this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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Not entirely true.
Some of us are still occasionally browsing parts of reddit because not every niche community has fully made the transition yet and said niche communities are the ONLY places to get relevant, timely information for those niches.
I know for me there are some decade+ old MMO communities that haven't swapped over yet. Since many of the old wikis got shut down years ago when fandom, etc, took over everything, for some games the only choices are youtube and reddit. Personally, I hate youtube's monetization forcing tiny bits of information to be strung out into 15-20+ minute videos more than I hate what the reddit team is doing, and I hate what's happened to reddit a LOT.
The move is going to be an ongoing process for a while.
Labeling everyone with broad brush strokes misses some of the nuance of the situation, but I look forward to the day I no longer have to visit Reddit for the information I'm looking for.
It's not perfect, but SponsorBlock helps a bit with that, it can automatically skips reminders and such. And the new YouTube chapter feature is also actually good for finding the info you want in a video, but that depends on the video creator.
I really miss the old wikis, Fandom is just filled with irrelevant bullshit like recommending me I visit another wiki that has nothing to do with the one I'm using at the moment.
The problem isn't the ads themselves.
The problem is that YouTube's monetization setup encourages content creators to stretch, expand, tease out and otherwise bloat their content in order to achieve returns. It turns 20 seconds of hard data into 18 minutes of sawdust that you have to either sit through or sift through in order to get what amounts to three sentences worth of typed out information.
Sometimes content creators are kind and they label things and "separate" them into time indexed segments, but even then, I read much faster than they talk and every single one of them I've run into still rambles around in loops of opinion, sentiment, and anecdote while doing so.
It's an absolutely awful last resort for getting simple answers to direct questions and it's so very, very much worse than even WALLS of aimless text would be, because at least text can be ctrl-f'd.
I agree with everything you said, but if you have to get the info from a video at least make it as painless as possible.