Just a brief rant:
I’m seriously getting tired of looking for some information about a rig, antenna, etc and being directed to nothing but YouTube videos. It seems everyone wants to be a famous influencer.
Just look at the main QRZ.com page. It’s all links to YouTube videos.
Sometimes videos help but it’s become absurd - especially when it takes less time to read the information than watch some video. Oh, if you’re making some stupid face and pointing at something, I doubt I will ever watch the video.
especially when it takes less time to read the information than watch some video
I think the converse is a big part of why you see so many videos. It’s a lot easier to ramble in front of a camera than it is to actually write a half-way decent web page for most topics.
Think there’s some browser extension which gives you the subtitles as text. Way faster to skip the BS. But yeah I feel you.
The worst are the autogenerated ones from Stackoverflow or whatver questions. Like it’s scraped text put in video automatically. Like really? That’s what we’ve come to? Lmao.
hmm i didnt think about extensions for subtitle viewing. i should keep an eye out. nice tip.
Completely agree. I’m thinking of starting an educational YT channel, and I plan on having an equivalent text article for every video for exactly this reason.
“Don’t forget to smash that LIKE button!” LOL
There are several good YT channels for amateur radio: MIKROWAVE1, Mr. Carlson’s Lab, VK3YE, ZL2CTM, W2AEW, D-Lab. If there’s a channel featuring an EFHW antenna video or a primer on Baofeng radios, that’s a likely sign it’s a wannabe influencer.
Although it’s not amateur radio oriented, I highly recommend “Iain Explains Signals, Systems, and Digital Comms” for those who want to understand more complex topics without getting a PhD.
There are also some excellent Navy training film from the 50s.
They talk so damn slow too. I always speed up the video and often it still sounds normal because they deliberately talk slow to stretch it out.
It boosts some engagement variable for algorithm -which, I’m told, improves some score and placement.
i definitely dont appreciate silly faces and clickbait titles, that’s for sure, have unsubbed from favourite ham channels as a result of it. that said you can use an addon called DeArrow by same person that does sponsorblock, which does some removal of the clickbait stuff and allows crowd sourced video titles etc. but yeah, i get your point overal re: video instead of text documents
I make videos of my SOTA activations, but I still write trip reports for the summits for people who like to read.
Couldn’t agree more. When something as simple as building a dipole turns into a 20 minutes video there is clearly something wrong…
It’s the same in all walks of life, from recipes to medical information. I believe in a recent survey of primary school children something like seven out of ten wanted to be “YouTubers” when they grow up. So I doubt it’s going to change any.
Trouble is, more people can use a phone videocam than can write.
