Back to the talks Previous by track: An example of a cohesive student workflow in Emacs Next by track: Transducers: finally, ergonomic data processing for Emacs! Track: General

So You Want To Be An Emacs-Fluencer?

Gopar - IRC: gopar, https://www.youtube.com/@goparism/ , gopardaniel@gmail.com

Format: 22-min talk ; Q&A: Etherpad
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2024-sharing
Status: TO_FOLLOW_UP

00:00.000 Introduction
00:12.466 Knowledge grows when it is shared
00:36.333 When's the last time you shared something?
01:07.200 Sharing Emacs
02:41.566 My background
03:06.766 Why you should make Emacs videos (or other formats)
03:44.100 Beginners
05:22.966 Intermediate
05:56.133 Advanced
06:22.866 Impostor syndrome
07:28.466 Process for recording
08:46.400 Details: recording
09:36.700 Tips: Recording
13:33.440 Details: Editing
14:38.320 Tips: Editing
15:44.000 Details: Uploading
16:06.820 Tips: Uploading
18:06.166 Your secret sauce
19:04.933 Cons of YouTube
Duration: 21:40 minutes

Description

Ever thought about sharing your Emacs knowledge? Starting a YouTube channel, blog, podcast, or even smoke signals to share those tidbits? If you’ve answered "No", then I'd like to change your mind. And if you said "Yes", then you're already on the right path.

In this talk, I will share what I've learned from my journey as an Emacs advocate, including tips, setups (both current and past), and various alternatives to get your works out there. Most importantly, I'll discuss why your story and perspective matter, even if you think otherwise. Your unique experience can inspire and help others in the Emacs community.

About the speaker:

Gopar, a fellow Emacs user and advocate, will be sharing insights on how everyone can become the Emacs Influencer they never knew they wanted to be.

From starting a YouTube channel to writing blogs, Gopar will provide practical tips and share personal experiences to help you embark on your journey of sharing Emacs knowledge.

Discussion

Questions and answers

  • Q: Why does Gen-Z listen to podcasts and videos instead of read books (not just a rumor, that's what they've told me)? The question has baffled me for a while and perhaps you've got an idea.
    • A: Gopar: Not quite sure how to answer this but I do know that the vast majority of my viewers are millenials and older (According to youtube analytics)
    • A: \<gs-101> Gen Z here. Not all of us raised in a book-centric family for education, so visual or audio media is mostly all we know (that's how it was for me, never seen my parents reading books, but that's probably because I'm from a low income enviroment). I moved to books for learning so I can't answer this question that much further. But one thing I can say is that it can be easier to visualize the amount of content, since you can easily view in the video's timestamp, that it has 12 hours or something. Podcasts are similar too. Interesting, ty. I notice that most intermediate to advanced content is book based. Put differently: few videos/podcasts break through the beginner's barrier. Easier to get started than to grow professionally w/o books.
      • sachac: might also be related to how niche-y the topics get. Like, we have lots of Emacs and Org tutorials, but go a bit further and things get pretty specific / idiosyncratic, and then the cost/benefit (making it, searching it, etc.) of video vs literate programming notes exported as a blog post tends to lean more towards words. I like videos for quick workflow demonstrations.
  • Q: What do you think about "silent coding videos"? I'm not a native speaker and conscious of my accent/voice & I really prefer recording "silent hacking" videos now.
    • A: Gopar: Awesome! The beauty of the interwebs is that there is always a group of people that like/learn/prefer the same way you do. You can cater to these people :) Also whats stopping from creating content in your native language? (German is ugly :-) & I live in US) I would also encourage that! More Emacs videos in multiple languages :) Good point.
  • Q: Does anyone know what happened to the emacs-elements YT channel? The style and cadance were quite different to a lot of the other Emacs video content online, and I found it to be a fantastic reference. It's a shame it seems to have disappeared :(
    • sachac: I confirmed with him that it was his decision (not a hack); he didn't provide details, so we'll respect his privacy thanks, totally understand!
      • audience: a pity. i enjoyed his YTs too.
    • gs-101: A bit unrelated, but there's also this creator who made one video on Emacs and then disappered too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRpHIa-2XCE. This is his first video but it just show so much experience...
    • Related: Are there any Emacs AI channels yet? (Emacs advice channel created by AI)
      • sachac: there are occasionally low-effort videos that read through Stack Overflow answers, but... \<shrug>
      • audience: I don't see any value in these type of generated "AI"-vids. Have you seen/heard NotebookLM podcasts? Not vid but often surprisingly well made and insightful (function of the sources fed to it) - essentially a conversation between two AIs. I'm not aware of this podcast, but will give it a try. Thx. https://notebooklm.google.com/?pli=1 Recommended e.g. for literature reviews or to summarize "jagged" content (always regression to the mean, of course but that's the AI curse).
    • A:
  • Q: Just discovered that I had already subscribed to \@goparism! But your last video 3 months ago...?
    • A: Gopar: Ah yes, sadly life does come up and other priorities take place. I plan on recording more thanks to the holidays coming up :) 
      • audience: Txs Keep at it, love your stuff
  • Q: Do you have any recommendations on where to find good advice on lighting for the camera?
    • A: Gopar: Sorry, not sure. I never looked into lighting. I don't use any lighting besides what comes through my window :) 
      • audience: it looks great! I thought you'd refined it. I live in a very dark place :D
      • gs-101: The free lighting setup strat.

