[[!meta title="So You Want To Be An Emacs-Fluencer?"]] [[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2024 Gopar"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2024/info/sharing-nav)" raw="yes"]] # So You Want To Be An Emacs-Fluencer? Gopar - IRC: gopar, , [[!inline pages="internal(2024/info/sharing-before)" raw="yes"]] 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: \ 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\... \ - 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 - \ (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 - \ (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  - \ \[: 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! - \ Where are peertube videos hosted?  Doesn't video hosting get expensive very quickly as you scale? - \ 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. - \ 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 - \ 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 :-( - \ 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 - \<\[\> 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/](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 - 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\... - \ 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 - \ 👏👏👏 - \* gs-101 claps - \ 👏 - \* inkpotmonkey 👏 - \* karthik\` 👏 - \ 👏 - \ 👏 - \ 👏 - \ 👏 \[15:43\] - \ 👏 - \ 👏👏👏👏 - \ 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. - \ 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 - \ 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 - \ sachac: Indeed, your personal infrastructure for these things is a sight to behold, hehe - \ sachac: 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. - \ karthik\`: that's a great framework, the paradigm and capabilities of Emacs generalized to modalities beyond text (A/V) - \ sachac: that's impressive, never got that far in my video editing quest 😅 - \ 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. - \ this presentation made me think about streaming package-code reviews for ELPA on peertube\... - \<@sachac\> pkal: yes! - \ 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! - \ lh: Interesting.  Sounds like the kind of thing that works better as a livestream - \ 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 - \ sachac, i was honestly pretty amazed by the subtitling process for emacsconf - \ my subtitles were added at most a few hours before streaming :O - \ 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 - \ 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 :) [[!inline pages="internal(2024/info/sharing-after)" raw="yes"]] [[!inline pages="internal(2024/info/sharing-nav)" raw="yes"]]