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I'm not sure that I see the convenience. When I click on a link and it's text, I can just start reading it. If it's video, I either need to dig out a pair of

I'm not sure that I see the convenience. When I click on a link and it's text, I can just start reading it. If it's video, I either need to dig out a pair of headphones or get up and go to another room, so as not to disturb my officemates. It's far more convenient to just click the back button and find a text link. Similarly, when I'm reading text and a message (e.g. email, IM) comes in, I can switch over to the other program, reply to the message, switch back to my browser, and the text is right where I left it. With video, there's no such guarantee. Also, I've never come back to a text document and needed to sit and wait while it buffered again. I can easily alternate between four or five different text documents, taking each a paragraph of two at a time, and still follow what it happening in each one. This may be a personal deficiency, but I've never been able to do that with videos.

pjc50 12y ago
Another aspect: people generally get to the point a lot faster in text, or you can skim/search to the point. (It may be surrounded by adverts, clickbait, or gifs, but at least it's there). But so many videos are unedited. Some guy rambling about stuff, advertising himself or his social media presence, while slowly setting up whatever the actual point of the video is. Possibly this is because editing takes skill (which most people don't have) and tooling (video editing software is hard and/or expensive). The last time I had to get information out of a video because there was no other source was for a minor car repair issue. It was useful to see which screws to undo and how the parts come apart and go back together. But that was one minute of a ten minute video. The "rule of 30%" (immediately skip the video to 30% in) helps quite a lot.