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I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content - the stuff that will be on this sounds broadly interesting to me but I'd

• sufyanadam 6y ago
  I'm one of those people who feel the same. I'd rather read than watch.
• inopinatus 6y ago
  That’s an “it depends” for me. I do always want the transcript, but let’s appreciate that a competent lecturer brings a topic to life. You don’t have to be Richard Feynman, but you do have to reveal and conceptualise at a pace an informed and inquisitive brain latches onto. Most video content is not at this level; it’s often either glibly oversimplified (content marketing), bogged down in minutiae (how-to guides), or buried under irrelevancies (what’s up guys). There is something I’d often prefer to consume as a AV recording, and that is interviews/panel discussion. The nuances of articulation, even body language may be informative. Compare and contrast the transcript with the video at https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/let-s-talkconcurrency-panel-discussion-with-sir-tony-hoare-joe-armstrong-and-carl-hewitt.html https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/let-s-talkconcurrency-... for example.
  • galaxyLogic 6y ago
    A good lecture is a good lecture but that is subjective because it depends on the level of knowledge each listener has. Whereas if I am reading I can easily skip the parts that seem too elementary to me, and read many times the paragraphs that seem difficult. A live lecture is better than video lecture because you can ask questions.
• xeromal 6y ago
  I'm a dev and enjoy my articles too, but I'd say I perform better with videos in some domains. The first one to come to mind if mechanic work. If I want to learn how to change a mass inflow sensor, it's way easier to watch the job be performed than to read a description, even with pictures.
  • porknubbins 6y ago
    This is a good point, I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair because its much easier to watch someone do and describe each step of a task than it is to decipher a service manual. Our language is severely deficient in ability to precisely describe physical, tactile, geometrical relationships of small parts and manual tasks.
    • xeromal 6y ago
      Yeah, it really does. There's also a lot of nuance in repairing something and I think most people gloss over things they've learned over the years. They forget all the details when writing out how to do something but the video preserves it. You see tricks they don't even realize they're doing.
    • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      I think ifixit.com does a pretty good job for all the electronics (okay, mostly laptops) that I've repaired so far. > I think youtube has the potential to bring back DIY repair This might depend on who you hang out with. I'm a tradesperson in the steel fabrication and construction industry, and I think a lot of people in this area have a propensity to want to fix and / or build pretty much everything themselves. From this perspective, with YouTube and online written guides, DIY repair is stronger than ever.
    • acheron9383 6y ago
      YouTube is the place my father always talks about to get quick guides on repair work from. It's absurd the depth of knowledge YouTube can contain.
    • mschuster91 6y ago
• ShamelessC 6y ago
  I've noticed certain communities that live on the edge of tech-savvy do this a lot. In particular emulator and jailbreak communities for video game consoles refuse to keep up-to-date text guides on things. Everything is done on YouTube which is such a terrible format when you need to follow 30-step lists and pause to click on many links throughout the process to download software, firmware and exploits.
  • Pxtl 6y ago
    I think Youtube's monetization does it... they want to earn cash from their guides. Is there any money in "Youtube for Articles?"
    • fomojola 6y ago
      Medium? I'd think there's money there, just not sure for whom.
      • hanniabu 6y ago
        I'm actually surprised they don't introduce unskippable ads into articles to let content producers monetize their articles. Rather than the static ads and paywalls you can have the intro paragraph visible and then a "watch to unlock article" ad. Just like youtube with their 10min requirement, Medium can make requirements like the article needs to be more than 1000 words for 2 ads or something like that. Granted, this would lead to a lot of useless fluff just like SEO has produced and pushing the meat of the content to the very end to get people through the ads. However this happens with video yet it's still popular.
        • nine_k 6y ago
          Are youtube ads really unskippable with youtube-dl, VLC, and other similar tools? Much like DVD ads used to be unskippable, but only for the non-tech-savvy.
          • 6y ago
• baddox 6y ago
  I’m pretty much in agreement with everything you said, but all I can think about is how even the worst video is almost certainly better than someone’s slideshow from a technical talk shared online with no transcript or other context. I’ve seen these shared quite frequently from tech conferences, and I fail to see how anyone gets any value from those things.
