You probably have already noticed that nowadays it’s becoming fashionable online to share technical material via videos (eg YouTube.)
I somehow can understand the appeal of creating videos for sharing thoughts/news, esp b/c it takes way less time and focus compared to writing things (just hit the record button and go.)
But videos are
👎 not index-able (at least locally)
👎 not searchable
👎 not copy-paste friendly if at all
👎 impossible to skim through
👎 a major distraction from the train of thoughts
IMO, in most cases, the more effective and impactful medium of technical comms is the written form: a Mastodon toot, a blog post, a gist, a Pastebin entry or even a Facebook post!
What are your thoughts?
Documentation is different from demonstration. Text (with graph or animation interspersed to unpack unintuitive terms) wins for documentation. Video could be good for demo if presented in a no-nonsense manner.
Documentation to me is the instructions manual of the technology. Everything from get started to specifics and edge cases.
Most videos are demonstrations or tutorials of how to use it. They’re no different from a blogger (do people even say that word anymore) who writes up a how to guide.
Clearly different audiences.
Not certain why OP is annoyed at this to post this question in two different places.
I’m sure why they’re doing it; there’s been an increase in “how to” videos sitting in search results as the documentation instead of as demos. Often it’s even that way for official commercial products; the product comes with a link to a video instead of printed or online documentation.
No idea why it’s happening; it could be a search engine thing more than a “wrong media for the task” thing.
Some one at the last company I worked for was trying to push us to make video knowledge articles for everything we did and I actually had to go to our leadership and argue with them to make them understand how much of a waste of time that was. We had plenty of actual work to do instead of dicking around with video editing.
The best I’ve seen include a transcript, even better when it is clickable and updated the position of the video. Pure video isn’t great, lots of wasted time. Pure text is better, but also takes a lot of attention and focus. For very in depth information text can’t be beat though, unless they are making a ton of separate videos which also gets cumbersome.
I rarely watch videos except maybe car repair, i can extract info from text exponentially faster.
Both formats have their place.
In my opinion written documents should be the primary source, and can be enhanced by using video to show details that are difficult to explain succinctly on paper. A picture really can be worth a thousand words.
The only goal of technical documentation in video format is to monetize it on YT. It’s a lesser format in every way and people create it only to get some $ out of their work. It’s good for the creators (it’s easier for them to monetize), bad for users. Let’s just create a startup where you will be able to monetize technical documentation. Like only fans but for programmers.