I hate videos. I’d rather read a book with 500 pages than watch a video about anything. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever watched a technical video in my whole life.

I’m mostly in the pro-written word camp myself, but I have sought out video tutorials in cases where written docs seem to assume something I don’t know. When I’m learning something new, a written doc might have a 3-word throwaway clause like “… add a user and then…”. But I’ve never added a user and don’t know how. If it’s niche open-source software with a small dev team, this may not be covered in the docs either. I’ll go fishing for videos and just seeing that they go to a web-ui or config-file or whatever sets me on the path to figure out the rest myself.

That is to say, video content that shows someone doing a thing successfully often includes unspoken visual information that the author doesn’t necessarily value or even realize is being communicated. But the need to do the thing successfully on-screen involves documenting many small/easy factoids that can easily trip someone inexperienced up for hours.

I’m as annoyed as anyone when I want reference material and find only videos, and I generally prefer written tutorials as well. But sometimes a video tutorial is the thing that gets me oriented enough to understand the written worthy I wasn’t ready to process previously.

Edit: The ubiquity of video material probably has little to do with it’s usefulness though, and everything to do with how easy it is to monetize on YouTube.

Can’t ctrl+f a video. People don’t often have good presenting skills, talk slowly or with defects. Text is much easier to navigate, faster to read.

Technical videos have helped me perfect my pronunciation of “umm” and “uhh.”

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 As soon as it goes anywhere else, it immediately goes out of date.

I like written-form documentation, it means I don’t need to play audio in our shared space at work. It’s also a lot faster to find what I’m looking for with written docs than skipping through a video looking for the relevant bits.

Usually when I’m looking for docs, I find that the less time I need to spend in the material, the better. Videos are fixed length and don’t often come with a list of labelled timestamps.

Technical documentation of API, Language constructs, and usage (a la mandoc) should always have a standard-compliant (any widely accepted help manual format like mdbook or texi) text form licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL). This is to ensure that freedom 01 (“The freedom to study how the program works”) is not obstructed in any way.

Videos are tougher due to having a much wider arrange of factors. First off, you’d want to make your videos accessible (using subtitles, on-screen graphics and not just a narration all the way through, translation to other languages). You’d also want to be able to share that video among your peers without obstruction. Just having it be hosted to a proprietary mass-media site like YouTube will not be enough. I have doubts about the “hit record and magic happens” premise, videos are a lot more daunting than text formats if you don’t have the prerequisite equipment and skills beforehand.

If you really want to create videos, you should have a text alternative to the video or at least a technical summary of the video’s topics attached alongside the video so that you can leverage both text and video alongside each other.

Videos are not documentation.

They can be used to demonstrate examples of how to do a particular task, but as other commenters have mentioned, documentation involves listing classes, functions, parameters, etc and clearly explaining what they all do, in a searchable manner. Text is searchable, video is not.

I prefer written articles. But for teaching, especially someone who is a junior or novice in the field… Video works better.

So depending on the audience.

If it’s a YouTube video, it probably has been made to monetise, not to share tech material. So I usually avoid YouTube, because most of the time it’s not worth it.

Well, obvious reason: you can’t edit an outdated video with easy effort. But with text you can.

But for a tech talk or demo, I’d still prefer a video than written text.

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I prefer written articles

It really depends on what’s being taught imo. If it’s something purely text-based like programming then sure, I absolutely would prefer reading an article to watching a video. For most tutorials though I think there’s benefit in seeing things done visually step by step. Most tools are visual, so learning stuff like 3D modelling or video editing through text can be difficult, but seeing someone do it in front of me makes everything click since I can see exactly what he did and don’t have to read between the steps.

I like Fireship style videos for a quick introduction to a subject, but I avoid videos if I quickly need to find something. Text is searchable and just a lot quicker in general.