  • pmichaud 6y ago
    I imagine they are mostly for people who saw the talk and want a reminder or follow up?
• eastdakota 6y ago
  Why for the last 10 years we’ve invested so much in https://blog.cloudflare.com https://blog.cloudflare.com. I’d think of this as supplementing that, and allowing you to interact live with many of the blog’s authors, rather than replacing it.
  • adventist 6y ago
    Thank you for the work you guys do! This is nice.
  • trog 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply - I have been subscribed to the Cloudflare blog for years and really enjoy reading many of the in-depth technical articles that are provided by the team. I have shared many of them both internally in my workplace and on a few other channels. I think I have interacted with authors on the blog a few times via comments - for me doing it "asynchronously" is probably going to be more applicable to me anyway. I'll definitely check it out as time permits but just wanted to mention my preferences are definitely more on the written side :) Thanks for reading & again for your response.
  • lioeters 6y ago
    I'm also in the camp of people who almost always prefer written text for consuming information, especially technical ones. If a video has transcripts, often I read that instead of watching, since I can skim, skip, find the best parts easier. The Cloudflare blog has excellent content, I've been a long-time fan and have shared links to it with colleagues. All that said, I feel that Cloudflare TV is a brilliant concept. The fact that such a fresh creative idea was embraced and implemented, I can see how the company culture encourages and supports collaborative innovation. Looking at the listing of shows, I remembered my teenage years, like how I enjoyed the variety of creative talents on early MTV. I'm excited to catch some of the Cloudflare shows live - I'll probably use the picture-in-picture feature of the browser, to have a permanent window on a corner of my screen, with the live streams.
• stimpson_j_cat 6y ago
  Text transcripts should be available out of a11y concerns alone
  • adventist 6y ago
    What are those concerns?
    • ajb92 6y ago
      Not OP, but I’d bet they meant that deaf or hard-of-hearing people should be able to enjoy the programs
      • stimpson_j_cat 6y ago
        Yes, thank you. Anyone that uses assistive technologies.
        • crehn 6y ago
          Or anyone that might want to watch without sound, also falls within “accessibility”.
      • ComodoHacker 6y ago
        That and high traffic cost in developing countries also falls into accessibility category.
      • KineticLensman 6y ago
        > deaf or hard-of-hearing people should be able to enjoy the programs This is really important. I have moderate hearing loss but can hear 'okay' with a hearing aid. I place where I worked had a lot of mandatory training that involved video presentations. They introduced one new video and I realised that there was one bit where some important info (it was needed to pass the post video test) was only presented in spoken form, with no transcript or captions. I could follow it but a person with profound hearing loss would have struggled. Because I am sensitised to accessibility issues I decided to make a fuss about this. In a superb piece of irony, the subject of the training video was actually diversity issues in the workplace. I therefore contacted the training department saying "Did you know that your diversity training discriminates against deaf people?" To give them credit, they said 'oops our bad' and quickly added captions.
• stubish 6y ago
  Its a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, where people who prefer one type of communication channel will engage mostly with people who engage with $CHANNEL, eventually ending up with the idea that 'everyone uses $CHANNEL'. Like Facebook, pod casts, web forum d'jour, and probably going back in time to Usenet, IRC, Email and maybe even the telegraph. I don't see subtitles (back to the 80s of accessibility), but it does have playback speed so you can skim and claw back some information bandwidth.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• Anon4Now 6y ago
  I'm mixed. I enjoy programming video tutorials, but they are often too slow and padded with non-essential and repetitive information. Unless there's a transcript, searching for a part that you need a recap of isn't much different than information retrieval from tape drives in the 60's. The best video tutorials have include a transcript and a github repo.
  • onion2k 6y ago
    For graphics programming tutorials a video is a huge help. The huge problem with text articles about complex dev topics is that errors compound - if you're following along and you make a mistake early on you won't necessarily know until much later, by which time it's a lot harder to figure out where you went wrong. Being able to see what was supposed to happen at each step makes it much easier to follow. Also, with a live stream in particular, you frequently get to see the author make mistakes and stop to figure stuff out rather than just the edited and polished perfection of a published article. I find that really helps to humanize the author, and gives me confidence that even though I'm making a lot of mistakes I'll be able to get to a finished product eventually.
    • tiborsaas 6y ago
      I also love the observe the whole process rather that the pieces a blog post author thinks is important. The two formats definitely complement each other, they are good for different purposes.
• dkdk8283 6y ago
  Text is important because it’s searchable - the fascination with zoom and video/audio communication makes documenting and finding knowledge so much harder. This is a problem for me at work, too.
  • hinkley 6y ago
    Also if you're going for text, please put IDs on all of your headings so I can bookmark the section I care about. Thank you on behalf of everybody.
  • rasz 6y ago
    Google automagically captions all YT clips, in addition it OCRs every bit of text in them just like it does to images. You will get those YT clips and images in results to text searches.
• cercatrova 6y ago
  It really depends. I can watch faster than I can read, at 4x video speed.
• toomanybeersies 6y ago
  I'm in the same boat. I can learn by reading faster than I can watching a video (I tended to skip lectures at university for this reason). Also, often I have partial understanding of the subject already and need clarification of certain points, and it's a lot easier to skim a text and find the information I need than trying to skip through a video to find what I need.
• ma2rten 6y ago
  I recently started learning React for a side project I'm working on (in my day job I have more of a machine learning/backend role). There are a ton of coding videos for react. I never understood why people are watching these kind of coding videos, if you can get the same information much more efficiently in text form. However, I ended up finding a use for them. I've been watching them at the end of the day when I was too tired to do any more coding work. Instead of wasting my time on YouTube, I ended up learning a lot.
• JacobAldridge 6y ago
  I’m much the same ... and I’m saying that as someone who trained as a TV journalist, once hosted his own tv show, put out 134 weekly episodes of a business video series, and even now focuses on putting out 1-2 videos (on businesses <500 staff in this economy) each week. As a creator, it’s laziness - I can produce a video in far less time than a quality article. As a consumer, I’ve started watching a few more video channels to learn from others - but would much prefer and retain information from the written word. The compromise I’m approaching: YouTube do a pretty good job of automatically creating subtitles. These are readily formatted so I can add punctuation, edit, and polish into something readable (and searchable). That also provides a text transcript!
  • stronglikedan 6y ago
    > That also provides a text transcript! As someone who's used the text transcripts to "search" through Youtube video content, I'd say you're on the right track.
    • JacobAldridge 6y ago
      Thanks for that. Here’s an example of what I’ve done - as ‘simple’ as copying the text into my CMS (Wordpress) and then polishing as I read through it with some headings and graphics to make it more readable - https://jacobaldridge.com/dont-waste-a-good-recession/is-this-a-dead-cat-bounce-april-may-june-2020/ https://jacobaldridge.com/dont-waste-a-good-recession/is-thi... Still a 30 minute exercise, but that’s now a ~5,000 word article on the subject plus graphics plus a video.
  • sradman 6y ago
    > As a creator, it’s laziness Perhaps a tad self-effacing but the sentiment reveals a core truth: publishing a stream-of-consciousness video/audio artifact is easier than releasing a carefully planned and/or edited version. What we seem to be missing is the processes/norms for annotating, enhancing, indexing, editing these rough digital artifacts. I’m not sure what the value add of Cloudflare‘s scheduled content is. Some events, like press conferences, are one time occurrences. Some events, like Zoom or YouTube Live, involve multiple contributors or audience participation.
• tutfbhuf 6y ago
  > I'm a generally technical person and I'm simply flat out uninterested in video content There are many good videos lectures available on YouTube from Stanford, MIT and other universities. You also have student questions on tape, very much like sitting in the real lecture. Could you explain what exactly makes the content uninteresting, when it is in video format?
  • louiskottmann 6y ago
    Whenever I see video content I automatically think "I do not have time for this". Text lets me efficiently skip through most of articles if they do not get to the point, or if they linger in ELI5. The more I know about a field, the more I want to skip bits, because I don't need to be explained the basics over again.
    • tutfbhuf 6y ago
      I am perfectly capable of skipping the video forward until it gets interesting for me, same like a book. Sometimes you even have skip marks provided by the uploader or user comments where you can jump right into the interesting chapter.
