The Death of the Technical Blog Post

Here's the problem: a junior developer spent 45 minutes typing code from a YouTube tutorial. Character by character. The video didn't provide copyable snippets. That's 45 minutes for what should have been 30 seconds. Nobody writes technical blog posts anymore. They make videos. Something important got lost.

The logic is sound on paper.

The problem is that video monetizes better, not communicates better. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey consistently shows technical documentation and Stack Overflow remain top resources for learning to code. Yet content creators abandoned text because YouTube ads pay more. The thoughtful, searchable, skimmable technical blog post - the format that built the programming knowledge base of the internet - is dying.

This isn't just nostalgia. Something functional has been lost.

What Text Did Well

Technical blog posts had properties that video doesn't:

Searchable. You could Google an error message and find exactly the paragraph that explained it. Try that with a 40-minute YouTube tutorial. The information is there, somewhere in the middle, but good luck finding it.

Skimmable. You could scroll through a post, find the section you needed, read it, and move on. Video forces you to watch linearly or scrub randomly hoping to land in the right spot.

Copy-pasteable. Code samples in text can be copied directly. Code samples in video need to be transcribed by hand. I've watched developers literally type out code from YouTube tutorials character by character.

Editable. When something changed or was wrong, authors could update text posts. Video is frozen. Outdated tutorials accumulate, pointing people toward deprecated APIs and abandoned libraries.

Why Video Won

Despite these disadvantages, video dominates technical content. The reasons are mostly economic:

Video monetizes better. YouTube ads pay more than blog ads. Sponsors prefer video. The creator economy rewards video formats with money that text can't match.

Video has lower barrier to entry for creators. Writing well is hard. Talking at a camera while coding is easier for most people. You don't need to organize your thoughts as carefully when you can just narrate your screen. As Jeff Atwood wrote, articles are especially efficient for both learning and sharing knowledge - but writing requires processing information in a way that speaking simply doesn't.

Video feels more personal. Viewers develop parasocial relationships with video creators in ways they don't with blog authors. That drives engagement, subscriptions, and patronage.

Algorithms prefer video. YouTube's recommendation engine surfaces content in ways that blog posts can't match. The discovery advantage is enormous.

What Got Lost

The shift to video created real problems:

Knowledge became ephemeral. Old blog posts are still indexed and findable. Old videos sink in search rankings and get recommended less. The collective knowledge base becomes more transient.

Quality filtered out. Writing requires organizing thoughts clearly. Video allows meandering. The average blog post was more information-dense than the average tutorial video because the format demanded it.

Non-English speakers got left behind. Text can be easily translated and read at any pace. Video requires listening comprehension at native speaker speed. The globalization of programming knowledge slowed down.

Accessibility declined. Text is inherently accessible to screen readers and assistive technology. Video requires accurate captions that most creators don't provide. The deaf and hard of hearing community lost access to content.

The Documentation Gap

Official documentation is supposed to be text. But when popular learning happens in video, official docs become orphaned. Developers learn from YouTube, then can't find what they need in the docs because they never learned to read technical documentation.

I've seen developers who genuinely don't know how to read API documentation because all their learning has been video-based. They search for a YouTube tutorial for every problem because that's the format they know. When no video exists, they're stuck.

This creates a dependency on content creators that shouldn't exist. The information is in the docs. But an entire generation of developers never learned to extract it.

The AI Angle

There's an irony here. AI coding assistants are trained primarily on text - code and documentation. They don't learn from YouTube videos. The shift to video content may actually be slowing AI training data growth for programming tasks.

Meanwhile, AI assistants are good at answering the questions that blog posts used to answer. "How do I do X in language Y?" used to require a blog post or Stack Overflow answer. Now it requires a prompt.

The video creators are losing to AI in exactly the way that blog authors predicted. Text is computable. Video isn't - at least not yet.

What's Actually Working

The technical blog isn't completely dead. Some formats still thrive:

Deep technical dives. Posts that go deep on a specific topic, with original research or analysis, still get read and shared. Surface-level tutorials lost to video; genuine insight didn't.

Personal engineering blogs. Engineers at companies sharing what they've built and learned. These often become hiring signals and reputation builders in ways that video doesn't.

Architecture decision records. Internal documentation that explains why things were built the way they were. This never went video and never will.

The common thread: content that requires thought to produce still requires text. It's the quick tutorials that went video. The thoughtful analysis stayed written.

What This Means for Learning

If you're learning programming primarily through video, you're building a dependency on a format that doesn't scale. You'll eventually hit problems that no YouTube tutorial covers. You'll need to read documentation, search Stack Overflow archives, understand error messages.

Video is fine as a supplement. It's dangerous as a primary learning mode. The skills that make you productive - reading technical docs, searching efficiently, understanding error messages - are text-native skills that video doesn't develop.

The best engineers I know still read more than they watch. They can learn from documentation, not just tutorials. That's not coincidence.

The Corporate Knowledge Problem

Inside companies, the same dynamic plays out. Teams that document decisions in writing build institutional memory. Teams that communicate everything in meetings and Slack messages lose context constantly.

When someone asks "why did we build it this way?" the answer should be a document, not "I think someone mentioned it in standup three months ago." When onboarding new engineers, there should be architecture docs to read, not just calendar invites to shadow meetings.

The shift to video in the public technical sphere has parallels in private corporate communication. The shift to synchronous communication at the expense of written documentation creates the same problem: knowledge that exists but isn't accessible when you need it.

Companies that enforce written decision records, technical design docs, and post-mortem reports are effectively maintaining their own technical blogs. The format matters as much internally as externally.

Content Value Calculator

Compare video vs. blog value over time. Video spikes then decays; text compounds through SEO:

What Would Bring Text Back

The economics would have to change. If text content could monetize as effectively as video, creators would create more of it. Some possibilities:

Paywalled technical content is growing. Substacks focused on engineering topics. Premium newsletters with deep technical analysis. The subscription model works for text in ways that advertising doesn't.

AI training demand creates new value for text. If models need text data, there's indirect economic value in creating it - though the incentives haven't translated to direct creator compensation yet.

Search evolution might matter. If AI assistants become the primary way people find information, and they process text better than video, the discoverability advantage of video might erode.

None of these reverse the trend entirely. But they might carve out sustainable niches for text content that serves readers who need more than video can provide.

"Text is searchable. Text is permanent. Text is accessible. Video is profitable. Choose accordingly."