My largely uninformed opinion has always been that it’s about monetization: you don’t make the kind of money off ads on a blog that you can off a popular YouTube site. That, of course, is all Google’s decision. Presumably advertisers are willing to pay a lot more for video ad placement than for banner ads or something.
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Engywuck@lemm.ee 7 months ago
https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?list=WL&index=1&themeRefresh=1&v=gIHi9yH6UB0
It’s a shame that nowadays a lot of potentially interesting subjects come mostly as crap and time consuming video format.
boatswain@infosec.pub 7 months ago
superduperenigma@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Ironic that this is apparently about company decisions leading to less ad revenue, and some of us won’t even bother clicking the link now that we know it’s a video rather than an article.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Sadly, from what I gathered, a lot of kids will follow a video link rather than a text one.
I’m the exact opposite as for 90% of topics, I’ll be able to extract the same amount of information in 1/10th of the time.
boatswain@infosec.pub 7 months ago
Yup; we are not the target audience, I guess
Pohl@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I hate YouTube so fucking much. The internet was once a useful place where you could find the instructions for anything you could dream. Now it is a wasteland of SEO laden video. Google is a bloated stinking corpse and its rot is befouling the whole internet. Being “evil” was a distraction, being useless is the bigger crime.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Hey thanks. This is neat and way better than the dumb pipe bot pushing links that never work anyway. Agree completely not everything needs to be a video. Hopefully this shoot themselves in the foot policy will promote more text-based reporting.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 7 months ago
So many videos don’t even use the picture for anything useful. You can go for a walk and just listen to the audio part instead, and you won’t miss anything essential. Just leave the phone in your pocket while you walk to the train station or something. It’s really surprising how many videos work perfect well as background content like that.
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 7 months ago
I find running youtube at 2x speed makes it more tolerable.
Postcard64@lemmy.world 7 months ago
This. Half of the videos I watch, I watch at 1.25x or faster.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Yes, It’s so convenient to grep through a video for the bit you need.
Voyajer@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Probably when other information vectors became ubiquitous. Though this kind of content is probably best consumed while doing something else when reading would be impractical since the graphics largely aren’t necessary for understanding the material.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 7 months ago
A side note/observation: good videos also take significantly more time to create/edit, along with getting decent equipment, which means a much higher startup cost.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 7 months ago
On the creator end, probably because it is easier to monetize than text.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 7 months ago
That’s the problem. Everything has to be monetized. Maybe I’m old and nostalgic, but I remember at the beginning of 2000s (and even before), “creators” were just people wanting to share their hobbies/opinions/passions/whatever. They had their own website (later, blogs), with, as most, contextual banners on them or donations links, whatever… Now it’s just unnecessarily long, time wasting videos full of ads or sponsored segments, clickbaity titles, ridiculous thumbnails on corporate services fulls of ads and tracking… For the life of me, I can’t understand people watching hours and hours of “content” everyday. There’s some kind of addiction going on.I can barely stand 2-3 videos per year, and only skipping to the relevant parts if they’re really interesting tutorials. On the contrary, I could spend literally hours jumping for link to link on, for instance, Wikipedia. Reading is much more convenient and less annoying…
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 7 months ago
Everything has to be monetized now because the Internet killed a lot of business models and content was heavily subsidized through other means.
We want to go back to the “free as in beer” Internet model, but the underlying economics of what allowed that to happen is gone.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Everything has to be monetized now
Well, too bad. I myself don’t use YT a lot (as in: almost never) and frankly I’ll avoid clicking on YT links, if written alternatives are available (and often even in they are). Maybe it’s just a generational thing (I’m oldish)
akilou@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
Sometimes I prefer to read, sometimes I prefer to watch
Prandom_returns@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Man, am I glad these video formats exist. When you have ADHD, reading is agony. Any information I need, I look up whether there’s a video about it. Reading is the last resort.
Engywuck@lemm.ee 7 months ago
For me it’s the opposite, actually. I can focus much more easily while reading than watching a video.
dustyData@lemmy.world 7 months ago
I can read in 3 to 5 minutes the same amount of info that would take a really well written and edited video at least 30 to 45 mins to present. I sympathize with neurodivergents, but reading is a super power. Sure, videos and pictures are incredibly useful for particular things. And video is amazing for entertainment, or when it’s infotainment and you don’t actually need to learn or retain any of the content. But video could never hope to compete with the data transfer rates of well structure written word.
Prandom_returns@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Same, but the exact opposite. [insert out-of-ass numbers here]
satan@r.nf 7 months ago
Some people like me just don’t want their face plastered to the screen all the time reading text. Videos take the least amount of focus on-screen to understand the message. If audio is what you want, you can just listen to it while you do other things.
Fast forward, rewind, position seeking thumbnails, speed conteol are a thing. Videos can play in the background on smartphones too.
I already code most of the day. I don’t want more stress to my eyes than I already put them through. I even use Text to Speech for text content to lessen the duration my eyes spend onscreen.
Companion1666@lemmy.world 7 months ago
“I wish motion pictures don’t exist.”
Engywuck@lemm.ee 7 months ago
This comment explains the issue much better than I did: lemm.ee/comment/5865257
psivchaz@reddthat.com 7 months ago
It’s so infuriating with DIY stuff and video game guides. There’s definitely a use for video in those contexts, but a lot of times I have one specific need. I don’t need to know how to completely disassemble my faucet, I just need to know how to get one handle off, and rather than search through a video and then rewind it fifty times I’d much rather have some words and pictures that I can scan through at my own speed.
snooggums@kbin.social 7 months ago
I love having both, and hate how search engines tend to drown me in video recommendations in the general search to the point that the text versions are hard to find.
It would be great if there was a text results group like there are groups for videos and images.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Video allows them to show you ads. Especially if you’re using google. At least that’s the assumption.
Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee 7 months ago
Unless it’s one of those generic crappy ai articles, in which case it’s guaranteed to be on top
Grimm665@lemmy.world 7 months ago
Interesting, i feel somewhat the opposite. i do camera repairs on film cameras, and having the exploded diagrams and manufacturers service guide is great, but a video of someone doing a full disassembly and reassembly is generally much more helpful in that context and allows me to scrub through the video to the parts i need for my repair.
agent_flounder@lemmy.world 7 months ago
For more complex devices, I agree videos can be better.
For simpler repairs, text and stills take me less time to understand than videos, especially with ones that pad a 2 minute video to 10 minutes so it can be monetized, with like 4 minutes of intro, 2 minutes of content stretched to 4, and 2 min of outro.