With all the respect to their efforts to make this hobby more popular I tend to agree. With their resources they can organize experiments in far better way to be scientifically sound. They can make partnership with an University and provide them with topic and resources. There are hundreds of scientifically challenging topics in this hobby and I can see tens of Masters and PhD thesis on them.
That would be nice. They'd have to interpret the results and present them for the majority of reefers to get anything out of it I'm sure, but that would be okay.
However, on experiments, I'm actually ok it's not 100% scientific. I'm also ok that for some of the results, the viewer has to come to his own conclusions. To me, the experiments they do are the single most interesting part (personally not super interested in other top10 fails or whatever) and the potential here is enourmous. I see a lot of opportunity here to further have them build a releationship with their viewers by:
1) Have the audience decide on what to test next (some vote)
2) Perhaps have a board of 'experts' from US/EU/other places that make the final decision among a pool of topics. This could be named industry experts (not scientists really, but reefers)
3) Scale it up, have many in parallel as some can many months (just buy 50 tanks or have them sponsored, fine)
4) It's ok to include vendors here as well. You'll likely see only some vendors would want to participate
5) Have a dedicated place to do this and live stream the tanks 24/7. With technology today it's not expensive, difficult or a problem really. It engages the viewers over longer periods of time. Have a reef2reef thread on each experiment.
If I think about it more, there's so much opportunity here. Even if not 100% accurate, it is much quicker to try and narrow in on conclusions vs having an opinion form over a decade via an online forum. Imagine some new theory around cyano is tested, some new product is dosed or a change made to the tank. Viewers can live stream it the following days, discuss what they see, among multiple tanks, etc. It would be fab.
That would be my 2c. If BRS doesn't do it, this would be _the_ opportunity for someone else to step in and start their own Youtube career. I bet the channel will get at least the same amount of subscribers as the BRS one.
I'd also like to see a set of recommendations/knowhow that form over time not just for the beginner, but also the more advanced reefers. I think the 'keep nitrate at 5+' one falls into this bucket. There's many many more (dkh, ph, dinos, cyano, burnt tips, encrusting vs light and what have you).
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