[saghm]

I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here. I could see screenshots maybe being slightly helpful, but to having this sort of thing as a video feels like an extreme inconvenience; I'd much rather see all of it at once and be able to visually scan (or even better, ctrl+f) to find specific parts over having to scrub around if I wanted to go back to a previous part or skip ahead. My eyes also don't require any sort of manual timing to pause on something I want to copy.

[ryandrake]

It's telling that most of the responses to this question center around why the YouTube video creator would want to make a video instead of a simple text description, not what the OP asked: why the user would want to intake the information by way of video.

Says a lot about what is broken, incentive-wise, about the modern Internet.

[raydev]

I think it says more about most people not wanting to bother to read.

Modern social media has only succeeded by moving away from text, and meeting the masses where they already are. They mostly don't want to read.

[ab5tract]

Definitely there has been a shift towards video content.

But I think there is a discoverability dynamic at play as well. Finding a blog post that isn’t garbage can be harder than finding a decent video on any given topic. This is clearly a feedback loop towards video but I think partly this is because up until now you couldn’t just create a spam video channel with the same ease that you could a spam blog.

[j-bos]

Not just social media, at work you're lucky if anyone reads the docs, and blessed if you find someone writing docs. To say nothing about how the substitute for those is looping zoom meetings.

[NoPicklez]

How so? People like to learn in various ways, some people like to read, other people like to inspect someone else doing it in real time.

I don't see an issue with there being multiple ways to learn how to do something, whether it be textual, images or video.

For this type of thing having a video running in the background while I punch in the commands makes sense, I can perform the actions at the same time the video does.

[dylan604]

Videos get higher rankings in Google's search. Remember those?

Definitely says something about your age though complaining about video versions of anything. Kids today don't even know what Google's search page looks like. They search in YouTube, TikTok type apps first. Since the location bar has also become the search bar while theGoogs pays browsers to be the default search, lots of people are not even aware they are doing a google search.

Also, some people will try things that are technically above their abilities normally. Having a video typing the commands in can be easier for them to replicate as it'll look just like the video. Text only from some webpage won't have those visual clues.

I much prefer text for this stuff too, but at least I can understand why something else is preferred by someone not me. I might be elder, but I'm not obstinate

[saghm]

Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing". I'm not claiming that there can't possibly be a reason that videos might work better for some people, but I don't think you've made a particularly strong case that you understand their mindset rather than judging them under the guise of claiming that I was the one doing that.

[Supermancho]

> Your argument basically boils down to "kids don't know any better than to use something else than what's pushed on them by the tech conglomerates or be aware that screenshots are a thing".

Not an argument. It's an explanation. Stop with the antagonism.

[dylan604]

No, you're old man yells at clouds with the entire comment. Someone likes something you don't prefer, and want to share that with the internet. That's great, but you have to know that someone will call you out on it.

Some people like blue, some people like red. Some people like audiobooks, some prefer reading actual books. Some people like to go to movie theaters, some prefer to wait for the movie to watch at home. Some people like cilantro.

The internet is a big place. There's room for multiple ways of skinning the cat without preventing any of the other ways.

[15155]

Video format is objectively lower bandwidth (information-density-wise) than text regardless of age.

[Yeul]

That assumes that how young people use the internet is inherently better than how we use it.

I can get the same information only without the ads and parasocial relationships with content creators. Not making anyone money!

[ycombinete]

This was a good comment until it suddenly became bizarrely insulting in the last paragraph.

[dylan604]

I don't feel I was insulting at all. If you feel obstinate is an insulting word I really don't know how to respond as anything else will probably feel as an attack on you now. I guess I could have said non-empathetic, but we're not talking about feelings so much as valid reasons someone prefers A over B.

[gspencley]

I share your bias, but something to consider is the prevalence of smart phone usage these days, and the fact that reading text on a smart phone can be as awful as trying to watch a video on a desktop when all you want is a quick text summary.

I've always hated the trend of moving towards video as well. But if my desktop was currently in the process of installing the operating system, leaving me without a web browser, and all I have is my phone as a secondary device ... I might actually prefer watching a quick video over trying to read text on a tiny screen and having to pinch zoom and horizontal scroll. Of course this depends a lot on how the text is presented, but in general I think video is easier to absorb on a phone and text is easier to skim / read / zoom / copy-paste on a desktop.

[SpaceNoodled]

Reading a brief article on a smartphone is far less tedious than having to squint at details in a miniscule video.

If you can't read normal text on a phone screen, consider corrective lenses.

[scuff3d]

I think non-technical people, who may have literally never seen a commandline, like seeing someone walk through it (and probably explain context along the way). Helps ensure them they are doing the correct things.

[pas]

I've seen probably too many terminals, but a video that actually demonstrates things (when to press the keys, for how long, what's the expected response from the installer, and so on, and so on) seems super helpful and easy to follow! (Even if it's worse in many regards, like terseness, accessibility for blind people, and so on.)

[scuff3d]

Agreed. Also people tend to add a lot of context when they're talking through a process. That often gets left out when writing.

