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.

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."

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Well, obvious reason: you can't edit an outdated video with easy effort.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

I prefer written articles

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.

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 As soon as it goes anywhere else, it immediately goes out of date.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.