  • Q: Why youtube and not peertube?

    • A: Gopar: I wasn't aware of peertube until emacsconf :0 (I will proabbly look into it)
      • audience: I guess some people want to make money? AFAIK, peertube does not pay people for making videos. 
      • sachac: Also audience/discovery is pretty low
      • \<robin> (i'd guess a lot of people neglect this side of things since it's almost inevitably tied into surveillance capitalism etc.)
      • A good question to ask is the goal to reach people, specifaly people who are not as used to emacs or make a workflow that is entirly floss but reaches far less people. I think the way Emacs Conf does it is pretty good using floss primarly for an Emacs Crowd and later hosting the videos in addition to hosting them on youtube for the people their to later discover
      • \<robin> (but the big proprietary platforms have an almost absolute monopoly on the requisite platforms, in effect, outside of almost-mainstream things like the fediverse)
      • audience: Maybe it would be cool to setup some kind of ring or collective for content producers who are in some way related to the Emacs community? So that Peertube et al can be a more viable place to stream to?
      • sachac: let me know when you post something and I can add it to Emacs News (Mastodon \@sacha@social.sachachua.com or e-mail sacha@sachachua.com) You pushing Mastodon over X? You still seem to be at X.com/@sachac 
      • \<lh> [: if you want to introduce people to emacs via your content, a peertube-only strategy is not very pragmatic. but syndicating to both is always good!
      • \<karthik`> Where are peertube videos hosted?  Doesn't video hosting get expensive very quickly as you scale?
        • \<lh> they are hosted on the instance where the account lives, so yes, typically instances are relatively small
          • audience: Some content creators mirror their YTs to Odysee. Whenever I come across a YT channel, I check on Odysee, which I prefer to watch videos on. No ads interruption, afaik.
        • gs-101: I also prefer to watch on Odysee, but the comments can get a bit, you know... hateful of certain groups. Maybe I'm in the wrong communities. Yes, I noticed such comments. I tend to not pay unnecessary attention to comments of these type. Difficult. If there is a choice between free speech and censorship, I lean towards the free speech first. It does not excuse stupid comments of course. Agreed.
      • \<robin> gopar, i hope my digressive side-comments didn't come off as negative, they're just concerns that come with the territory, as if only microsoft were able to host software manuals :p i'm definitely going to be watching your talk a few times over
        • \<gopar> robin: ah no worries. Didn't really take them that way. Appreciate reaching out to say that though :)

  • Q: Does using tools like yt-dlp / invidious hurt or impact the content creator's traction on the platform?

