I know you came here looking for a recipe for boiled water, but first here's my thesis on the history and cultural significance of warm liquids.

Water boils in pots with different metals because only temperature matters for boiling water. If the water is 100c at sea level, it will boil.

Surely Google is too afraid of our vigorous pro-competition regulatory agencies and would never do such a thing.

I search for "how to do X", and instead of just showing me how to do it, which might take 30 seconds, they put a ton of fluff and filler in to the video to make it last 5 minutes.

Typical video goes something like:

0 - Ads, if you're not using an ad blocker

1 - Intro graphics/animation

2 - "Hi, I'm ___, and in this video I'm going to show you how to do X"

3 - "Before I get in to that, I want to tell you about my channel and all the great things I do."

4 - "Like and subscribe."

5 - "Now let's get in to it..."

6 - "What is X?"

7 - "What's the history of X?"

8 - "Why X is so great."

9 - finally... "How to do X"

Fortunately you can skip around, but it's still a bunch of useless fluff and garbage content to get to the maybe 30 seconds of useful information.

As someone who learns best by reading, I'm already at a disadvantage with video to begin with. To make it worse, instructional videos tend to omit a great deal of detail in the interest of time. Then when you add nonsense like you're pointing out, it makes the whole thing a frustrating and pointless activity.

Do you have an example of a video that does this? Seems like an interesting problem to solve.

They're probably reaching some YT threshold to have more ads show on it

(The converse is; whenever I turn on a Hololive stream I'd say that I pick up 20% of what they're saying. If they talked slower, I would probably watch more than every 3 months. But, they rightfully don't feel the need to optimize for non-native speakers of Japanese.)

100%, and you can skim it so that your pace subconsciously varies depending on how relevant or complex that section is.

I wish more stuff were available in just text + screenshots..

That said, tinkering before and after youtube has been two different worlds. I really like having video to learn hands-on activities. I just wrapped up some mods to a Rancilio Silvia, and I noticed my workflow was videos, how-to guides and blog posts, broader electrical information documentation, part specific manuals / schematics, and my own past knowledge. I felt very efficient having been through the process before, and knowing when to lean on which resource. But the videos are by far the best resource to orient myself when first jumping in to the project, and thus save me a lot of time.

I definitely write super long things when I consciously make the decision to not spend much time on something. Meanwhile, I've been working on a blog post for the better part of 2 years because it's too long, but doesn't cover everything I want to discuss. If you want people to retain the content, you have to pare it down to the essentials! This is hard work.

I think the situation that people run into is something like "how do I install a faucet" and they are getting someone who does it for a living explaining it for the first time. Explaining it for the first time is what makes it tough to make a good video. Then there are other things like "top 10 AskReddit threads that I feel like stealing from this week" and those are too long because they are just trying to get as much ad revenue as possible. The original comment was about howtos specifically, and I think you are likely to run into a lot of one-off channels in those cases.

Making a long video isn't like writing a rambling letter. It takes work to make 10 minutes of talk out of a 1-minute subject. And mega-popular influencers do this, not just newbs who haven't learned how to edit properly yet.

This is something that happens a lot. I'll Google a narrow technical question that can be answered in three lines of text--there's literally nothing more of value to say about it--and all the top hits are 5+ minute videos. That doesn't happen by accident.

You get no random ad content which just cut into the feed at will, which makes for a somewhat better experience. But there's the inevitable "NordVPN will guarantee your privacy", "<some service here which has no ads and was made by content creators so you don't have to look at ads if you subscribe but hey all our content is on YT but with ads and here is an ad>" ad.

There is no escape. I actually pay for YT premium and it's SO much better than being interrupted by ads for probiotic yoghurt or whatever. I know there are a couple of plugins out there which I have not tried (I think nosponsors is one of them) but I really don't think there is any escape from this stuff.

I want the most succinct result possible when I search the web.