Videos vs Articles, what do you prefer?

I can talk faster than I can write and I am referring to the fact that I can go sideways sometimes on videos, like pointing things that do not matter that much but it is nice to have the info.

I wouldn’t like to explain a lot of things on articles, people get bored, I would prefer to keep the articles direct and shorts so they can spend just 2mins read and keep going.

A video means it is extremely difficult to jump around, test information, experiment while keeping the information up to re-read a few times if necessary, etc… They are difficult to actually ‘learn’ anything from…

2 minute articles I find fairly insulting personally, they are 99% of the time a waste of reading time as they almost never give the information that I look for (I’m always weary of going to any blog on medium for example, ‘most’, though not near all by any stretch, are these useless kinds of articles)… The things I tend to and prefer reading are exceedingly long and detailed, like I most prefer reference-level of detail with added examples of usage and reasonings. This is the kind of stuff that I consider a ‘short summary / introduction’ in to something. It is a simple high-level overview with (interactive!) examples about what is being talked about (so you can change something and see the results of the change in real-time to experiment with different conditions). This kind of interface is by far the best for me to learn something and immediately test what I learned simultaneously while reading.

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I like videos of talks which I often consume like a sound-only podcast (I often even strip out the video to be able to listen to them in the underground).

But as an actual learning resource or as documentation I prefer (hyper)text for obvious reasons. I can easily skim, re-read or skip passages as I need, search for keywords or easily follow a link.

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Yeah, I like videos (I also often just get the audio! ^.^) of debates and discussions as I find those easier to digest than, say, a 100+long post thread, but when learning videos do almost nothing for me.

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But videos can also boost your SEO! I prefer it as a user because I use youtube a lot!

Uh, but doesn’t that seem entirely backwards? How can a video be indexed for content to know what to relate searches to? An article on the other hand is entirely indexable. o.O

I also use youtube quite a lot (mostly listening in the car), but I’m not sure what that has to do with it being in video form? If it were in video form it doesn’t seem to matter much of it’s self hosted, on youtube, peertube, whatever, what is important is how easy the information is to digest and learn from, which video’s are fairly poor at due to their higher synchronous interactions.

If somebody gets bored by text in 2 minutes maybe they should be at the beach at that moment and not trying to study. :wink: Articles have to carry informational value and not just be quick skims over something I can easily find in the default docs myself, as @OvermindDL1 pointed out.

For tech education text is better.

I ain’t bad-mouthing you, it just seems weird to me how increasing amount of people treat tech education as some sort of a Twitch gaming stream session…

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For those against videos, I’m curious - do you have a Rails background and did you use Railscasts?

I think Railscasts was a massive component in driving Rails adoption, and I think the main difference I see in this thread is that most people replying (against) are what I would consider fairly accomplished programmers… so maybe videos are more suitable for those learning different kinds of topics at a different level? (Novice to intermediate users may prefer videos - advanced users may prefer written articles?)

I still personally feel videos with a transcript and ‘show notes’ would be a fantastic option - as it caters for all users; those who like videos and those who like written articles…

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I don’t understand what you mean by that.

It is not the length but the content. Attention span has decrease for newest generations and it could be better to actually write short articles related to a topic than a long article that the person can’t keep it in her/his mind at once.

Fair enough

@OvermindDL1what else would you add to this readme GitHub - straw-hat-labs/straw_hat_review: Review System ?

Either I explain every single line of code in the package, or the user is trained to go and keep reading functions and modules for example.

It is hard to define what is required to explain and what comes from tuition and you getting deeper into something (Like Ecto or Elixir, no everything was written on the readme but you can keep improving) so this is the dilemma for me.

No rails and no railcasts.

I haven’t seen many videos that teaches anything other than either introductory material or high level concepts of more advanced topics. I don’t think the skill level of the programmer makes too much difference as the high level videos can be directed towards beginners/intermediate/advanced.

Would you pass your university courses by going to lectures only? And not reading the text books?

I am not saying videos are useless but that they should be complementary to the actual documentation. Just like a university lecture is just a complement to the actual text books. You should be able to skip the lecture and still get all the information but I hope you agree that the opposite would be quite silly.

Unfortunately I often I find that video is the only documentation. I think this is because videos are actually more used as a marketing tool than as a proper educational source and that they are much easier to create than good documentation.

I can’t tell you how to feel :smiley: but I find transcripts doesn’t add much to the video. The problem is that the content is adapted to video format. The transcript will contain as little content as the video. This would be for people who like videos and videos.

So to summarize my stance: feel free to have videos as long as they complementary to the existing documentation/articles. If you only have time to do one, do articles.

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  1. The thing is you can always put link in the video description and increase your domain authority by linking from a trusted domain (youtube). Secondly, you can do both thing, i mean record video and make transcription as an article.

  2. Thanks to video format you can learn by many senses - more than when you read an article.

OK folks, do not speak reading is the ultimate way to learn.

Based on facts, watching videos still better for learning about it than reading, 10% more.

Which means nothing for me right now thanks to all your feedbacks :purple_heart::purple_heart:

Are these facts giving context about in which topics and disciplines are videos better than articles?

It’s funny thread. You ask what do we prefer. Crushing majority says: Articles! Then you say: Wrong! “based on facts” you should prefer videos! :wink:

The truth is that that programming is rather abstract topic, and seeing someone’s head talking does not add anything to content and is rather distracting, seeing someone typing text in terminal and spelling it out loud etc does not add any value over reading text by yourself.

Give me video about cellular division, or how to clean pen, or cook a complicated dish or anything that has actual video with comment (instead of text or images in video) and I’ll prefer video then.

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As long as there are no color e-ink ebook readers out there, I stick to videos. Reading too much hurts my eyes and most articles are filled with useless crap just for SEO purposes or to stretch the article.

Read the sentence again. Who said anyone is wrong at the individual level?

If I am not mistaking I am trying to put people into perspective that do not go that harsh on the topic and speak as a single final truth about it.

What is your point?

I do knowledge what you said and I am not saying you (at the individual level) are wrong.

But do not speak as it HAS TO BE the only way, specially that it would be based on the people hanging out here, no the majority.

and I would love to know how many of the people that says videos are millennials btw :thinking:

Anyway, do no take it personally and please go back to the thread please :pray::pray:, you don’t need to prove me anything :smiling_face: I am listening. :purple_heart:

My point in first paragraph was to to joke a bit, hence the emoticon at the end → :wink:

I really don’t mind videos, I simply ignore them most of the time. Im not try to force through anything, but rather give a perspective why the programming topics may not be best suited for videos.

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I don’t think you and I read the same articles. Very simple Google searches yield very quality blog articles filled with step-by-step experiments and demonstrations that make it easy to onboard anyone. But that is probably relative to the tech sub-area so results obviously vary.

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I would still like to see the study that tries to pass as “facts” the idea that videos are preferred for tech education. :107:

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I think that the mismatch comes from generation differences to be honest. I bas been noticing the pattern and I forgot where I read about it as well.