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# So You Want To Be An Emacs-Fluencer?
Gopar - IRC: gopar, <https://www.youtube.com/@goparism/> , <mailto:gopardaniel@gmail.com>
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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](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](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
- 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](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](https://www.youtube.com/@LiterateProgramming)
- Been embracing impostor syndrome for decades & it never gets better
:-(
- \<lounge-548\> jreicher: I agree!!
- \<jreicher\> It's great having a talk like this in the conference.
- \<robin\> 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
- \<robin\> 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
- \<\[\> OBS unfortunately requires an OpenGL version newer than 2.1,
so won't run on a ThinkPad X200
- \<screwlisp\> Just use ffmpeg with x11grab. It works everywhere
basically.
- \<sachac\> \[: I sometimes use simplescreenrecorder (love it)
- \<sachac\> I think that worked on my X230
- \<sachac\> 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/](https://sachachua.com/blog/2024/10/yay-emacs-tweaking-my-video-workflow-with-whisperx-and-subed-record/)
- \<karthik\> sachac: Your whole A/V workflow is pretty crazy.
Subed with waveforms in Emacs, WhisperX\...
- \[re: DaVinci Resolve\] \<pkal\> kdenlive or pitivi is a nice free
as in freedom alternatives that are worth mentioning
- \<MetroWind\> I've used Blender to do video editing. It worked
- \<robin\> 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
- \<robin\> 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)
- \<lounge-081\> karthik\`: speaking of videos, yours are truly
fantastic - the only issue is that there isn't more of them :)
- \<MetroWind\> 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
- Just a thanks to the organizers: I only EVER use etherpad during
EmacsConf and then I forget what an awesome tool it is. Gotta
reconnect with those abandoned memory cells\...
- \<corwin\> 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
- \<jkm\> 👏👏👏
- \* gs-101 claps
- \<lounge-323\> 👏
- \* inkpotmonkey 👏
- \* karthik\` 👏
- \<Ez3\> 👏
- \<screwlisp\> 👏
- \<plattfot\> 👏
- \<robin\> 👏 \[15:43\]
- \<ElephantErgo\> 👏
- \<johnhamelink\> 👏👏👏👏
- \<screwlisp\> Gopar, come on the lispy gopher climate sometime
- Apsopos "negative comments": Lotsa bot commenters on YouTube.
Student of mine programmed one in class, almost trivial to do,
despite attempts to stop it.
- \<plattfot\> 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.
- \<@sachac\> plattfot: that's what I do too! I also use "oops"
to remind me to go back and edit things
- \<@sachac\> plattfot: I have some Elisp that scans backward for
the previous instance of the words that I say after the oops
- \<karthik\`\> sachac: "elisp to scan backward for oops": this
is what I meant by your A/V setup being crazy
- \<@sachac\> karthik\`: well it only makes sense\... what I
really want is something that can string-distance approximate
matches
- \<@sachac\> karthik\`: like,
[https://github.com/stevenwaterman/narration.studio](https://github.com/stevenwaterman/narration.studio)
is a cool approach too
- \<@sachac\> karthik\`: 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
- \<lounge-081\> sachac: Indeed, your personal infrastructure for
these things is a sight to behold, hehe
- \<karthik\`\> sachac: I'm watching your quest to treat video as
searchable text closely!
- \<karthik\`\> 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.
- \<lounge-081\> karthik\`: that's a great framework, the
paradigm and capabilities of Emacs generalized to modalities
beyond text (A/V)
- \<plattfot\> sachac: that's impressive, never got that far in
my video editing quest 😅
- \<karthik\`\> sachac: 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.
- \<pkal\> this presentation made me think about streaming
package-code reviews for ELPA on peertube\...
- \<@sachac\> pkal: yes!
- \<lh\> karthik\`: +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!
- \<karthik\`\> lh: Interesting. Sounds like the kind of thing
that works better as a livestream
- \<lounge-081\> karthik\`: re \@lh's comment, myself I'm quite
curious as to how you became so intimately knowledgeable and
proficient with sometime arcane internals so fast
- \<robin\> sachac, i was honestly pretty amazed by the subtitling
process for emacsconf
- \<robin\> my subtitles were added at most a few hours before
streaming :O
- \<robin\> i was fully expecting to have to stream the video over
bbb w/o subtitles or something along those lines
- \<@sachac\> robin: we're getting better and better at it.
=) In previous years, subtitling last-minute presentations
was done by taking advantage of a volunteer's brother's
fancy-schmancy gaming computer, but now that we use whisperx
and I've upgraded to a Lenovo P52 (from an older X230T), I
can run the whisperx myself for last-minute submissions
- \<corwin\> 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
:)
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