So...
I've watched, over the past few months, dozens of YouTube videos a day it seems so that may have something to do with my "YouTube burnout" (if it is one) but it seems as though YouTube videos especially teach you nothing, certainly not compared to written content or articles or even books. I have the videos on in the background when I'm doing something. I have tried to put more focus to actually, well, consuming the content or media in a way that's more mindful and where I am edified. Maybe I'm trying too hard, but a lot of what I'm watching seems a bit superfluous or whatever.
All art or content or products have this problem, to a point, I think, but at times, it seems that videos are either there to sell me something (bad, at least in my case, because I like retail therapy) or maybe "hook me" into something (not necessarily bad, perhaps, as it can be pretty innocuous and even fun, depending on what they're motivating you to get into, such as a hobby).
And I have to say:
I'm starting to see this in documentaries to, to a point.
I feel like visual media has this problem a lot.
And yeah, I know it's a "D'oh!" moment for me because, honestly, of course they're a bit sparse on details or info compared to, say, books and written text.
But...
I feel like I'm not getting stuff out of it? Like, I ask: "What are they hiding? What are they not showing?"
Am I just paranoid? It's one thing to contemplate this sometimes, but every time I watch a video now?
Maybe I am just burnt out on YouTube LMAO!!
(I will say that one thing I miss are videos that are 2 to 5 to 10 to maybe 20 or 30 minutes long instead of these LONG videos that seem, erm, "useless," from my point of view.)
At some point, Youtube changed to where it was more beneficial to do videos that are 10+ minutes, I think cause of number of ad rolls or something. It's been a while since I heard it talked about, but I remember some creators bringing it up. Naturally, this is going to contribute to stuff where people pad out video length just to have more ads, but it doesn't actually have more substance to it than it would if it was shorter. That is probably some of what you're noticing. There's also the fact that youtube's ads are not the most reliable way of income, so some people do sponsorships within a video or have a product to sell. It's a very capitalist problem I suppose, but whatever the cause, I don't think you're imagining it if you find a lot of videos to be rather shallow trails toward ads and products.
In particular, those infotainment style videos with cutesy animations, reek of content mill to me. I'm sure there is some genuinely informative stuff, but it may not be as easy to find sometimes, as the flashy millions of views most popular videos.
One thing that I do with ASMR videos is I'll search for some kind of ASMR and I'll change the date range, so it's searching for like, video that came out within a month. Not quite the same kind of video as education, but the general idea here, is it allows me to find stuff the algorithm may not prioritize as popular but that is still enjoyable to watch.
This explains a lot actually, I didn't know it. So many times I clicked on a long video essay where the actual information could've been summed up in 3 minutes.
Actually, yeah, I search videos within the month or week when searching on YouTube.