Video is a extremely poor way of communicating large-scale, scientific subjects that require dialogue for folks to really understand. One, because it’s only a one-way conversation; and two, the more prescient reason, is that aside from a video transcript, the information is not searchable/findable, and if the video itself is disorganized, the transcript is not going to make as much sense. Even worse when there’s a series of videos and multiple questions being answered, in which case the subjects—even if the video titles are accurate and well-written—are spread out and indiscernible. People will have to find things through intensive trail and error.
I get why Ben from Suspicious 0bservers is annoyed with all the questions, but that’s more of his ignorance of how the answers should be delivered. All of his problems would be solved if he hired someone to take a few weeks to compile all the questions and answers and put them on one page in a FAQ or help text format. He could have just straight, well-formatted text, and people can just “Ctrl-F > type” or “Find on page” to for keywords of interest. It’s probably better in the long run to have a separate domain (0bserversFAQs has plenty of domain extensions available) and WordPress install, and make each question and answer its own post with proper tagging, and to take advantage of native WordPress search functionality.
Zappos has a great example of a one-page FAQ format, with a navigable table of contents at the top, which link to different anchor spots on the same page. It’s not a great design feat to create one, as you won’t need any JavaScript or even CSS to make it work. All of that is native HTML functionality.
You could do a show/hide accordion-style format, like what Kleenex tissues does, which is a pretty common technique to save vertical space and reduce “text anxiety,” but I generally prefer to not make users have to make select gestures if I don’t have to. Scrolling is cheap and easy. You could do that with CSS only, but event handling should really be HTML and JavaScript. Either way, some special coding needs to happen to make accordions work.
For complicated overlapping subjects rolled into one (astrophysics, electromagnetism, geology, worldwide disaster scenarios), Instagram’s Help Center microsite is a format I’d recommend for what Suspicious 0bservers has to deal with. You can have up to three levels of navigation on the left, or breadcrumbing at the top if you’re on a mobile device, and any further informational hierarchies can be demonstrated in the content area.
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People who enjoy public speaking seldom write well. But as you note, Ben could easily get volunteer help. There are several supporting blogs run by Observers, and it would be very easy to mobilize volunteers for something like this. Ben gets a lot of annoying questions because he actually requires people to watch videos as the only free source (the books are expensive), and most people who like videos are intellectually lazy.
I will say that video is excellent for demonstrating physical phenomena, like with animations and such, which is a good medium for some of Ben’s type of information. The sun data in particular in his daily updates are good for that, and some of the unique things he’s shown, like a possible way the earth may tilt from the unlocking of the crust/mantle pairing.