    • A: Gopar: Technically it would since its not displaying 'ads' but the amount of \$\$ lost is so small it's not really an issue. Personally do not mind if people do that, rather have people learning and sharing :)
    • audience: So views are still counted and will allow for the video to be suggested to others regardless of usage? That has been a thought running through my head in the past. TY for your talk :) 
      • Gopar: Not completely sure, it all depends on how youtube handles things on their side.
    • audience: I'd be fine with running any clips on YT in some sort of unattended mode (so it does "benefit" YT creators) while in reality I watch myself them - if available - on another platform :) As far as your channel, I'm having not much of an issue with watching them on YT of course.
      • Gopar: Ah, don't worry about "gaming" the system, if the content is good, it will get viewers eventually :)

  • Q: Emacs promotion as a topic is kind of an infinitely wide umbrella. You don't think that there should be a vague consensus on the direction emacsformational content?

    • A: I don't think, I mean I started my YT channel b/c I wanted to talk about Emacs from my perspective and talk about things that were interesting to me :) Telling Emacs creators to "focus" on a specific topic, I believe would be a net negative since it might discourage videos created b/c they dont revolve around the topic. Plus a "consensus" is already kinda made via things like EmacsConf I guess? :)

  • Q: How might creators collaborate to promote each other's content? In other content I notice lots of cross-collaboration on content to introduce viewers to the wider ecosystem of creators on the platform, but I haven't witnessed much of that with Emacs creators

    • A: Gopar: Personally, i've linked to other creators channels but I think the "cross polination" of channels is largely due to the channel owners themselves talking about it between them. I haven't talked to any other emacs channels about doing such a thing (yet.. :)) But I don't mind sharing links to ther channels. I much perfer Emacs as a whole to grow, than to try to be greedy with very little to gain. Thanks :)

Notes

  • https://www.youtube.com/@goparism
  • Want to focus and highlight excerpts of buffers for videos and stuff?  Master of Ceremonies coming to M/ELPA soon.  https://github.com/positron-solutions/moc It was born to be used with Dslide.  Psionic wuz here (probably asleep on azn time)\
  • I shared the link/information to this conference/talk with my students yesterday!
  • I mostly do this for my students - https://www.youtube.com/@LiterateProgramming
  • Good points about the imposter syndrome!
  • Been embracing impostor syndrome for decades & it never gets better :-(
    • jreicher: I agree!!
  • It's great having a talk like this in the conference.
  • i was a little skeptical about this talk due to the title, but this really is great information if one is going to be doing remote conference presentations or whatever
  • i'm used to group video chat, unsurprisingly, but there's just so much more to know (and, um, equipment to own) when it comes to preparing something that's not solely going to be watched in real-time ...where of course you'd normally have assistance in contexts like in-person conferences
  • OBS unfortunately requires an OpenGL version newer than 2.1, so won't run on a ThinkPad X200
    • Just use ffmpeg with x11grab. It works everywhere basically.
    • [: I sometimes use simplescreenrecorder (love it)
      • I think that worked on my X230
  • I like using Emacs to edit my audio. https://sachachua.com/blog/2024/10/yay-emacs-tweaking-my-video-workflow-with-whisperx-and-subed-record/
    • sachac: Your whole A/V workflow is pretty crazy. Subed with waveforms in Emacs, WhisperX...
  • [re: DaVinci Resolve] kdenlive or pitivi is a nice free as in freedom alternatives that are worth mentioning
    • I've used Blender to do video editing. It worked
