Starting a Blog
Posted and modified Tags:Welcome to my new blog! Formerly I made YouTube videos, some of which became quite popular. However, I've decided to transition from videos to blog posts.
Don't get me wrong, YouTube is great. Great enough to spend hours watching it. What exactly makes it so addicting? I'd argue it's the ease of consumption. You simply hit play, and that's it! The video runs its course, without the need for any active scrolling or reading. Even if it contains nothing of value, its self-playing stream of motion convinces your brain that it's doing something worthwhile.
As soon as writers realized that video is more appealing than text, the video essay was born. Like an audio book, a video essay has a narrator reading some content. At best, it's overlaid with relevant video clips or visualizations. At worst, it's generic stock footage.
Viewers adapted their habits to interact with these videos:
| Text Essay Action | Corresponding Video Essay Action |
|---|---|
| Skim reading. | Fast forwarding the video. |
| Ctrl+F to search for text. | Jumping around or reading a computer-generated transcript. |
| Printing it out. | Downloading/pirating. |
| Reading slowly. | Pausing and rewinding. |
| Reading quietly. | Muting the video and relying on subtitles. |
As you can see, the video essay is awkward for these practical purposes. It's also inaccessible:
| Text Essay | Video Essay |
|---|---|
| Only a few KB, so it's downloadable from anywhere. | Requires 100s of MB. |
| Negligible hosting and storage cost allows for creator-owned websites. | Requires a centralized platform to fund streaming costs through targeted advertising and paid subscriptions. |
| Writing an essay isn't too difficult. | Requires writing a script, buying or recording footage, recording a narration, and editing clips. |
| Blind users can use a screen reader to navigate content and textual descriptions of images in a standardized way. | Blind users can't see text and explanations that are displayed in videos. |
| Deaf users simply read the text. | Deaf users rely on unreliable computer-generated transcripts and subtitles to make sense of what's being said. |
I was inspired to switch to a text-based format after falling in love with a community-made collection of interactive articles called Explorable Explanations. They let you play around with complicated ideas at your own pace by providing interactive examples and simulations.
PS: I broke my addiction to YouTube by installing a browser extension called Delayed Gratification. When you try going to youtube.com, it displays a blank screen for a few seconds before letting you proceed. Turns out this brief pause is all it takes for your conscious brain to overpower the mindless muscle-memory of typing "y" + Enter.
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