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Comment by vova_hn2 | Hacker News Reader

> How-to YouTube videos. Why scrub through a 24-minute video to find the 40 seconds you need, when an AI can watch it for you and hand you the steps?

Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?

This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:

- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)

- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need

- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)

- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)

- text is much quicker and cheaper to produce

Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.

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The right 15 seconds of video can be extremely helpful with household tasks. I'm thinking specifically of super-tactile ones like getting such-and-such panel off the car or appliance so that you can get at the bit you're looking to replace. Those can really be worth a thousand words.

Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.

> Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.

This feels like something you could vibe code up (creating the blog posts from YouTube videos). Fascinating times.

Perhaps, but the recently shared vibe-coded blog posts I've seen on HN have been… not that great.

Wouldn't be surprised if this is viable by next year though.

Between the bloat and bad UI in both modern OSes and modern websites, I'm seriously considering if my next OS will be a command line pointing to an LLM where most web browsing is rendered out in plain text (perhaps LCARS, just for fun?), and any apps that actually need a UI are just-in-time generated as each feature is needed.

After all, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VibeOS already exists.

Yep, for home improvement and work on cars, I’ll take the video every time. Everything else, if only a video is available, I’ll ask Grok to summarize it so I don’t have to sit through it.

But last weekend I had to remove a trim panel under the hood of my car to extract a dead rodent, and I was wondering how to get those round clips off without breaking them. This video helped: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K_rsVDj5s1o&ra=m

The AI summary of the same video explains the exact steps but doesn’t show them actually being done.

It's because you get better ad rates on Youtube than if you made a website and posted the information there. Additionally, the current state of the web (Google only exposing SEO blogspam, AI overviews making it so ~60% of searches end without the user clicking on a site) pushes people further and further away from making websites.

Being able to skim, filter and comprehend large amounts of text is much more rare than you might think. More than half of Americans read below sixth grade level and a fifth is functionally illiterate, struggling even with the most basic reading tasks. Videos are the only way for these people to consume any kind of information.

Isn't it obvious? The creator gets paid much more, in whatever currency they care about:

- ad revenue - youtube algorithm placement - sponsored content - street cred

With an article, if you're lucky google will base their AI overview on it, and the creator gets bupkis.

It's the money that comes from getting people to watch ads, generally speaking. If people write an article, even if it blows up all over the internet, nothing happens. If they make a little shitty short that appeals to kids, with a thumbnail where they make a stupid face, they get a a chunk of actual money. I imagine it's real hard to not get influenced by that.

But as understandable as it may be, a clown whose job is to keep people entertained until the ad break can talk about a lot of things, but cannot be something else. This clown talks about math, the other one just rubs the microphone over materials and then says "smash that like button", but they all have the same purpose and can only differentiate themselves by how much engagement they create. The platform is the payload, the content is whatever.

It's a mixed bag. When you're (for example) repairing a lawnmower, being able to see parts from different angles and hear what it sounds like is very useful.

When you're trying to repair a Playstation motherboard, you gonna need some photos and text.

One would make a long education video to hold eyeballs longer that can lead to more ad revenue (if that's your goal and your video is sufficiently entertaining).

I've commented about this before [1] but a lot of my simple searches lead to monstrous walls of text with tangential information about the query. The answer is buried well past a simple ctrl-F on the page. It definitely varies for domain though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45830763

YouTube handles distribution. Some people search for information by typing their question in the YouTube search box. Whatever article you wrote won't surface there. You have to post to many social media sites if you want to show up everywhere people are looking.

A lot of people are functionally illiterate. Those people are online now. We have image, video, and sound based social media for them. They send each other videos and voice messages instead of texts.

Not only that, they're creating content for each other. People who can barely compose an email run TikTok accounts and YouTube channels and podcasts with audiences in the millions.

I don't even know if I think this is a bad thing. Sure, their education system failed them, but they need to know how to do things, and they often have information worth sharing. Providing video tutorials almost becomes a question of accessibility (in the a11y sense) in some contexts.

There can be a lot to gain from the graphics and audio, depending on the topic.

A certain portion of people just prefer learning from video instead of text.

And audio. This also explains the popularity of podcasts, the descendants of a century or so of radio shows.

I thought the explanation for podcasts was people who drive to and from work, and don't care for current radio shows.

More than just your commute. Any downtime where you are doing a mindless chore is prime podcast time.

Personally, I don't care for podcasts much around the house. I listen to them much less now that I don't commute.

> text is much quicker and cheaper to produce

I agree that a huge percent of 10+ minute YouTube videos would be better off as a few sentences and a bulleted list.

The success of YouTube and TikTok has shown that video is by far the easiest way for the average person to share whatever they know and have a chance of getting it seen. Where would the average person even post a article?

>Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos

a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course your text article can have pictures, but how can you sure you include all the "useful" pictures. Then there is animation which is impossible to do with static picture.

>Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?

Because increasingly many people wont even stoop to reading an article, but will put on some bs video - even for tutorials

I wonder why not write an article for people with correct information. Then have the LLM create 5 articles with slightly wrong information with generated plausible URLs.

> Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?

Which one is more likely to result in more ad revenue for you?

It’s because large fractions of internet users today are functionally illiterate and can’t follow an article.

Yeah since most are visual learners. Of course reading is quicker.

Text is not cheaper to produce. Most people can type out a lot of drivel but something worth reading takes practice and talent to write.

>Why? I don't get it

Because articles make no money?

Because, money. Nothing else.

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