• me551ah 6y ago
  Personally I prefer written content because I can pace it myself. I can skim past stuff that I already know, jump to a different section quickly, and reread complex content. You can play a video at 1.25x or 1.5x but sometimes that can be hard to understand and skipping and finding a section in a video can be time consuming.
• nindalf 6y ago
  I'm not interested in video content either. But in recent years I've found that some people respond much better to it. Anecdotally, it seems like every student on /r/programmerhumor got through their CS degree with the help of algorithms videos on youtube. Despite having trouble understanding the accent, they found it much easier to learn from the video than the book. I prefer the book, even though I would have had no trouble understanding the accent in which these videos are apparently made. My partner is the same. Finds it difficult to concentrate on a textbook, but easy when it's people talking. I'm not wired this way, and I don't understand why others are wired differently from you and me, but I do accept that it works for them. The consensus Hacker News would have you think that plain text is the pinnacle of human communication because it's searchable, copy-able, skimmable etc. But many people feel differently. Cloudflare.tv is for them.
  • oblio 6y ago
    It's somewhat simple: we have a lot of processing power dedicated to communicating with people. We also have a ROM + BIOS in our brains for caring about other people and liking to interact with them. Reading and writing are quite unnatural, in comparison.
  • michaelt 6y ago
    > Despite having trouble understanding the accent, they found it much easier to learn from the video than the book. In my experience, a video and a textbook will often present content radically differently - even when they're both by the same person and for the same audience. You give a CS professor a blackboard to explain a binary tree and they'll explain it to the level of "and three is less than five, so we go left at this node" Ask the same professor to write a textbook, and they'll instead start writing ∑ and ∃ and defining what an integer is.
  • pmontra 6y ago
    In my current experience blog > video > book. There were only books when I was a student. The only chance I got to study on videos were some MOOCs years ago but there were no books or blogs to compare them too. The experience was mostly ok but unfortunately I often had to pause the video to read formulas and sometimes go back to listen again to some explanations. Written text is much better for that. Furthermore one hour of video is one hour of time and it's not easy to get an idea of what is coming up in the next minutes. Text makes that easy.
• reallydontask 6y ago
  I'm not so sure that we're in the minority, those of us that prefer text over video. I just think that it's a lot easier to sell video than text and that subscriptions to learning services are the tech equivalent of Gym subscriptions. I have a Linux Academy subscription and I find that the labs are really useful (they do range in quality to be fair) and that the courses are next to useless but, and this is a big but, the text content that the courses provide gives you, with the labs, probably as much as the videos. Idk, maybe I'm doing the videos wrong or have the wrong expectations.
  • oblio 6y ago
    > I'm not so sure that we're in the minority, those of us that prefer text over video. We are. Just the fact that every modern OS uses GUIs should tell you something ;-)
• cowsandmilk 6y ago
  > we're in the minority, and there is enough of a technical audience that would prefer to watch this kind of stuff than read it. Note, you can be in the vast majority and the second half of the sentence can be true. A media channel that only reaches 10% of your customer base can still make sense.
• noir_lord 6y ago
  I like both, video content on fields/interests related to stuff I'm interested in is great if it doesn't require really deep focus, often I watch those at 110-150% speed. If I'm really trying to grok material a quiet room and a book is still the best. So it's a case of the nature of the content fitting the form of the content.
• Aeolun 6y ago
  I think this kind of stuff would be nice to tune into the same way that I look at HN. I don’t think it’s great for targeted watching, but good for discovery.
• hinkley 6y ago
  Videos are great for motivating me to dig into a topic, but when I actually have to apply that knowledge then I get quite frustrated. There's really no good way for me to make a bibliography of videos. And even when you do find the bit you care about, the presentation is rarely at the speed of absorption, so you end up pausing and rewinding a lot (and sometimes, there simply is no rewind button, and jumping back 15 seconds in an hour video? forget about it.) I recall during the dotcom boom someone discovered that there was just a little bit of unused bandwidth in TV signals and wanted to earmark it for adding hypertext to the video, so that with a smart tv you could jump to further reading on a subject. This seems like a best of both worlds situation and I was disappointed to see it go nowhere. I wonder if there's a way to do something similar with the CC data in videos...
• deleted 6y ago
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