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RANT - Why I won't watch your video tutorial

Posted on 2021-02-16

I wanted to talk about something that I see more and more in the tech and FLOSS space… More and more "how-to" and tutorial are now made as video available on {Peer,You,smth}tube…

Maybe I'm old but I'm really not a fan ot this and enjoy much more reading articles… And if possible in a clean website without much animation, ads, useless JS, fonts, … But I guess it shouldn't be a surprise for the reader of this post, as you are most probably reading this via a gemini client :-).

But let's get back to the main topic here. My main issue with technical videos is I found myself very limited because:

1. I have to watch at the speed of the video… For me that's the most annoying part. I don't want to watch a 10 or 15min video if I can browse an article and read it through in less time. Also, I might not be interesting in the full content but just a sub part. Watching it in a 1.5 or 2x speed does not solve this for me as it is both less understandable and still longer than browsing an article to see if I'm interested in it for a further read.

2. Clicking through the video guessing when the subject you are after will be talked about is a huge pain for me. When reading an article, I can very quickly see browse the it or search for specific keywords to get to the part I'm interested in. There is no ctrl+f in a video :'(…

3. You can't copy past stuff to try out things from the video. Yes, they might link a github repo or put stuff in the comments section, but it does not help to have to scroll or switch between tabs… Plus, things are there without the context of the video where in article everything comes at the right time.

4. Even though youtube algorithm is great to search, I do believe that search works better with websites as I could search for a specific command and find an interesting article about a new subject using the same tool, whereas with videos it is much more linked to the title and comments mainly. But maybe I'm bad at searching videos too :).

5. Also, I can keep many articles open in tabs as long as i'm working on a subject (and some tabs stay open months), but having lots of video open in different tabs, even stopped is taking a lot more memory and is not as scalable… Might be a non issue for some, but for a huge tab user like me, it is a big deal (:

I don't see a lot of reason of preferring videos, except maybe for "shows" type of vides, where people are more discussing topics at a high level. But as soon as it gets into the details, I believe a text support is a lot better to learn but also to reuse. Going back to a video to look for a specific part of it is very tedious compared to opening a bookmark and do a quick search on it…

I understand that one of the reason of doing such video is the ability to monetize your content a lot easier… I mean I get that but for me in this case the best compromise is to have an article written on the side. It means people that prefer watching the video can have the long detailed explanation, and people more in a hurry could access browse and access what is needed a lot more easily.

Writing is hard, I agree, but I think making good video is also very hard. Most of the content you would need for an article needs to be prepared for your video anyway, so why not do both reach an even bigger audience :).

So TLDR; please write technical article! If you want to make a video, please create a readable scripts/version too!

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