minor car repair issue. It was useful to see which screws to undo and how the parts come apart and go back together. But that was one minute of a ten minute video.
The "rule of 30%" (immediately skip the video to 30% in) helps quite a lot.
Of course, with the popularisation of using videos for "all the things" lately, I don't feel at home at many a (popular) website any more. But that's another matter entirely, I suppose.
If this opinion is popular, maybe there's a good reason for it?
So in the time it takes to watch a video, I could have scanned throough several documents online. Couple that with copy-able text and it seems apparent why one might avoid videos.
[citation needed]
I agree that on average we're much more willing to learn things ourselves and interested in the subjects you listed, but I reject the idea that the community prefers text content because we're smarter than average. One problem with HN being connected to YC (though it comes with a lot of upsides) is that people will always go out of their way to appear smart. Everyone knows that can help their chances of getting accepted.
Sure, literally everyone that has replied to my original comment has said they're in favor of learning by reading plain text, but the fact is less HN users would have followed along with Sam Altman's "How to Start a Startup" course had it been in that format.
It's especially surprising since having your MOOC captioned is already mandatory if you want to comply with accessibility laws.
A great example is news sites creating ~1 minute videos instead of just printing out the story. News is almost always better to read than to wait for a person to say it to me in a video.
I frequently will download all the videos for an online course. Subsequently, when I watch them in VLC [1], I'll bump the playback to 1.25x - 1.75x.
Fwiw: for me, playback speed strongly correlates to how technical the topic is, less technical videos tends toward the 1.75x; while highly technical tends toward the 1.25x.
I'm also a big proponent of subtitles and transcripts.