I see a video, I think "ugh, a fucking video."

Articles are so much better at giving information, it's crazy to me that people bother with video.

Boggles my mind how. Unless it is an arts and crafts or mechanical or some other hands on video, it is so inefficient to watch someone talk rather than just read the transcript.

It's well known that not everyone does best with text. It's why most college lectures have a text/notes, a lecture, and a discussion component. Some value the interactivity of the discussion, some the audio of the lecture, and others the text itself. For the longest time the internet mostly gave value to people who preferred to interact in text. Now the internet is wide open to give value to people who prefer interacting in discussion, video, audio, and more.

Most people don't judge content based on information density.

I do. My time is valuable. And text is also much easier to archive for future reference.

It's also much easier to skip through parts in a written document because you can see the context before and after easily on a written text. Whereas with video you have this kind of catch up every time you skip.

It’s not the only difference. If I think along with a video/audio, I lose tracks quickly and have to rewind, but there is no obvious cue to where. Text has a fundamental property of being in sync with whatever level of attention I’m paying to its parts. Talk doesn’t have it.

TikTok and IG are mostly for entertainment not for learning, not sure how efficiency apply. Also we are talking about an instant stream of short clips, not old school YT where launching a video requires clicking and waiting.

However creating text content is much cheaper than video, and I also don't see text comments replaced by video replies.

Text is also easier to search both for humans (skimming) and computers. "This meeting could have been an email" also applies to entertainment.

Human attention generally isn't zero sum like that, so I've always been puzzled by this perceived "war" against text on the internet. People who previously didn't want to interact in text probably only used the internet sparingly or only used the internet for certain tasks. I've always been great at interacting with texts but had a strict rule not to try to learn mechanical skills on the internet and checkout picture books from the library, or better yet ask an experienced friend/professional. Now I can pop up Youtube and find out how an electrician changes outlets in a home. I now strictly do more things on the internet.

> Human attention generally isn't zero sum like that

How so? There's only 24 hours in a day, and so many things to do in them. During those hours, one can pay attention to multiple topics but even then, the time limit means only so many details and thinking time can be acquired during them.

That's where "like that" comes from. We're certainly not at the point where our attention is theoretically maximized.