Comment by adrian_b
13 hours ago
There are obviously many things that are better shown than told, e.g. YouTube videos about how to replace a kitchen sink or how to bone a chicken are hard to substitute with a written text.
Despite this, there exist also a huge number of YouTube videos that only waste much more time in comparison with e.g. a HTML Web page, without providing any useful addition.
As someone who used to do instructional writing, I'm not sure that's true for those specific examples, but I acknowledge that making a video is exponentially cheaper and easier than generating good diagrams, illustrations, or photography with clear steps to follow.
Or to put it another way, if you were building a Lego set, would you rather follow the direction book, or follow along with a video? I fully acknowledge video is better for some things (try explaining weight lifting in text, for example, it's not easy), but a lot of Youtube is covering gaps in documentation we used to have in abundance.