      • i used kdenlive, the UI is very straightforward for clipping out bits of unwanted video and similar. i've heard blender's video editor is great but my partner told me to just "find a youtube tutorial" (instead of showing how it works) and there's a lot of junk out there, at least wrt my simple use cases
  • i have no interest in making revenue from videos but this sort of information is critical if one wants to maintain a high-profile free software project that can sustain itself financially (a lesson i learned from a lot of time working at coops and nonprofits)
  • karthik`: speaking of videos, yours are truly fantastic - the only issue is that there isn't more of them :)
  • Also having a good mic does help with voice quality. I used a basic condenser mic and I found it to be vastly better than the snowball
  • Gopar, come on the lispy gopher climate sometime
  • Apropos "negative comments": Lotsa bot commenters on YouTube. Student of mine programmed one in class, almost trivial to do, despite attempts to stop it.
  • Good point about using pauses.
  • One editing tip regarding pauses, you should be able to see them by viewing the audio waveform.  Might be quicker than watching the whole take in 2x.
    • that's what I do too! I also use "oops" to remind me to go back and edit things
    • I have some Elisp that scans backward for the previous instance of the words that I say after the oops
    • "elisp to scan backward for oops": this is what I meant by your A/V setup being crazy
    • well it only makes sense... what I really want is something that can string-distance approximate matches
    • like, https://github.com/stevenwaterman/narration.studio is a cool approach too
    • that shows this segment and the next segment, and if you move on to the next segment, it knows that the first segment is okay
    • Indeed, your personal infrastructure for these things is a sight to behold, hehe
    • I'm watching your quest to treat video as searchable text closely!
    • In general you're trying to do with audio/video what we do with text in Emacs.  This is a thing that should exist but doesn't yet.
      • that's a great framework, the paradigm and capabilities of Emacs generalized to modalities beyond text (A/V)
    • that's impressive, never got that far in my video editing quest 😅
    • From reading your blog posts it looks like you're almost there already (treating audio like text).  I haven't tried anything except subed.el with a connected mpv instance, and that alone was the best sub editing experience I've ever had.
  • this presentation made me think about streaming package-code reviews for ELPA on peertube...
    • pkal: yes!
  • +1 to the request for more unstructured videos like the notmuch one, in fact I would prefer a raw, unnarrated stream to see how you typically navigate (e.g. avy usage) without half your brain dedicated to walking through the process!
    • Interesting.  Sounds like the kind of thing that works better as a livestream
    • myself I'm quite curious as to how you became so intimately knowledgeable and proficient with sometime arcane internals so fast
  • I'd be interesting in helping organize or just rabble rouse for some Emacs themed livestreaming group project, if such a thing happened. I think AP made some noises several conferences ago about this being a generally good thing for "somebody" to work on :)
  • OBS unfortunately requires an OpenGL version newer than 2.1, so won't run on a ThinkPad X200
    • Just use ffmpeg with x11grab. It works everywhere basically.
    • I haven't used this alot but I think this might work as an equivilent tool https://github.com/russelltg/wl-screenrec
  • ...Mac keybindings? We need an emacsfluencer mode :) ...and possibly a derived one for emacsconf-presenter? :)
  • I often record the audio on my phone so that I can avoid the fan noise from my computer
  • Not editing at all ever under any condition makes it real ;p
  • I feel just watching over your shoulder as you do these things (investigate and fix a point of friction, etc) without much edit would still be a powerpack of value for most

