Why make a 24-minute Youtube video instead of an article with proper navigation?
This is slightly off-topic, but this is a pet-peeve of mine. I believe that for most practical purposes hypertext beats video:
- you can Ctrl-F through text (well, now you sort of can search through a video, but it is much less efficient)
- you can quickly skim through text to find what you need
- text can have proper navigation (chapters etc)
- texts can be linked to each other. Link could lead to a specific part of the text (proper navigation)
- text is much quicker and cheaper to produce
Yet a lot of people make and watch serious educational and informational videos. Why? I don't get it.
Of course I'd prefer a blog post with many looping, silent 5-15 second gifs and no extraneous like-and-subscribe and life-story-delivery. But c'est la vie.
This feels like something you could vibe code up (creating the blog posts from YouTube videos). Fascinating times.
- ad revenue - youtube algorithm placement - sponsored content - street cred
With an article, if you're lucky google will base their AI overview on it, and the creator gets bupkis.
a picture is worth a thousand words. Of course your text article can have pictures, but how can you sure you include all the "useful" pictures. Then there is animation which is impossible to do with static picture.
I've commented about this before [1] but a lot of my simple searches lead to monstrous walls of text with tangential information about the query. The answer is buried well past a simple ctrl-F on the page. It definitely varies for domain though.
When you're trying to repair a Playstation motherboard, you gonna need some photos and text.
Because increasingly many people wont even stoop to reading an article, but will put on some bs video - even for tutorials
If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since 2022. So, by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
> If this source [0] is true then 65% of audiobooks (in 2022) were non-fiction. Likewise that the audiobook industry has grown by nearly 3x since a2022.
Lead to
> by my math, it's simply that people prefer to listen to self-help books (which matches my own experience).
I'm not sure I see the math there, when most nonfiction is not self-help books (and an increase in the broader genre says nothing about a specific niche)
The whole spiel about "I just want to help others in the same situation" died with the Internet, because for the past 30 years it has been entirely feasible to publish your advice and guidance for for free. The books are just for money and fame.
Perhaps there is a business opportunity for a "rigorously fact-checked" chatbot? You can test chatbot to see if it gives "correct" (according to the author's opinion) answers on a topic of your choice and fix errors through prompt engineering, RAG (or other "memory" techniques), fine-tuning the base model if previous two approaches didn't work.
You can also probably teach it to use your own voice instead of dreaded LLM-isms, to make it sound less like typical AI-slop. This potentially can attract people, who are annoyed by the typical AI voice.
Perhaps, people who wrote self-help books should craft bespoke, custom-made chatbots instead?
Or even books like “The Phoenix(/Unicorn) Project”.
I think he was actually saying that by calling it fiction, lol.
These were just not on the market except for one that had 8 section 8 apartments and would have driven me crazy trying to manage as a bleeding heart who cares about people.
Like it or not a lot of successful businesses have some bodies buried somewhere, particularly those that have been successful in two-sided markets such as online communities. There have been legendary successes in marketing enterprise software that didn't quite exist but I can say it didn't work when I tried it.