This. I am amazed that anyone has the leisure to consult youtube videos. I know this makes me a dinosaur, I see my kids learning all sorts of stuff from them but:
it’s not searchable,
it’s not a reference, I can’t archive it on my hard drive
– it just isn’t reliable, useful information. Sorry.
Originally shared by Jürgen Hubert
I am fairly active on Google+, and as you may have noticed I like to discuss many political, technological, scientific and other matters. I generally encourage others to join in. However, here is something you should keep in mind for my stream:
If you want to make an argument and cite a YouTube video in support of your claims, I will not watch it.
This is because using a YouTube video to support your claims forces the other people in the discussion (including me) to consume a lengthy piece of media without any prior indication of its quality – I only have your word that the video actually contains useful information or is good at all. I can speed-read text articles, jump to the relevant bits and do Google searches of key phrases and figures mentioned therein, but with YouTube videos I either have to jump around a lot in the hopes of finding the relevant information (hoping that I haven’t missed anything relevant) or be forced to watch it all from the beginning – and that may be minutes or even hours of my life wasted that I won’t get back. There is too much bullshit on YouTube as it is – and it’s much harder to sort it out in advance than with text articles.
The same goes for podcasts. I may be willing to watch videos or listen to podcasts recommended to me by people whose opinions and knowledge I trust, but that list of people is unlikely to include You, Random Internet Stranger who dropped by for an argument.
So give me some text citations, or don’t bother.
Tattered Remains of Tartary 
Yeah, using a youtube video in place of an argument is a pretty dick move.
The person who posts it doesn’t have to do any work to construct their argument, but in order to continue the discussion, you will have to spend an exhausting amount of time not only watching the video, but explaining why you disagree with it.
I’ve done this precisely once, for a young man (~14) who was angry about feminism, but who I sincerely thought would listen to me. It took me about a week to write a comprehensive response to the long, blathering, 30 minute video he posted by some Youtube MRA. Was goshdarn intolerable.
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one of the things that bothers me about it is that the person posting the video isn’t doing anything to tell you why they agree/disagree/what their relationship to it is. “Explain in your own words” is primary school training – it’s “make this argument your own” i.e. “engage critically with it, understand which parts you get and which you’re not clear about, extract the ideational payload that you can use to help to define yourself/your position on this issue.” This is so deeply ingrained in me that I cannot understand when people don’t do it – are they saying “this expression is precisely what I need” or just “here’s something somebody said”?
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Richard G
That, in fact, was a point I made the one time I did this. Specifically, the guy in the video said several things that I knew the person who posted the video strongly disagreed with.
I pointed out that posting a video was abdicating his responsibility to actually think about his position; and that in doing so he had endorsed some stuff that should upset him.
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Stuart Robertson
Link to video. Your point is invalid.
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see, we will never know what he’s trying to say
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I actually like this a lot more. I think we need an acronym. IANWYV – I Am Not Watching Your Video.
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also TNAATJAG – That’s Not An Argument, That’s Just A Gif
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Just because something is reliable doesn’t make it correct.
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Greg Gillespie true, but if it’s not reliable then it doesn’t really matter for purposes of argumentation whether it happens to be correct.
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you can get browser plug ins to upload and grab frames
video search on google ok
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information mostly shit but lotsa good docos like bbc, nature, history and war stuff
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Chris Tamm that doesn’t solve the problem of trying to find out what someone means when they comment you a video, though. The message there is “I don’t have time to write you a thesis statement so here spend however many minutes watching this video hat may or may not be relevant.”
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conspiracy kids love this
watch this illuminati recruitment vid
a old man on a set wit vid grain proves it
dont you think ppl do this with books too
ive a friend with litracy problems and the book quote or it didnt happen kids were pretty mean to him for learning through documentries
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oh definitely – in my historical research work the obscurity of a source counts in its favour, if it’s really hard to verify (ie you have to go hunt it down in a specific archive, ideally in another language) then that’s evidence of your hard work and thoroughness and ability to bring something that isn’t already common knowledge. And then there are approved survey works that everyone recognizes so you start there for your backstory and say what’s wrong with that view (they’re usually a bit old fashioned).
The trouble with videos for history is they’re just so short and therefore light on detail, and historians thrive on odd details that can spin out into whole other stories. And at some point you have to actually quote the boring data sources, and videos tend not to be good at that (no appendices).
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I am glad to finally have an acronym,
I just don’t even have the instincts that make me click on YouTube URLs.
I know it’s perhaps a bit jejune what with G+ and all, but I also never watch a YouTube vid while signed in or in a browser in which I have been signed in to any Google service without first signing out and clearing all cookies and cache and then doing so again after the video. Sending someone a YouTube link is a little like signing him/her up for a newsletter. I’m just too curmudgeony to help with more market research than I have to, I guess.
When you refer someone to a book or an article, that person can with relative ease hide his/her trail in reading it. Less so with YouTube. For many of us this is completely trivial. But for some people it really isn’t.
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