You probably have already noticed that nowadays it’s becoming fashionable online to share technical material via videos (eg YouTube.)

I somehow can understand the appeal of creating videos for sharing thoughts/news, esp b/c it takes way less time and focus compared to writing things (just hit the record button and go.)

But videos are
👎 not index-able (at least locally)
👎 not searchable
👎 not copy-paste friendly if at all
👎 impossible to skim through
👎 a major distraction from the train of thoughts

IMO, in most cases, the more effective and impactful medium of technical comms is the written form: a Mastodon toot, a blog post, a gist, a Pastebin entry or even a Facebook post!

What are your thoughts?

  • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I’m sure why they’re doing it; there’s been an increase in “how to” videos sitting in search results as the documentation instead of as demos. Often it’s even that way for official commercial products; the product comes with a link to a video instead of printed or online documentation.

    No idea why it’s happening; it could be a search engine thing more than a “wrong media for the task” thing.

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      Some one at the last company I worked for was trying to push us to make video knowledge articles for everything we did and I actually had to go to our leadership and argue with them to make them understand how much of a waste of time that was. We had plenty of actual work to do instead of dicking around with video editing.