Feedback: - 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 - 👏👏👏 - * gs-101 claps - 👏 - * inkpotmonkey 👏 - * karthik` 👏 - 👏 - 👏 - 👏 - 👏 [15:43] - 👏 - 👏👏👏👏

  • Gopar! love your YTs 👏

Transcript

[00:00:00.000] Introduction
Hey, I'm Gopar and today I'm going to talk about being an Emacs influencer and try to convince you to be one too. Hopefully that goes well. If not, we'll see at the end of the talk.
[00:00:12.466] Knowledge grows when it is shared
But first, I want to share something, and that is: that knowledge grows when it is shared. This is usually how I end my videos. Some of you may be familiar with this. I say this quote because I believe there is truth to it. The more you share something, the more you reinforce it, and the more the knowledge grows, not just for you, but for everybody else around it with who you share it with. With that being said, there's only one question I want to ask you.
[00:00:36.333] When's the last time you shared something?
That is: what is the last time you shared something? Now, the sharing of knowledge doesn't just have to be about Emacs. It can just be about other things that you learn in life. There's plenty of things that I share with people that I've learned in life, and I hope that they learn from what I'm saying as well. Learn from the mistakes in others type of deal, things like that. But anyway, since this is EmacsConf, we're gonna keep it to Emacs-related, so we're going to find ways on how to share all that Emacs knowledge that is locked up inside you guys' brain.
[00:01:07.200] Sharing Emacs
So sharing Emacs, how can we do that? Well, there's a few ways. We can do meetups and conferences, aka EmacsConf, like we're doing now. So hopefully one of you guys might be incentivized to share the knowledge that you have in the next upcoming year, or the future ones, or be a repeated presenter. The list goes on and on. Blog posts. So, one of the easier entries to [??] because it is writing and you don't have to do video, not like the other formats that I'm about to present. Tweeting is also an easier format as well because it's even smaller than a blog post, more condensed, and you can use hashtags. When I was learning, when I was reading the Org Mode manual, I would use the hashtag #OrgTip on on Twitter. Even if you search right now, I believe you'll find some of my tweets. But yeah, that's one way that you can go about it: simple tweets that you find, little things, little nuggets of gold as I would say. Of course, there's podcasts, which I'm pretty sure the Emacs community would love to have, so if anybody wants to pick up a podcast go right ahead. Twitch live streaming, which is... Twitch is a platform in which you can do live streaming for those who are not familiar. And people, I've seen people use the Emacs tag in there and, you know, just pop up, say hello, ask questions, things like that. You can be working on the configuration or just reading Emacs source code, you know, fun stuff like that. Videos, which is what I do, which I will touch on in a second. There's probably more formats that I'm not thinking at the moment and that you guys can probably fill in the gaps. But yeah, these are just some of the ways that we can share Emacs. So how do we get started?
[00:02:41.566] My background
Well, before we get started, I want to talk about my credentials, right? I mean, who is this guy that you're just listening in this little square talking about creating videos? Well, I run a channel called goparism on YouTube. It has around 2700 subscribers at the moment. I kind of know a little bit of the flow. I'm not an expert, but I've done enough videos that I kind of understand the flow of all of at least the simple way of doing it, which I want to share.
[00:03:06.766] Why you should make Emacs videos (or other formats)
So right now you're probably thinking, OK, I get that you want to sell us on the whole video making formats or you know sharing just Emacs in general, but I'm a beginner, I'm an intermediate, I'm advanced, I don't know if I can provide input. Each of those, I want to tackle each of those, and say that yeah, each of you have input. You know, for a beginner it might be say, oh, an intermediate and an advanced person already has information. Intermediate might say, oh, I'm not at that level yet. An advanced person might say, oh, I have nothing to say. You know, I don't... What I know, everybody else knows. So I want to, you know, dispel all that and just tell you that, hey, it doesn't matter.
[00:03:44.100] Beginners
So for beginners, you guys are in a beautiful place, which is that you have a clean slate. So the way I imagine is that every Emacs user is presented[??] upon themselves, you know, kind of like this world. And in this world, you can either build a road that goes to the mountains, the city, or to the beach. Some of us have decided which way we want to go. Some of us might be building the road to the city, to the beach, for example. If someone starts a road to the city, they are probably stuck in their ways, right? And then what leads them to the goal to the city, they're not going to make a detour towards the mountain or towards the beach to get to the city. They just want the straightest path. And when you are used to doing things a certain way, you're going to have a ton of vision. So as a beginner, you don't have any of that because you're just starting brand new. Everything is, you know, a world of possibilities. So I would say that this is a very big advantage. The second one is that people enjoy the journey, right? People want to see someone grow from this spot to the next level, etc, etc. This is one of the reasons why we watch movies, TV shows, anime, right? Because there's a character that needs a problem and they're working their way up to solve that problem. If we just get to see the ending of where they solve the problem, we don't really feel anything because we weren't part of that journey. I would say that starting from scratch is a pretty good place to be. Of course, if you're going to be writing or making videos or anything related to Emacs, you kind of have to force... If you want to teach people, you kind of have to learn it. You're kind of forced to learn, which is always encouraged.
