alt Hacker NewsThat's interesting ... why would you want to wall off and ignore what is undoubtedly one of the largest repositories of knowledge (and trivia and ignorance, but also knowledge) ever assembled? The idea that a person can read and understand an article faster than they can watch a video with the same level of comprehension does not, to me, seem obviously true. If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers. Everyone would just read the text.
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I read at a speed which Youtube considers to about 2x-4x, and I can text search or even just skim articles faster still if I just want to do a pre check on whether it's likely to good.
Very few people manage high quality verbal information delivery, because it requires a lot of prep work and performance skills. Many of my university lectures were worse than simply reading the notes.
Furthermore, video is persuasive through the power of the voice. This is not good if you're trying to check it for accuracy.
YouTube videos aren't university lecturers, largely. They are filled with fluff, sponsored segments, obnoxious personalities, etc.
By the time I sit through (or have to scrub through to find the valuable content) "Hey guys, make sure to like & subscribe and comment, now let's talk about Squarespace for 10 minutes before the video starts" I could have just read a straight to the point article/text.
Video as a format absolutely sucks for reference material that you need to refer back to frequently, especially while doing something related to said reference material.
> If it were true there would be no role for things like university lecturers.
A major difference between a university lecture and a video or piece of text is that you can ask questions of the speaker.
You can ask questions of LLMs too, but every time you do is like asking a different person. Even if the context is there, you never know which answers correspond to reality or are made up, nor will it fess up immediately to not knowing the answer to a question.
There are obviously many things that are better shown than told, e.g. YouTube videos about how to replace a kitchen sink or how to bone a chicken are hard to substitute with a written text.
Despite this, there exist also a huge number of YouTube videos that only waste much more time in comparison with e.g. a HTML Web page, without providing any useful addition.
This "knowledge source" sponsored by $influence...
YouTube has almost no original knowledge.
Most of the "educational" and documentation style content there is usually "just" gathered together from other sources, occasionally with links back to the original sources in the descriptions.
I'm not trying to be dismissive of the platform, it's just inherently catered towards summarizing results for entertainment, not for clarity or correctness.