Your answer touches on something I can’t really relate to, which may be the key to my lack of understanding: people’s desire to get information in the form of videos rather than text. It just seems so much slower to me. I can skim 50 Google or Yelp reviews of a restaurant in the time it takes to watch a single short video review. I might watch one video along the way if I want a sense of the ambience of the place, or some other information that’s hard to convey well in writing, but that’s it.

It does seem like it may be a generational thing, though. I’ve seen the same trend in my work-related searches: sometimes I search for technical information and instead of a blog post that takes me 30 seconds to digest well enough to tell if it’s even going to answer my question and that I can copy-paste example code from to play with, I get an hourlong YouTube video. This is a relatively new thing that has only become common in the last 5 years or so. I used to think it was purely about monetization (videos pay more than blog posts) but I see people, especially beginners, asking for technical information in video form. To me that’s like saying, “Please answer my question in the least convenient form possible.”

Apparently this is my “kids these days, who can understand them?” topic.