[00:05:22.966] Intermediate
For intermediates now, you might be saying, hey, I'm a little past intermediate. I'm sorry, past beginner, but I don't feel confident enough to share. Well, let's say that you're wrong. Once you're intermediate, you're probably fiddling with your Emacs config, maybe doing something with Org Mode, like a lot of people are doing it, and you can document, talk about the things that you do, and also those functions that you write in Elisp to just improve quality of life, things like that. There's a whole list of things that you can do. These are just two things out of a plethora. of items that you can talk about.
[00:05:56.133] Advanced
For my advanced folks, you guys are in a position where you guys know more about the Emacs internals. You might have read the source code. You might know a Emacs manual section pretty well that you can talk about. Usually when you're at the advanced or intermediate level, you start, or at least some people start writing packages. You can talk about the best practices for creating packages, the troubles that you face, you know, the things that you learn, things like that.
[00:06:22.866] Impostor syndrome
Now that I've given a little bit of examples for each of these tiers, there's probably still something going on in each of you guys' mind, which is something all of us get to face, and that is impostor syndrome. Now, with impostor syndrome, the sad reality is that we all have it at some point, we're going to, you know, at the beginner, intermediate, or even advanced stage, it doesn't matter, there's always that little voice of imposter syndrome saying, hey, "You're probably not good enough" or not... but questioning if you're good enough or if you deserve to be at this level and things like that. I believe it's very common with software engineers. The other sad thing is that it will never go away But the way I see it with impostor syndrome is that we embrace it. If we are getting an impostor syndrome, it's because we're pushing ourself to a next level that we haven't been able to to overcome or to progress in. If you're pushing yourself, you will get impostor syndrome. Like, hey, am I good enough to lead this project? To finish this? To optimize this part or whatever? I feel it's a good way. Impostor syndrome, yeah, it feels horrible, but I believe that if you have it, it's because you're doing something right.
[00:07:28.466] Process for recording
Okay, now that we've gotten that out of the way, what's the process for recording? Well, it's actually a lot simpler than you think. There's three steps, and one of them you might not even have to do, depending on how you want to go about it. The first one is that you have to record your voice and screen, because if you do want to make video, people have to see what you're doing and they have to hear what you're talking, otherwise it's going to be not as engaging. Of course, you can make the face optional when recording videos. If you watch some of my videos, sometimes I show my face, sometimes I don't. It just really depends on the mood of what I'm doing when I'm recording the video. But yeah, completely up to you. After recording, you can edit if desired. I remember when I first started making the videos, I was not editing them at all. I was just one shot and upload. That can either be good or bad depending on how you view it, but it is what it is. Nowadays I do some light editing, mainly just to remove the silences or when I'm going through debugging something. Third one is to upload it, which might be the easiest section, depending on your goals. At minimum, you would put title, description, and a little bit more. You'll get why I see it can be as easy or as complicated as you want, which I'll go over later at the end.
[00:08:46.400] Details: recording
Let's go over details for recording. For recording, thankfully, all OSes, or at least the major OSes, have free recording software, or you can go a little fancy and get paid [software], which usually, you know, depending on your viewpoint, might make things easier or not. Personally, I use, I'm on Mac, so I use the built-in screen recording, which, if you do Command-Shift-5, it will pop up a little dialog, and if you did it just now, you can press the Escape key to get rid of it, and life goes on. Also for all major 3 OSes, OBS is a pretty popular choice not just for streaming, but for recording as well. That's something you might want to look at. If you do decide to record videos. All up to you. These are just things that I've come along or encountered along the way. When it comes to recording,
[00:09:36.700] Tips: Recording
I do have some tips that might help you out. At least, if I could go back in time, this is what I would tell myself: that audio quality matter matters. If possible, get an external mic. That is not always feasible, because extra mic costs money, and when you're starting out with YouTube, you are not going to make a penny. YouTube has very high restrictions or bars that you need to pass before you start getting any revenue. For example, my channel, I still haven't met those bars, so i'm still not generating any revenue. Anything that I buy is just out of pocket. Since I work from home, I already had a mic and things like that set up. I just use that for recording videos. But if you have... You can use the built-in mic in your laptop if you have one. I would strongly suggest if you do that, try to minimize the noise. Go into a quiet room and make sure there's no washing machine or anything going off right now, because people do not... They can handle, you know, not the greatest quality of video. But when it comes to audio, picky people are a lot more pickier when it comes to that. Next is don't start with recording the face. Voice and screen are just fine. Personally, I feel when I started recording my face, it made it harder in a sense, because now I was just not only concentrating on what I was showing, how it was sounding, but how I look, if I was making any faces like that. It's just one less thing to have on your brain when you're recording. Another thing is that when I started recording, I was very passionate or excited about doing this. What I would do is--I took that to the advantage-- is that I just recorded a lot of videos in one go or in sessions. As soon as I recorded, start the next one, next one, et cetera. I strongly believe that helped because later down the road, once I got busy with work or life or whatever, I didn't really have to worry about making time. I already had a batch ready to go that I can just slowly pull out and edit and upload. That's something helpful whenever you know work is slow or your vacations or things like that, you want to record, just go for it. Another one is when you are editing, you can use pauses so that it's easier to edit because what happens to... At least this is what happened to me when I was beginning, I would say, oh I can mumble fumble, you know, do a lot of verbal fillers, and I can just edit it, but if you don't do any pauses it's hard to fix the mistakes, the things that you don't want people seeing because then it doesn't blend well if you do editing. If you do any editing, you know what I'm talking about, because then there's chops of audio from the previous clip. Trying to edit... There's ways to mitigate that, but my editing skills are very minimal. It's just what I need to know to get things done. Just using pauses helps out a lot. Another thing is that some people want to record in like super-high quality, you know, get the highest quality possible for the video. I would say instead of focusing on the video recording, focus on the audio, like I mentioned, because at the end of the day, we're in Emacs and we're only sharing text. You know, there's only so much definition that you can show on text. If anything, just increase the font. Simple as that. My personal favorite, or at least the one that I still encounter even now, is that when I'm recording, my voice still feels dry. Right when I'm about to record, all of a sudden, I get dry. I need to drink water. It feels uncomfortable. I get nervous because it's something new. I'm staring at myself. It's like, oh man, all the... I mentioned just extra things that I need to worry about. But all of this goes less with practice. The more you do it, the more comfortable you are. It's just like everything else. When you start learning guitar, your fingers are very hard. When you start learning piano, the independence of fingers don't want to work. When you're learning drums, each limb needs to be independent. It's very hard. You have to start very slow. Everything in life, you know, practice and it will get better. All right now .
[00:13:33.440] Details: Editing
Editing, well, like I mentioned, this is not always going to be necessary, depending on your style. There's some Youtube Emacs creators that simply record everything in one go. They might get up, get a coffee or something, and they'll just leave that in the clip, which is totally fine. No shame. It's the way they they want to do the video. Sometimes they just don't have any time to edit the videos themselves or pay someone else to do it. What's the best next thing? just leave it as is, upload, and that's fine. That completely works. I will say that if you do end up editing or deciding to edit, and you want software I would say check out DaVinci Resolve. It's free. It's available on the three major OSes. Honestly, DaVinci Resolve by itself has a plethora of features. I personally, I only use like 5% max of the features. It's professional, it's like professional studio all the way, things like that. But yeah, I would say DaVinci Resolve is a pretty solid choice.
[00:14:38.320] Tips: Editing
Okay, what about the tips for editing? Well, most of them are pretty straightforward. Just learn enough to get going, like in all things. Like if you have a band practice and you're rehearsing a song, you just need to know the chords, you don't need to know improvise, just enough to get you through this gig that you're playing. That's pretty much it. Of course, learn the keyboard shortcuts. We all come from Emacs, so we all know how valuable, how much we treasure shortcuts to avoid the mouse. unfortunately since you're editing, you will still have to use the mouse, but the more keyboard shortcuts you use, the less the mouse is used. So there's that. One thing is that--I didn't know you can actually do this until I started editing-- is that you can play the speed of the video in 2x. For me this is great because since I'm mainly just listening for pauses in my video, I just wait until there's silence. Oh, that's the part I need to trim, or that's the part I need to remove. Simple as that. Also batch edit, the same thing as I said about recording videos, just do it in batch. You can also just batch edit as well.
[00:15:44.000] Details: Uploading
Uploading, the final step. YouTube, if you do end up using YouTube which is the most popular choice for uploading videos, is that the uploading process is pretty straightforward. I imagine this is the same for every other platform that you choose. It's pretty straightforward, but it can be a little complicated depending on what you want to do.
