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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2470 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 13, 2023

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Does anyone else really dislike people citing video-essays as proof of their argument? I find them to be a really poor way of expressing information compared to text. The amount of time needed to watch it is very long. No ctrl-F either.

Plus looking at youtube transcript is a very user-unfriendly experience. I'm happy with video for visual things like 'Shanghai is a really pretty, advanced looking city from the perspective of people walking through at night' or 'this is how some criminal accosting happened'. But for expressing arguments it's not in the same league as text.

The audio format isn't the main problem imo, if you were citing a lecture in a university course it'd be annoying to read the transcript but fine. The real problem is video essays are universally uninformative because they're made for the kind of people who watch youtube. I can't think of a single 'video essay' that isn't strictly inferior, purely by information content, to a piece of text.

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