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I think the push to video and away from text is a net failure for accessibility and usability, at least for reference use cases.

My example: as a woodworker, I'm often curious about the details of a particular joint or the usage of a particular tool. The great amount of content on YouTube is helpful, but it's incredibly inefficient to have to seek through a bunch of filler or unrelated content to get the answer I need.

Of course, that's "increased engagement" so I'm not surprised it's what is commercially more viable.

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That sounds remarkably similar to how recipes are shared in blogs. There's a huge amount of story, and then at the tail end there's the recipe. It's all for engagement, but I'm never engaged. If I'm looking for a recipe, I want to know the recipe so I can make it. I don't care about what the blogger did last weekend or in college.

I read that the recipes are actually bullshit. Written by content farms eating instant noodles, not anyone remotely involved with a kitchen.

Google* how long to pressure cook white or brown rice and you’ll see widely differing answers. Like shots all over a dartboard. They can’t all be correct — it’s just rice.

I wonder if many of them care more about CPM rates and page visits than actual recipe accuracy.

  *or Bing, DDG, Kagi, etc if you prefer although I haven’t tried.

I would somewhat disagree with that. My household eats rice on a daily basis and the timings for different kinds of rice varies wildly. Basmati, Sona masuri, jasmine, risotto, jeera samba rice have very different water and rice measures. And that's just white rice! Other rice variations are a whole different ball game.

I strongly recommend the books Cooking for Geeks and The Food Lab. In both books, the authors explore a variety of different approaches and show their math.

> There's a huge amount of story, and then at the tail end there's the recipe. It's all for engagement, but I'm never engaged.

It's not about engagement, it's about copyright.

Recipes - in the form of lists of ingredients and the method - are not typically protected.

However, add a huge rambling story about how Grandma handed this recipe down to you when you were five and on holiday with her in $place, hey presto, it's protected.

It's not for engagement. Some sites have now a Jump to recipe button. It's for google that said that if you write normal text they will send you a ton of traffic. What people figured out was that unless you spam the recipe with keywords repeated at least 20 times, the google bot will not understand what the text is about. Maybe google was forced to do this, but that's how it works and it contradicts how they said it works.

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.

(Old post, but you made a good point)

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).

That actually seems like a great use case for AI; identify all videos about (topic), differentiate between high and low quality ones (as preferred by you or people similar to you), abstract the information into conceptual videos or schematic diagrams as you prefer.

> That actually seems like a great use case for AI; identify all videos about (topic), differentiate between high and low quality ones (as preferred by you or people similar to you), abstract the information into conceptual videos or schematic diagrams as you prefer.

Q: Why would your $videoPlatformOfChoice allow a commercial AI bot to scrape boatloads of videos, abstract the information, then serve that information separately somewhere else .. possibly while serving their own ads(!)?

Scraping is legal, plus how will they even know?

May I suggest a simpler and smaller scope? An AI converting speech to text, extracting a bunch of still frames (or short video rolls) as illustrations (where relevant) and making it an ol' good readable article?

Then it can be fed to the search engines and those would do the rest of the job just fine.

I think that will just multiply clickbait and those making the most substantive contributions will be ripped off by SEO/content farmers.

Once AI can do all that with video, then we’re at about the point where automated video spam is too high also.

SponsorBlock is the response. It's a crowdsourced extension that labels parts of the video, like sponsor segments, highlights, intro/outro, etc. Very useful, you can skip through useless segments.

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