Comment by Sesse__
Comment by Sesse__ a day ago
There's a perfectly good format for long-form dives: An article. But no, everything needs to be a video because otherwise, how would anyone bother to consume it.
Comment by Sesse__ a day ago
There's a perfectly good format for long-form dives: An article. But no, everything needs to be a video because otherwise, how would anyone bother to consume it.
I can read an article about 10x faster than watch a video. I don't have a problem with Alec's videos per se, but it's crazy to claim that video is the medium with higher information density. Text is always going to be the better medium for transmitting information, except for cases where the unique advantages of video (moving pictures and sound) help.
there are things you can communicate well in text as well as things that make more sense with visuals.
Please, stop thinking in binaries.
Articles are capable of using both. The main content can be in text, with an image, a gif or a short video or audio clip here and there to help explain if an illustration is better suited.
I wouldn't want to read a phone review that was text only, but one that has a set or two of images and video to show of the camera, a size comparison to a different phone, and you've got most of what you'd want to put in a video anyway. The rest of many youtube videos are just talking heads and stock footage. The substantive parts of many videos, the stuff that actually should be video for better information density, is rarely a majority of any given video.
Video is definitely a more engaging form of content for me, but claiming it's more effective at information transfer as compared to text is ridiculous.
No, for the kind of content he produces video is absolutely essential, since much of it is either demonstrating audio and video playback (including things like artifacts and color distortions), and showing how the internal mechanisms operate on partially disassembled machines.
His videos have so much higher information density than texts can offer. Videos are just much more efficient and can explain things better for those topics.