Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

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short_sells_poo

Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I despise this new fad of everything having to be a video. I can read much-much faster than the goober on youtube can talk, and I can easily skip sections which are uninteresting because I can see at a glance what the paragraph is about. But these days everyone has to be a Content Creator and a Personality and there's just no money or celebrity in written text, even though it is a vastly better medium for a lot of knowhow. So if I want to know something that could be a paragraph, I have to seek through a 15 minute video padded with 10 minutes of "Like, comment and subscribe and don't forget to smash that bell because it helps me so much"...

</old man yells at cloud>

Not only written text is a faster way to communicate information, it is so because it has much bigger context window:

"A moment" in a video is exactly that, a moment of time, either a frame or a couple of seconds that will stay in short term memory.

"A moment" in a text is a page or two facing pages. There can be diagrams or formulas there. It is extremely easy to direct attention to parts of these pages, in any order.

In a video, "moments" in the above sense are generally low information, quickly changing in linear order. In a text, they are fewer and of higher density. It seems that the second type is easier to commit to long-term memory, to understand, etc.

There is a place for everything. I absolutely love video for home improvement stuff, because instructions for those tend to be not great or inaccurate pictographs. The problem is that we forgot that for each task, there is an appropriate tool. Video is a good tool for some things. Raw text is a better tool for other.

It's not about being old fashioned. If you can't maintain focus to read a book, you're obviously not truly engaging with the material. How far are you going to get in a field, if you're reliant on having everything explained to you in simple terms.

Hear! hear!

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