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.
I think the counter view here is that video can be incredibly inconvenient depending on your exact use case. E.g. my scarcest resource is time and video is, for me at least, a very slow way of consuming content (compared to text). So if it's content that I need to consume quickly, video is a none starter.
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.
One thing I do is use VLC and it's ability to speed up content without altering pitch.
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.
A MOOC I'm currently taking, and possibly soon dropping, is heavy on functional programming (with a language whose syntax has been pretty new to me), primarily through 1.5 hour lectures. The professor is quite skilled, but the convenience of that video format is often overshadowed by both needing to wait for lectures to be published and having to pay complete attention to them for 90 minutes a pop.
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.
I'm not sure that I see the convenience. When I click on a link and it's text, I can just start reading it. If it's video, I either need to dig out a pair of headphones or get up and go to another room, so as not to disturb my officemates. It's far more convenient to just click the back button and find a text link.
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.
Another aspect: people generally get to the point a lot faster in text, or you can skim/search to the point. (It may be surrounded by adverts, clickbait, or gifs, but at least it's there).
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.
Having grown up without a television, I never understood this 'convenience' because whenever I watch a video, I cannot do another thing. I never learned to work with a television in the background, and as a result, if I don't give a video my full and undivided attention, I don't remember almost nothing from it. On the other hand, when I was a kid, I got used to listen to (news) radio while reading or doing other stuff. I have no trouble following an audio program while doing some other cognitive intensive task.
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 it's a technical subject and something genuinely new for the viewer/reader, comprehension and learning are probably the bottlenecks, not ease of consumption.
If this opinion is popular, maybe there's a good reason for it?
For me, evaluating the content and the usefulness of a video takes about the length of the video. That's a huge problem when searching for technical resources, since text can be scanned many times faster than a video.
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.
Agreed. The community is probably biased towards people who are (1) a little bit smarter than average, and so relatively happy to go away and learn things by themselves, and (2) generally more interested in maths, technology and science, which lends itself a little bit more to just "working through the problem sheet" as opposed to, say, the arts and humanities.
> community is probably biased towards people who are (1) a little bit smarter than average
[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.
Watching a video does require little effort, but learning -- and subsequently retaining anything is where the real effort is required with technical subjects.
I totally disagree in some cases. I despise internet video most of the time, unless I really need an illustration.
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.
I'm glad you brought this up. This has tremendously improved my experience with video lectures. For online classes, I do the same as you mentioned utilizing VLCs playback feature. Youtube's addition of playback speed has also been a huge improvement in consuming more technical content.
It also takes longer and is harder to skim/skip around to exactly what I want to see. I usually kind of have an idea of what I want when I'm looking something up so I'll just scroll an article to get to the good stuff, and then go back if I realize I need more context. That's a lot harder to do with video.
Unfortunately I can't watch videos when I'm surrounded by other people unless it's something they're watching too. Which basically means I can't watch videos half the time I'm browsing the web.
I don't know that this is really a controversial viewpoint.
Video is one of the worst ways to learn.
Anecdotally, think of times at high school when a teacher has put on a video: it's typically to distract the students so that the teacher can have some time out from interacting. It has a similar function to leaving a baby in front of The Happy Little Elves. It's better than having no stimulus, but no serious learning is expected from that.
Although the article says "Watching videos is not better (or worse) than sitting through lectures", I would even disagree with that. A good lecturer has the opportunity to gauge the audience and adjust their lecture depending on how many students are throwing paper aeroplanes (or looking lost). This just doesn't happen with video.
