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YouTube is uniquely bad and transmitting information via video through what they incentivize and how they do it. A sub 2 minute video that gets directly to the point of its subject matter, for instance a how-to video on completing some task (car repair, video game level, homework question), while obviously superior at its intended function is less likely to appear in search results and offers next to nothing to its creator. What you tube actually incentivizes are 10 minute+ videos, with ads, that keep people watching. Effectively communicating information is, at best, a happy accident. This also occurs in text based communication as well, were a single sentence answer to a question (a personal example from recently: an excel formula I'd forgotten), will be stretched to 7+ paragraphs of useless words with at least 3 ads, one of which is a video that auto-plays, with the actual answer to the question (a single sentence often less that 10 words long) being buried in the 2nd to last paragraph. At least with text you can ctrl+F.
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