I've written docs at work intended for non (or less) technical people and it's a pain in the ass to try and get screenshots of expected inputs/outputs, try to predict every question or misunderstanding and make the writing clear. There has been more than a few times I wished I could just record a video.

[duxup]

Youtube creators want to cover this, youtube is their chosen path, so video it is.

Not so much about the best way to communicate as much as the creators see it as their best option, for them.

I've seen a lot of tutorials that really just seem to be infotainment / social media news. Often forgetting critical steps and describing why you do a thing incorrectly. It's frustrating.

[moate]

Exactly this. If I have 100,000 followers on YT for my software related content, why wouldn't I use that platform to post my content? Some people are also visual more visual learners and while straight text is helpful, having a trusted source going screen by screen/prompt by prompt and comparing to their machine is helpful.

So it's both content and communication preferences. HN is a self-selecting group of a certain type, but not everyone on the planet thinks like the average HN dude

[dylan604]

Just yesterday there was a post to one of Geerling's pages where he posts the transcript to a video he's made. He could have just made a text blog and not spent the extra effort of making a video, but that's not what he does. Instead, he went the extra step to make the content available in text only. He could have just as easily left it as video only. (yes yes, creating a text only transcript of video in today's world is trivial, but an extra step nonetheless as it still needs to be added to his CMS to make the webpage)

[plorg]

I'm coming here from a follow up post. I would find it difficult to follow a YouTube version of these instructions, but I might resort to searching for it because it is much easier to find this kind of information on YouTube than through a search engine, whose results are hopelessly polluted by LLM spam that has the deficiencies of often being just subtley wrong enough as to void it's usefulness, misrepresenting chronology in a way that makes it difficult to identify the up-to-date methods, and answering questions that are popular and easy to answer over ones that are difficult or unsolved, while failing to identify the difficult problem or its sticking point.

[Galanwe]

> I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here

For the creator: videos can be monetized trivially

For the search: YouTube results are often highlighted top of the page on Google search results.

[tim333]

As a beginner doing tech things I quite like youtube video. There are various problems with text. It'll say just type this into that but sometimes you don't know what to click to get 'that' to open. Then you find the instructions don't work because they've either skipped over something they think is obvious, or the software version has changed since they wrote it or their setup is different from yours.

At least with a recent video you can see what they click, it's probably up to date and you see all the stuff they do and you can see if it actually works.

I was trying to install jupyter notebook a few months ago and all the how tos failed because macos had updated some nonsense. At least with youtube you can try to find a recent one where they mention that.

[Hard_Space]

TextSniper on Mac and PowerToys OCR on Windows have eased my frustration with rasterized text in 'engagement'-obssessed videos that should have been blog posts.

[AngryData]

Its not as helpful, but youtube will give far better discoverability. Facebook isn't mostly the right audience, and everyone else is fractured up among many other social media companies. Not even reddit is a great place anymore for this sort of thing because so many older users and tech enthusiasts have abandoned it.

[Brett_Riverboat]

My guess is some of the better videos will post the text in the description and some folks are very visual and need to be able to reference an image or video.

But that aside I appreciate the compliment (or at least I'm going to take it as a compliment).

[8note]

you could do screenshots, but my preference would be a video with the text instructions as the description, with timestamp links.

text with images is a pain to scroll, and in video form you have one more channel of info - sound.

the visuals are there to tell you where it is you find the different things, or so you dont go hunting for a button that doesnt actually exist on a gui, but also so you can match the confirmation, and get an idea on if its running at about the right speed

[ratelimitsteve]

it's easier to monetize a video, and if this information is going to have value and be presented for free there has to be someone giving someone money somewhere.

[dylan604]

Suggesting someone can make money off of their efforts that doesn't cost the viewer/reader anything directly is one thing, but to suggest nobody anywhere ever posts anything to the internet without the expectation of monetizing it is just totally ignoring how the internet was started.

[ratelimitsteve]

no one is talking about the entire internet starting from 1976, we're talking about the tech tips space in 2025 where a vanishingly small percentage of people are acting in a non-monetizable way.

[dylan604]

Maybe we can get somebody willing to do a "in a weekend" project scraping websites to just to make that content available on a free website. of course, nobody could afford the hosting fees once all of the bots start scraping your site that you built by scraping other sites.

[NoPicklez]

> I guess I'm out and out of touch

I don't know why this is being put in this "I guess I'm old" bucket. Its just another form of content and a different way of following something. Perhaps if they put the text commands in the video description you would get the best of both worlds.

I like both, but following along watching someone else is helpful. YouTube tutorials on how to do things are extremely helpful.

If you find the video an inconvenience, just don't use it.

[bsder]

> I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here.

Because a bucketload of people only interact with the Internet using a device with a tiny-ass screen and super-shitty keyboard.

So, what you are actually asking is "Why the hell are people using phones to look this shit up instead of a laptop?"

Which, to be fair, is a valid question.

[hulitu]

> I guess I'm old and out of touch after only a bit over three decades, because I can't figure out why this would helpful to have as a video in the first place over the text summary you posted here

It is because "modern" search engines will retrieve only links to SEO spam. The only thing that, somehow, works (50% of the time) is youtube search.

Enshitification.