Expertise in the Age of YouTube
As a finish carpenter for a number of years and having to deal with fixing homeowners attempts at doing their own remodel efforts based on them watching youtube videos, I&#x27;ve come to general law regarding expertise or &#x27;how to&#x27; videos.  There&#x27;s an inverse relationship between quality of video and accuracy of information (or maybe just usefulness of information.)<p>The majority of good polished videos have the least accurate or useful information. These I&#x27;ve surmised are people that would rather be into video production or youtube stardom than they would being actually good at the subject they profess. Alternatively, some of the worst grainy, shaky cam videos I&#x27;ve seen, usually on the jobsite, are some of the best practices, tricks of the trade or just informational rich videos you can get. These are people that are not into being youtube stars and are just part of the &#x27;sharing community&#x27; as it maybe was originally envisioned. But as Rumsfeld said, there&#x27;s known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and when you&#x27;re a homeowner watching how-to videos, its very difficult to know what you should know.... so most of them go by, instinctively, the quality of video production as their guide to what they should be doing.<p>Sure there are great craftsmen with great video quality and there are some really poor craftsmen with poor video quality but these are not the bulk of what&#x27;s out there. What rises to the top of search offerings seems to be equally what&#x27;s been marketed (poor craftsmen, high quality, &quot;please like,share, and subscribe&quot;) or what&#x27;s been organically liked (poor quality, high craftsmanship).<p>For the tradesmen out there dealing with homeowners, its now sometimes a bit of an uphill battle after homeowners have done their &#x27;youtube&#x27; research and have determined how hard the job they&#x27;ve asked you to bid is going to be.