Instructional video instead of step-by-step text is a personal pet peeve. I know it's a lot easier to just record a video to show something like "how to replace the battery on a cordless vacuum" or "removing a sink basin nut" but it's often such a painful experience for consumption (watch a moment, pause, scrub back and watch again, pause, continue, pause, all with potentially gloved hands often in tight working spaces).
I really enjoy watching instructional videos, especially for recipes. The demo of the cooking techniques is almost always hard to write or talk about, and easy to show.
In the kitchen it works this way for me:
1. Watch the video once or twice all the way through to "learn it" and decide if it's what I want to do.
2. Put together my mise en place and basic prep for the recipe. Learning to do this was a game changer.
3. Finally, put it on my phone or tablet in my kitchen and let it play while I work, it's mostly audio at this point as I've "seen" the content a few times but I'm just listening as if the video is a coach. I'll hit pause at the major steps, and scrub back if I need a refresher on a technique or step.
I've gotten through some very complex dishes this way, and never hit the equivalent rhythm using cookbooks or recipe websites. The audio part of step 3 is really critical to me as it helps me focus on the food rather than remembering all the steps and it's just fills up the background space in my kitchen or act as a coach. The only way it would be better for me is if it automatically paused after each step and I could then ask it "what next?" or "go back two steps, I missed a step" or some other audio prompt.
Granted, there's a blurry line here, since I certainly may pick up some useful techniques and knowledge from cooking edutainment content even though I never genuinely aspire to the same level of personal cooking.
If we want people to create more text-based material, it needs to have similar financial incentives.
Now, people consume most of their information in video formats. Think about the rise of Vine, Youtube, TikTok, and the 100s of others out there just like them.
They are growing like weeds, because that's apparently how the public now likes to consume media, info, etc.
"Oh, but they're only doing it because it will trick people into paying more money."
I know most all of us here are techies and very used to cracking open books and documentation and text tutorials to teach ourselves stuff, but many people are not like that and especially if you're new to a subject, sometimes books just don't help things to click as well for some reason.
There's probably something to do with the way material is structured and presented differently between talking about it and writing about it, but I wouldn't know what to say about it.
I dunno, just a guess because it's an interesting observation to think about.
I understand and agree with you but there are situations where full video is better anyways.
example from life: I needed to teardown old laptop to replace thermal paste and I was following some image guide it was all fine until one part stuck and I couldn't figure out what was holding it. there was no way to figure that out from description and images, I needed to find video.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that ideally you want both, or maybe hybrid? like step by step guide constructed from short looped videos showing you how to do that single step?
Visuals can be useful. I had to look at one just this morning tearing down an old HP Elitebook 8470p. Here I was removing all kinds of screws, when it's just a battery release sliders move, then the entire panel just slides off. doh.
But, most of the time, I just need the list. I don't need a video of someone stepping through some arcane, obscure and rarely needed AD repair. Just gimme the steps and I'll take it from there. :)
- Big white page not showing any text or images until the entire page and its assets are downloaded, which means if you accidentally click something and go back you have to wait another several seconds for everything to load again
- Pop up GDPR popup while hands are covered in flour and eggs
- Pop up "would you like to subscribe to the newsletter" while hands are covered in sticky sauce
- Pop up "buy this shit for 10% off" with a microscopic X button while something on high heat on the stove
- Not specifying image height and width in CSS so that when user is looking at a piece of text and images above it load, the scrolling position jumps
For these reasons alone I've largely stopped looking at the internet for recipes and turned to physical books, which are much better behaved.
I'm tempted to say that this is a dark pattern because when it happens to me is is almost always a "subscribe", "purchase", or "login" button.
It does a remarkable job at extracting the recipes, and the end result is a consistent experience no matter the source.
So he's using the same bit of friction that this article is trying to solve, to fill his rice bowl. It's a bit of a shame that fixing this problem for me will cause one for him.
You spelled out exactly what the attention economy is about. Friction. The money is made on friction. Waste - of time, of cognitive effort, of emotions good and bad.
I feel sorry for this guy, but at the same time, I wish people recognized that attention economy isn't about some nebulous attention you have too much of and don't feel when it's being taken. On the contrary, attention is stolen through friction, and the sum of everyone who "fills their rice bowls" this way is why the web and so many processes and activities on-line feel like shit and remain painfully wasteful.
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And, to your point, friction-based monetization is one of the more effective ways to monetize your content.
If you can't monetize your content, what's the point in creating it? Creating a lot of this content takes time, and therefore many people won't create it if it's not worth their time.
If the world would just start paying directly for content (e.g. via Patreon), and if that was the only monetization needed, then maybe we could remove the painful friction (or other painful methods of monetization). But unfortunately, this will probably never be sufficient on its own.
I wish we'd go the other way, where free text content is complemented by paid-for audio or video commentary. But it has to be a very dull video for a bullet list to be a good replacement (and a bad bullet list to be able to capture what a good video production can convey).
Perhaps it is a rationalization, but I don't feel that consuming content that someone offers to me for free creates an obligation on my part, whether I love it or not.
> Garlic balsamic chicken, you'll be making over and over. By sear your chicken. I resin wine. Grab yourself a nice large bowl, extra virgin and olive oil. Balsamic glaze. Tomato paste. Honey, fresh lemon juice, garlic, Oregano fresh thyme, coat my chicken with this beautiful balsamic, no balsamic, left behind. Don't you dare waste the good thing. Right? Going in the oven at four twenty five degrees, about thirty ish minutes. Look yes. Fresh thyme, fresh parsley. This is so good. I can't wait. Win our winner. Oh
If we run this through ChatGPT with some basic prompt engineering this becomes:
> Start by searing your chicken in a pan. In a large bowl, combine extra virgin olive oil and balsamic glaze. Add tomato paste, honey, fresh lemon juice, garlic, oregano, and fresh thyme. Coat the chicken thoroughly with this balsamic mixture, ensuring no glaze is left behind. Preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. Place the coated chicken in the oven and bake for about 30 minutes. Once cooked, garnish with fresh thyme and fresh parsley. Serve and enjoy your delicious garlic balsamic chicken. (Note: The phrase "I resin wine" in the audio transcription seems unclear and is possibly a mishearing. I have omitted it as it does not appear to fit the context of the recipe.)
ffprobe -show_frames -of compact=p=0 -f lavfi "movie=THE_VIDEO_FILE,select=gt(scene\,0.3)" -pretty`It seems to be a proper media for 'printing' a video.
Of course, choosing challenges and finding solutions is what drives fun.
The recipe could be loaded up via a linked smartphone or something, but then you have a device that you can touch with food covered hands and then wash it right alongside your hands later. Big screen so you don't have to squint or scroll frequently like you would on a smartwatch. E-ink so it works well despite bright kitchen lights and has low power consumption.
Live web pages suck because they pop up annoyances every 5 seconds that you have to deal with while your hands are messy, and the scrolling jumps around against your will.
The use-case is technical videos (like from conferences) I’m interested, but not enough to invest 20-60 minutes.
Haven’t used it in a few months so the yt-dlp commands may need updating.
If I make a video of me cooking, can I embed the recipe in the video, etc. Not just visually, but i.e. at 10s, I digitally insert the data "Add 1 cup red peppers". It isn't necessary a caption of something said or shown, just extra data.
Could a video creator leave substantially more metadata in their videos? I always assumed the pop-up metadata was externally stored and timestamp synced. Is there a way to embed it?
> We’ve all been there: we used the florb for too many glorbs and now it needs to be replaced. [...]
> This is an experience that everyone at the staff of howto.biz.uk has had! [...]
> But how do you replace a used-up florb? In this article we are going to show you how. [...]
> [scan the next five paragraphs]
I got this running yesterday (Sunday), and I wanted to write the blog post first to test if there was any interest in this topic. Apparently, yes. Now I only have to do the remaining 80% ;-)
(Very cool and useful project, though.)
You could even do a little line drawing of the important bits.
You could keep this "cook" book in your kitchen, and maybe pass it to one of your kids (just an example) when they move out or something.
I didn’t see how that print out would be super useful, it’s not the complete step by step is it?
* It does not print the video frames as a 3D object.
* Despite what the graphic at the link suggests, it doesn't 3D-print food
it extracts a recipe with images and text from a video, automatically.