I really dislike that a lot of content is now Video

2024-02-24 @rrobin

This is a rant for sure, but that in itself does not make it false (also does not make it true), I think I will file this in the Saturday introspection category.

I find it incredibly frustrating the amount of content today that is distributed over video rather than text.

Earlier today I was looking for some old school information about some specific algorithms. The sort of stuff you find in computer science books, but I had none at hand.

And I was more interested in looking at an actual implementation in imperative style.

So I went into a search engine at throw some words at it. A significant part of what I get is

Ad content with some very bare bones information

Videos with someone explaining how such and such works

Some of those videos are good other bad, but that is not my point. I find it hard to go through this kind of content in a video. I have to wait for the whole thing to be sure it is useful (or not) since there is not index structure.

I should mention here my own biases:

it has been a long time since I learned in a classroom environment

language in such videos gets in the way (accents or terminology don't match my own)

I have NOT done the legwork to understand why this is happening, but I can still throw some hypotheses around.

Your search fu is just bad

Maybe I just need a different search engine. But I tried alternatives and got no better results. e.g. marginalia shows no video content but still lands low quality results.

Google/DDG are somewhat similar in this.

Your arrive at low quality Youtube results

This is true. First most video output out of a search engine is YT anyway (because most content is YT). Not like I care too much since I generally don't want to see video content.

Go back to your books, old cog

I'm old and grumpy and my behaviour does not match the majority, so either "evolve" (sarcasm) or go back home.