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.

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TylerE 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	Sesse__ 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		You can do that just fine with the occasional video inside the article, though. I mean, significant parts of the video is just panning by some device while he's talking.

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rs186 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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bigstrat2003 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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eldaisfish 3 days ago | parent [-]

there are things you can communicate well in text as well as things that make more sense with visuals.

Please, stop thinking in binaries.

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Telaneo 3 days ago | parent [-]

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.

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TylerE 3 days ago | parent [-]

And I don’t want to switch between reading and watching short video clips constantly. My brain doesn’t work that way.

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Telaneo 3 days ago | parent [-]

You probably don't need more than one or two video clips unless you're writing about video itself, say, comparing Ffmpeg renders or phone cameras. You certainly don't need any video for most subjects.

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TylerE 3 days ago | parent [-]

But that's exactly what he is talking about. He's not doing, like, car reviews.

	▲	Telaneo 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		He's doing a video about a format, not about video itself. How much of this video is comparisons of video itself? None that I could see. He's already done that video way back with his Betamax vs. VHS comparison. All the cases of him comparing the form factor, that is, the size of the casette, with something else, are easily shown with either pictures or diagrams.