Programming

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.

Well, obvious reason: you can't edit an outdated video with easy effort.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

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.

Video demos are nice, but they are not documentation.

Documentation is an ordered list of functions, routines, methodologies, and possibly fields, with a description in a human language (usually English) that follows technical writing standards, assumes nothing about use, and explains what the element is to be used for. It should also contain notes on deprecation, any necessary descriptions of why the program or API is implemented the way it is, descriptions of any expectations of the end user, and no unnecessary frills. They're technical writing, as a rule.

Videos are for showing you how to get a common job done using the tool or API; they cannot be true docs. It's great for jumping in, but as docs they would be absolutely unpalatable!

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.

I prefer written articles

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 As soon as it goes anywhere else, it immediately goes out of date.

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.

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