second order effects of this preference for video is how poorly video content gets indexed.
With text, searching of obscure things is cumbersome but possible. With video its impossible.
Meaning I, as a user cannot take the shortest path to my target content simply because of the medium.
I now default to looking for really old books on my topic of interest, or authoritative sources like textbooks and official documentation and then skim and weed through them to get to a broader understanding. Very often this has led to me on to better questions on that topic.
Online I prefer to look at search results from focussed communities, reddit, HN, StackOverflow, car forums, etc. I just never go to video for anything beyond recipes , quick fixes to broken appliances and kids videos.
I finally realized what actually bothers me about shopping physically vs online these days is (a) the lack of "sort by price, ascending" & (b) the lack of ability to get a reference or "fair" price for similar items.
Similar, with video the key missing feature is deep search.
It's mind bogglingly sad YouTube didn't focus more on improving this after being acquired: they have all the components to build a solution! And it's a natural outgrowth of Google's dead tree book digitization efforts!
I assume it was harder than just relying on contextual signals (links and comment text) to classify for ad targeting purposes. Also probably why they also incentivized ~10 min videos over longer/shorter.
Which is sufficient for advertisers, but utterly useless for viewers.
It makes me cry that we're missing a future where I could actually get deep links to the portion of all videos that reference potatoes (or whatever).
With text, searching of obscure things is cumbersome but possible. With video its impossible.
Meaning I, as a user cannot take the shortest path to my target content simply because of the medium.
I now default to looking for really old books on my topic of interest, or authoritative sources like textbooks and official documentation and then skim and weed through them to get to a broader understanding. Very often this has led to me on to better questions on that topic.
Online I prefer to look at search results from focussed communities, reddit, HN, StackOverflow, car forums, etc. I just never go to video for anything beyond recipes , quick fixes to broken appliances and kids videos.