cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/3560540

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?

  • @atheken
    10•11 months ago

    Demo videos are not “documentation.” They are “demos.”

    If you want someone to repeat your steps, it should be code or CLI commands. You can write more descriptive text, but as soon as you reference pictures to show something, you’re introducing ambiguity that text/code can avoid.

    UIs change faster than videos and screenshots, as you said, can’t be searched, and are generally less accessible than text.

    The source files for documentation should also live side-by-side with the code in the repo. As soon as it goes anywhere else, it immediately goes out of date.