+1 all the way. Online content is optimized not for quality but rather for clicks and interaction. As someone who grew up during the 90s the hope was that better quality would lead to more clicks. Clearly that’s not the case.
As a technical author myself, I can speak to the effort required to create a book versus a blog post. A book requires you to think holistically about a topic- building a comprehensive outline of what you intend to cover. Then you have to write. A lot. If you’re a good writer (for example take w. Richard Stevens) your text will include not just the information you wish to convey but context around that topic which is paramount to a deeper understanding of the topic.
Finally you go through a vetting process with other people in the industry. You’re challenged on your assertions, they help you correct errors, etc. Here the Wikipedia model may actually be superior as you are not limited in time or selection of experts for the tech editing phase.
In contrast, blog posts or tweets are optimized for speed and engagement. Superficial yet sensational topics are emphasized, context is lost due to lack of time and space to write, and the quality of the writing is highly variable.
Books are excellent and in fact I wrote my first tech book expressly because I found no good online resources for what I needed to know. I highly encourage people to read. It provides an excellent counterbalance to blogs and tweets.
Regarding the technical writing, that is indeed one of the very best examples when conveying an idea with a mindset or process on how that came to be (to varying degrees). It's not just a summary of facts or a list of tasks, but when well written it contains the core, the context, and how the core out of that context came to be. If the reader then reads it, they will not only learn the subject, but often also how that information was obtained in the first place and get a sense as to how the information was optimised for the subject, what was dismissed (and why) and often gives you a transfer of thought that allows you to continue to build on that instead of having to do the same exact learning process over again to get (and this is a lucky pun) on the same page.
Conveying an idea is hard enough as it is with the languages we have, but writing it down and having to think ahead of time what the reader might think, might already know, and might want to do afterwards, or ponder about upon finishing the work, that is a very underestimated specialism. It enables not only knowledge transfer but practically brings the level of understanding of the reader(s) to a new minimum level (being a higher level than before but not everyone might get the same out of it).
I work with a group of people in tech with varying backgrounds, ages and plans for the future, but when we need to make sure everyone has at least some equal foundation to start off from, we have at least one technical writeup (some chapters in a book, or a series of well written articles) combined with exercises to make sure that that base layer is there. You cannot really do that effectively if you were to try that with... tweets. Or just videos. Or a simple workshop. Getting somewhere still requires real work and real (time/attention) investment. Well written and researched information is at the center of this.
Every now and then I read a technical book on a subject I am not familiar with or never had a real-life purpose for. For example, a lot of projects never had to use a custom data format with custom parsers, or a new domain-specific language. Yet reading a well written book on GNU Bison can be fantastic. (i.e. the Flex & Bison one from O'Reilly) Even if you end up never writing a .y file or having a need for a custom syntax parsing system. Strangely enough, while the subject is different, and the goal is different, it can be just as entertaining or maybe even enriching as reading The Gargoyle (by Andrew Davidson) 15 years ago. No relation in content or context except that both are books.
As a technical author myself, I can speak to the effort required to create a book versus a blog post. A book requires you to think holistically about a topic- building a comprehensive outline of what you intend to cover. Then you have to write. A lot. If you’re a good writer (for example take w. Richard Stevens) your text will include not just the information you wish to convey but context around that topic which is paramount to a deeper understanding of the topic.
Finally you go through a vetting process with other people in the industry. You’re challenged on your assertions, they help you correct errors, etc. Here the Wikipedia model may actually be superior as you are not limited in time or selection of experts for the tech editing phase.
In contrast, blog posts or tweets are optimized for speed and engagement. Superficial yet sensational topics are emphasized, context is lost due to lack of time and space to write, and the quality of the writing is highly variable.
Books are excellent and in fact I wrote my first tech book expressly because I found no good online resources for what I needed to know. I highly encourage people to read. It provides an excellent counterbalance to blogs and tweets.