Let’s take a break from the computer architecture analogy and talk about a pet peeve of mine: the proliferation of video tutorials on the Internet. Blame my engineering background, but I’m pretty obsessed with efficiency, and videos are often the least optimal way of delivering information.

1. They’re slow. Slow to load, slow to watch, slow to learn from. Buffering takes long enough as it is, but then we need to sit through a long video to find that one (usually tiny) piece of information we wanted in the first place. Everyone is capable of reading faster than anyone is capable of speaking, anyways.
2. They’re huge. Granted, video compression and Internet speeds have come a long way, but videos are still unnecessarily large for the little information they convey. They can easily be 100x larger than a similarly informative plaintext document.
3. They’re not searchable. My personal favourite, not being able to CTRL+F a video really drives me up the wall. It means I have to painstakingly scrub the whole video for what I want, keeping my balance along the knife-edge of “if I go faster I might miss it” and “if I go slower I might shoot myself” all the while.
4. They might not even have what I want. After all this scrubbing, it might not even answer my question, and there’s no way of knowing without taking the plunge.
5. They’re not easily editable. So you’ve release version 2.0 of your popular software, with a slightly improved UI? Time to remake all your videos from scratch instead of just updating a screenshot and a couple keywords!
6. They make too much noise. I’d rather not disturb everyone around me as I hunt for an answer; critical information should not be confined exclusively to audio.
7. They’re not repeatable. I finally hit the jackpot and found the information I wanted, but I didn’t quite catch what you said there! Time to scrub back and forth a few times, instead of just slowing down and absorbing at my own pace.
8. They’re not copyable. I can’t just CTRL+C whatever you said to save for later, I can’t easily take a still shot of your video for reference, I need to just remember.

All of the above reasons have trained my subconscious to completely ignore most video content when seeking answers. Anyways, it feels good to vent, but luckily I’m not just here to tell you to get off my lawn. Instead, I want you to be considerate and question trends before following them. So, here’s some advice on how to use video tutorials responsibly:

1. Ask yourself why you’ve chosen to make a video. Is it because it’s genuinely the best way to deliver highly visual content (which is often perfectly legitimate), or because you’re lazy and it’s easy to just fire up FRAPS and yell into a mic?
2. If you must make a video, don’t be a douchenozzle. Don’t create a cheesy intro animation, don’t ramble for several minutes, don’t play any music in the background, crop your video so I don’t need to see your nine different messenger conversations blinking furiously, and slow down during the parts that actually matter. If you can’t resist all of these temptations, please go back to using text.
3. If you must make a video, provide a plaintext version with screenshots as necessary. So that all the geeks like me out there don’t ignore you on principle (we’re sorry, we blame the YouTube twelve year-olds that do the things listed above). As an example, the amazing patio11 provides transcripts of all his podcasts, and people like me love him for it. And you do want to be loved, don’t you?

Now, I am aware that it’s just as possible to make a terrible plaintext tutorial, riddled with spelling mistakes and full of useless fluff. But looking at the big picture, I think that the very worst plaintext tutorial is still better than the average bad video tutorial, since it doesn’t suffer from any of the problems I listed above. It’ll let me CTRL+F, find what I want, and nope my way out of there ASAP. It’s also much more forgiving than video as there are far fewer ways to be obnoxious through plaintext (like not having sound).

So please, create more plaintext tutorials, and take it as an opportunity to improve your writing skills… the Internet can certainly use some of that.