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Comment by btbuildem | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a generational thing. It seems like short-form videos are the only thing majority of people are willing to consume.

I've noticed more success with classifieds that have a video vs ones with a thorough description. I've always made efforts to include all relevant information in a post, and it recently dawned on me (while answering a dumb question) that a lot of people just don't read anymore.

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I think that shift can be explained not as any outright consumer preference, but rather as a form of platform/advertiser preference. It's hard for a standalone website to compete with a platform in the best of cases, and better yet, it's relatively easy to make ads lucrative in video perhaps since the format simply lends itself better to being both in your face, yet short enough to get out of the way.

In the very unlikely hypothetical that youtube were to allow other formats such as articles or images, I suspect many publishers would be able to make that work - on that plaform, as opposed to on a standalone website without the traffic attracting algorithm to help crowdsource valuable content for users.

If you look at e.g. GamersNexus, Hardware Unboxed, etc. the videos aren't really short form in that "10:02" way. Like there's plenty of detail, but 30 minutes with 15 minutes of it being looking at graphs is clearly a pretty slow way to do it compared to see they literally just presented the video script in article form and you could choose the graphs and time that matters to you.

Both Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed(Techspot) have Websites where they post all the related images/analysis(in text format) from their respective video content, and more! And so why are you not doing your due diligence before commenting!

Which generation? My parents really like video (boomer/genx line), but I prefer text (millennial). Not sure what the kids these days like, although I do recall some students (gen z) that really wanted videos for setting up basic stuff, like how to download VSCode.

I can see that. Television was the newest thing for the boomers, and was a big deal for early Gen X. Later Gen X and Millenials got the Internet, which in its infancy, was too slow to display anything other than text and crappy graphics. Once video became virtually free to transmit, we started seeing a lot of video-based content saturate the waves again.

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