Completely and strongly disagree.

You seem to focus on educational videos, and just regarding that I consider youtube one of the greatest educational tools in all of history.

I've learned so much through watching youtube videos, much faster than I would have learned it by reading about it.

This is especially the case with learning things that have a visual component, like learning GUI apps, painting techniques, etc. There's no substitute to watching a master painter work, for example, and you've got dozens if not hundreds of them on youtube.

Regarding information density, I've found "a picture is worth a thousand words". It might not correspond to kolomogorov complexity or the sort of information that compsci people are used to, but just like looking at a painting (which is arguably equivalent to a single frame of film/video) can convey and enormous amount of information that even a book can not equal, the amount of such information conveyed by moving pictures can be almost infinitely greater than print.

Of course, the amount of information will differ from video to video and book to book, but it does not to justice to say that for video "information density is terrible", unless you're talking about something like a video of someone reading something (though I find even there, I can listen to speech at a much higher rate than I can read, and usually listen to videos at 2x or 3x speed, so can consume way higher amounts of verbal information through audio or video than I can through books).

If you step outside the realm of educational videos, your argument becomes even less tenable. The "information density" of a music video, for example, is terrible? Compared to what? There literally is no equivalent.

Or how about a film, or watching someone sing on camera? Outside of educational videos, talking about information density in these contexts seems to be missing the point of such videos entirely.

I, like your parent, if I run into a video, will press back and try and find an article first, and then use the video as a last resort. For some process type things, like you describe, things I'm less familiar with, like a mechanic working on a car, a video might be easier.

I do very much like the rev interface for transcript/video. https://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/MHjYIxnUkQQJMJ6...

Then you would have chapters so you could avoid the waffley "please like/subscribe" begging and longwinded intros that don't get to the main part of the video.

Youtube would still be able to embed their ads whenever they want.

The "Hey guys, blahblahblah" is insufferable but you quickly learn hammering L about 4 times gets you to the real meat of the video.

I was replying to the parent, who was focusing on learning.

> If you step outside the realm of educational videos

I was only talking about educational use. Entertainment, of course, is different, also explaining why most schools don't hold class in night clubs.

I notice you devote almost all your attention to the density question, but that's hardly the worst problem I listed - pacing, discovery and reference are all far worse problems. But to focus on density,

> the amount of such information conveyed by moving pictures can be almost infinitely greater than print.

Ah yes, I aced many exams thanks to the almost infinite amounts of knowledge I picked up watching slow sweeps of dancing corporate logos and stock footage of the Grand Canyon.

This is semantics. In a learning context, the illusion of "infinite information" your brain creates in response to a pretty picture is at best a comfort for the student, more typically a distraction only there in the first place because people expect it out of video.

Just because an exam might not test you on all the information in a video doesn't mean it's not there.

You seem to focus only on certain types of information, perhaps (though you don't specify) "useful" information, but there's lots of other types.

Think of a high resolution photograph (or a frame of video) of a person wearing some clothes. With a high enough resolution you're going to see thousands or millions of fibers of cloth on the clothes they wear, the subtle gradations of color of each fiber, the direction of each tiny fold of clothing, millions of pores of their skin, gradations of color on their skin, thousands of hairs, their direction and color, and many details of the background of the image (such as, say, millions of blades of grass).

It could take volumes of books to describe all this precisely in detail. And that's just for one photo or one frame of video. You'd 30 such frames per second in a 30 FPS video, and with many of these details changing based on the lighting changes and movement of the scene in question, making for insane amounts of information for, say, a whole hour of high resolution footage.

Now, of course, you could compress this and write it out very efficiently (as is actually done in computer video file formats), but this virtually unreadable for humans.

And, of course, on the other hand, a human normally isn't going to pay attention to or be conscious of all these details in a photo or video, but that doesn't mean the information isn't there.

Humans are also going to be subconsciously influenced by or subtly affected by videos or images in ways they may not be by words -- as is clear from looking at the difference between a book and the film adaptation of the same book (nevermind that no complete, 100% faithful translation from one form to the other is possible). So the information in an image or video arguably matters even if one is not consciously aware of it.

This is all quite apart from any test one might have on the material in question. It doesn't really matter if you're not tested on the color or direction of one of a million fibers in someone's shirt, for example. Those colors and directions are still there in the image regardless.

To make the example a bit more meaningful, consider, say, Goya's The Third of May 1808[1] or Picasso's Guernica[2], or any of hundreds of other incredibly famous paintings. Entire books have been written about each of them, and that's just for one single image each. I suppose whether you would get tested on their information content would vary on the art history course you took, and its instructors, but that's almost beside the point. Arguably, these paintings contain information that can not be expressed equivalently in words (else we wouldn't need to look at the paintings at all but just read a book on them instead).

The same goes for movies, except they contain millions of images each, and not just one. So the informational content is that much greater, and is again not reduceable to something you can say in words without doing them injustic (which, of course, never stopped a movie critic, analyst, or summary writer from trying).

[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/El...

[2] - http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/121341829928-0-1/s-l1000.jpg

I'm more on the side of design/art than programming so maybe its more of a thing in my industry but basically anything you can think of a video exists, "How to remove green leaks from greenscreen footage" "How to render great metal material in 3D software" etc

But now I even use it in the rest of my life, if I'm going to cook something I check 2 or 3 videos on the recipe before I make it looking for tips. Sure I could have used a cookbook but that would mean I'd have to own multiple cookbooks to get the same information for the dish that I get from 2-3 videos and also I'd need to have planned ahead not just watch the videos then go to the supermarket.

I completely get the things you're saying about the format and I used to feel the same, but honestly the amount of content has overruled my previous feelings.