[00:16:06.820] Tips: Uploading
What are my tips for uploading? Well, first of all, at minimum, you need to have a descriptive title and a description of what you talk about in the video, just to help out with SEO and things like that when people are searching for Emacs on YouTube. Also, if possible, use a thumbnail. There's a whole community about Emacs creators discussing best practices to get the highest engagement, how to get people watching your videos, things like that, and one of the things is they highly recommend a thumbnail. If you mainly watch, or if you watch any Emacs content, a lot of us do not use thumbnails, and that's perfectly fine. I think the Emacs community is pretty used to just watching videos with just a thumbnail, it's just a screenshot of the video, and we just go there for the content, right? We're not really going there for anything else, for the knowledge that the person is spreading. I say that it can be as simple or as complex, because if your goal is to potentially earn revenue down the line, you will want to spend some time configuring some of the settings for uploading, like the tags, I forget what they're called, but they're a little embedded so that people can watch other videos and things like that. So there's a plethora of options, an abundance of options. Honestly, there's too many, but it all depends if you potentially want to make some type of income in the future with Emacs, making videos on Emacs. And yeah, that's just something that you will have to discover and read and learn more about what the Emacs community, Emacs creator community suggest, and best practices and things like that. But if anybody ever wants to talk about it, feel free to reach out to me. I would love to talk about things about YouTube and all this, because I find it interesting. Potentially, hopefully, one day, I'll be able to make some revenue. Hopefully, maybe some of you guys might knock it out of the park with what I'm going to talk about next.
[00:18:06.166] Your secret sauce
That is your secret sauce. This is your ultimate weapon as to get viewers, to get subscribers, you know, to get anybody that wants to watch your... to reach a higher audience. That can be your humor. You might be naturally funny. You can make comments. You have a natural skill on the way you talk, on the way you articulate things, so you might be able to get people drawn to that, or you might be someone who just does animations for your videos, which does highly well as well. or you can do a mix of all these. You can just insert your superpower whatever you want. You can go ahead and use that to your advantage to grow user base, a viewer base. Hopefully, if all things align, you'll be able to get paid to also create Emacs videos soon, spread the knowledge, which would be pretty cool--become an Emacs influencer, which is the goal, right? Okay. I believe I painted this in a pretty good light, at least personal opinion.
[00:19:04.933] Cons of YouTube
But like everything, every good also has a bad. Nothing is always perfect. That's also the same for Youtube. What are the bads of Youtube? Well, it's not going to be an overnight success. That is very very rare. You're not going to create a video and then all of a sudden get like a hundred thousand views. I believe by from what I've seen in the community if a video gets over 10k that it means that it did really well in the Emacs community. I think on average is under 3k for a video within... This is within the time span of I'd say like two weeks or so or a month, around there. So it varies. All these metrics you'll learn if you really actually want to be able to create something in the Emacs... But like I said, it does take work and it does take time. Another thing is that negative feedback people are very quick as we all have been accustomed to that. People are do not shy from being very negative. It is so easy to just say negative and mean things online because there's no repercussions. I don't understand why people do that, but it is what it is. But most of these comments are from the younger population. You know, just ignore them. Most of the time, they're just ignorant. They don't know what they're saying. It will help you get them, you know, grow some thick skin. If you already have thick skin, then you don't. This is not going to be a problem. But most of the negative comments that I've receive our or childish, I would say, that it's not really based on anything that has substance. Yeah, just ignore it. It's fine. It's not going to affect your day. "Don't let it affect your day" is the most important thing. Third, like I was mentioning, revenue is very hard to get monetized on by YouTube standards. That will definitely take some time and dedication. But if you really want it, you will work for it. Hopefully all of us, the people that are constantly creating content via these platforms are able to get compensated in some way or another, because we do share it because we love it, but also it would be nice to get some compensation. I'm not speaking for everybody. I'm speaking personally because time is a valuable asset. You can choose what you want to spend it and right now I'm having fun making videos. That's what I'm deciding to spend it. But yeah now, with all this that I've said, there's only one question that I want to ask all of you, and that is: what are you going to share?

Captioner: anush

Questions or comments? Please e-mail gopardaniel@gmail.com

Back to the talks Previous by track: An example of a cohesive student workflow in Emacs Next by track: Transducers: finally, ergonomic data processing for Emacs! Track: General