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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.