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Comment by BoysenberryPi | Hacker News Reader

I agree you about LTT to a certain point but I think you are dragging them too much. LTT has done some very good tech journalism in the past and brought some very important stories to light. While I do not prefer them for my hardware information for reasons you stated, I would not call them the polar opposite of quality.

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That's the 10% good info that I referred to.

If I drop into a random page of a random Ian Cutress article, there's a high probability it will be interesting and well thought-out content.

If I drop into a random LTT video and scroll to a random timestamp, it's most likely going to be some minimal content arbitrarily stretched past the 10 minute threshold for YouTube monetization. I can usually find the answer to the clickbait headline with enough seeking around, but many of his videos contain so little actual content that it could probably be summarized in a couple of Tweets. His specialty is expanding it into 10+ minutes of overly enthusiastic, slow-paced talking about it.

The information density is at polar opposites of the spectrum, and that's by design. YouTube favors quantity and clickbait, and it's no secret that Linus is playing that game as aggressively as he can.

I mean very obviously you're comparing different media aimed at different audiences but even so you're wrong, there are plenty of LTT videos where they dive into their methodology and provide explanations that are fairly in depth. I think you should be blown away by the fact that LTT manages to retain it's broad audience going as deep as they do when it comes to stuff like testing thermals under various conditions. I came into LTT thinking it was clickbait trash but it's absolutely not, you have a long way to go before you get to the "polar opposite of the spectrum".

In any case people are suggesting Ian join LTT Labs, not LTT.

Wow, entertaining content is orders of magnitude more popular and profitable than in depth analysis.

Doesn’t mean that entertainment doesn’t benefit from rigorous science and methodology.

Which LTT has been shown to be interested in producing, buying cable testing equipment, using high speed cameras for monitor analysis, ... and with LTT Labs those efforts will likely increase.

> arbitrarily stretched past the 10 minute threshold for YouTube monetization.

So do you blame the creator or Google who makes these rules?

I don't know if this has changed but at some point I stopped watching LTT because my own knowledge of computing exceeded his (as far as I can tell) and I started noticing trivial technical errors in a lot of the content he made, delivered with unwarranted confidence. He's not an engineer, he got his start demoing products for tech retailers.

This is why I've long since preferred AnandTech to LTT. They employ people like Cuttress, who has a respect for scientific rigor and can go deep into the technological weeds and actually report usefully from them, whereas I feel LTT was limited mostly to surface-level observations when I watched regularly.

YouTube is HN taken to the extreme: nobody asks for credentials if you present content with infinite confidence.

This is what annoys me most about LTT: they have nuggets of value in most videos, but they're buried under a mountain of optimized dirt.

It's cool to see them try a different format and hope they succeed in bringing proper empirical-mindedness to the top of the presentation.

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