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This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not…

Pivot to Video!

100,000 eyeballs here, & yet less influence than I would want to see; increasingly the sphere of public reason, such as it is, has migrated to video; the question is whether we follow or fade…

Brad DeLong

Dec 15

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100,000 eyeballs here, & yet less influence than I would want to see; increasingly the sphere of public reason, such as it is, has migrated to video; the question is whether we follow or fade…

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Text still builds ideas, but video spreads them—thus text is where ideas are born and sharpened, but without a video connection they cannot win. Why? Because short-form video is increasingly a better #discoverability layer both for those who will and those who won’t read, and one of the few effective ways of pulling those who want deeper engagement back into the text.

So how to design a workflow to do both and maximize potential wins?

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Provoked by seeing the powerful public-reason voice that is Jamelle Bouie <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamelle_Bouie> throwing down the gauntlet:

Jamelle: <https://bsky.app/profile/jamellebouie.net/post/3ma2efylh5c2g>: ‘I have said this before but if you are actually interested in influencing people beyond a narrow circle of too-online journalists you will be making direct to camera videos on tiktok, instagram and youtube. if you primarily post on text-based social media then you’re just dicking around. To be clear, it is fine if you just want to dick around! That’s what I mostly do on here. But the idea that “you’re giving up the fight to influence people by not using X” is belied by the fact that effectively *no one* uses X. And I don’t see any of the “use X!” people on TikTok or YouTube.
The proximate reason I post here—beyond the fact that I like a lot of you and enjoy reading your thoughts and jokes and observations—is that this is a non-algorithmic platform where people share lots of stuff and people read what is shared. That’s still valuable even if it doesn’t “influence!”, and because I still primarily think by writing, text-driven social media is very useful for sketching thoughts into ideas…

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I am becoming increasingly convinced that he is right, and wise.

And I note that he has successfuly pivoted to video himself:

And so with the coming of the new year, it will be time for me to start throwing some spaghetti against the wall, and seeing what sticks. The question is: What kind of spaghetti? Continue the weblog, yes. Revive the Hexapodia Podcast <https://braddelong.substack.com/s/hexapodia-is-the-key-insight-by-noah> and also make it video, yes. But what else audio? What else video? At what length? And on what platforms?

And with what tools?

The goal is not to surrender to the algorithm but to ally with the reality.

I will put interesting suggestions from the comments behind the paywall, and then comment on them: