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by AnthonyMouse 628 days ago
It's not the audience, it's the monetization. Why are so many things that ought to be a blog post now a YouTube video? Because YouTube has video ads, which pay better.

And it's not just from the perspective of the creator. Lots of people would write blog posts for free, if people would read them. But then Google dumps them out of the search results in favor of YouTube videos that take ten times as long to tell you the same info, and then the bloggers stop writing because nobody is reading.

What we need is a search engine that goes back to giving people what they're looking for instead of showing what pays the search engine company more.

1 comments

> And it's not just from the perspective of the creator. Lots of people would write blog posts for free, if people would read them. But then Google dumps them out of the search results in favor of YouTube videos that take ten times as long to tell you the same info, and then the bloggers stop writing because nobody is reading.

I disagree with this take. I hate learning by video unless it's for physical stuff where seeing it is useful (e.g. how to wire something), and thus I always prefer text content when searching for information (due to the higher flexibility in moving at my own pace instead of the narrator's).

I've never had issues with Google pushing videos too much in search results. You have an initial "videos" results block I just scroll past by, and that's that.

The much bigger issue is the narrowing attention span of people. Thanks to social media, like Twitter, but also Stories, Shorts, Snaps, Reels, TikTok, etc. people's attention span is going down. Many people would prefer watching 10 tiktoks instead of spending 10 minutes reading a blog post.

> I've never had issues with Google pushing videos too much in search results. You have an initial "videos" results block I just scroll past by, and that's that.

The issue is that some large portion of people don't do that, they watch the video because it's listed first. Which drops the readership of the later-featured blogs below the threshold where the author keeps making them.