#that I'm going to conflate and say they're the same as each other and sinister for reasons

[witch-of-snow-and-stars]

Long rant under the cut:

Maybe it's because my AP World History teacher had a "fail you til you don't suck" way of teaching us how to write essays, but a lot of the essayists I've seen would have been failed by her due to lack of quality essays (both in terms of structuring and in terms of informative writing). Tbh I'd respect a lot of these essayists more if they said they did commentary videos and/or made think pieces because most commentators and think piece writers typically are open about just being someone with thoughts/opinions about things, not necessarily someone who's done research and/or has some level of authority on X subject. The entire James Somerton situation should have been a major wakeup call for a lot of people for a lot of reasons (beyond even what I've mentioned) and it just wasn't.

I think a big part of the issue is that a lot of people play video essays as background noise and are a passive audience rather than an active audience. It's incredibly difficult to analyze what someone's arguing or what the quality of that argumentation is if you're only halfway paying attention, much less check their sources or the materials that they cited. I'm not against long videos or background noise videos but essays are kinda supposed to be engaged with, the basic purpose of an essay is to say 'I contend X about this topic and I'm going to defend that contention with these points backed by information'. An essay is just a one sided debate (typically with some acknowledgement of differing views) that communicates information and *should* be able to stand up to good faith critique or counter-arguements. A lot of video essays either don't accomplish that or just don't hold up under fair scrutiny.

I'm not saying that you should be paranoid that every essayist is up to something or anything like that, but you need to examine what they're communicating with a healthy dose of skepticism. Hell, read what I'm saying in this with a grain of salt too

Anyway thanks for dealing with my tedtalk, rant over

YouTube essayists have too much power over you people