YouTube, and dreams of monetization, have infected the hobbyist internet too. I am active in some niche travel hobbies. It used to be that people in this subculture would write detailed text blogs with tips about various routes and definitions. Now, people think video is the default medium for sharing one’s information, and so they make YT videos that have lots of whizbang effects and GoPro shots but aren’t very information-dense. You have to sit through many minutes (or up to an hour) of a guy stuttering “Uh... So...” to eventually glean details that might help you. It sucks. For a while the people who made these videos would also spam Reddit and specialist forums with links, clearly interested in the prospect of monetizing, but now everyone seems to understand that YT is not a reliable path to financial success.

The decline of text blogging is also partly Google’s fault, in that lots of hobbyist blogs are now excluded from search results even if you try to search for the exact terms you know are found in the blog entry.