[DISCUSS] Pros/cons of videos for technical documentation?

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 As soon as it goes anywhere else, it immediately goes out of date.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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 prefer written articles

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.

Weirdly not many responses are talking about real workspace that much. While written docs are king, video has its own place. Recordings of technical meetings are very valuable and if spoken in english, tools like sharepoint are transcribing them, so you can search them via text. Most often those meetings material will never be written, so video is best second choice.

The one case where I prefer video is when I know next to nothing about the topic and the other choice is mediocre to low-quality writing. Most people aren't great technical writers, and it's easy to skip over steps either because the writer assumes too much prior knowledge or simply because it takes effort to put that information in. On the other hand, videos are the opposite where it takes effort to cut stuff out, so you usually get all the steps which is what I need when I don't know anything.

If I have the option of a well-written, step-by-step tutorial though, or if I already know the topic and have a vague idea of what I'm looking for, then text is much better for being able to search/skim/go back and forth at my own pace.

I agree to pretty much all the previous answer (text >>>> video), just adding what's missing from my point of view:

Video can be fun. As irrelevant as this might seem at first, motivation is an important part of every learning process. If you can make the information easier to digest for some people, it can make their learning progress more efficient and effective.

"Being fun" can relate to literal jokes (which I like much less in text documentation), presentation style, atmosphere. It can also help to address more sensory modalities to support learning (like audio, colors, or sometimes people just like having a face explain things to them).

I also feel I need to focus much less to follow a video than I need to digest a technical documentation in text form. Yes, I might spend more time on the video to achieve the same understanding, but I can consume it in more situations. For example, when tired before going to bed, or while eating, I might still watch a video about something I'd like to learn, but rather not scroll through the corresponding docs.

Ideally, videos would be additional to clearly structured and comprehensive text docs. But as much as consumers are people, producers are, too. If they happen to prefer video for whatever reason, and don't have the resources to do both, video is what you get.

Unfortunately, trends are trends. I wonder if we can get people to use the open source live captions application that futo sponsored recently. At very least we can get reasonably high quality captions, as well as a full transcript automatically generated with each video. Live captions is done with a locally running AI so you don't have to reach out to any third parties or share data to use it.