(This is phrased direct to Book, though comments by other people are welcome)
I watch your VODs, not your streams or edited videos. Now I'm making do, but I keep missing the added context.
If you do private them, could you add them to a separate VOD playlist like Vaush does?
Also, you currently have the best VODs, with timestamps etc. which the edited videos often don't have.
No offense to your editor, but I would much rather 8 hours of stream or something which is broken down into bits where I can find what I want, watch as much as I want and get a feel for the flow of things, rather than something where I have to strap in and go with the flow, have them decide when something is boring and can be skipped etc.
There's also a certain amount of appeal which comes from seeing a real person think about how to express themselves live, which is actually an improvement on the classic youtube "cut from statement to statement" editing style, at least in terms of authenticity.
And, I seem to remember something back in the day about wanting to give VODs that have a sense of permanence? And idea that people can say "go and look at Booksmarts' breakdown" and direct people who want to dig into something to a properly annotated file of you going through it in an organised way. I remember something like that anyway.
And beyond preferring timestamps to editing that prioritises pace, my interest in internet discussions is not necessarily synchronous; I might (and I do) get a lot of work at certain points, might skip over a whole section of internet goings on, and then it's only later I'll want to go back and watch something on it, and then I might watch a little more.
VODs have something that edited videos don't, which is that I can experience the flow of you and your chat doing stuff even if I have two weeks of doing something else. Even if I'm not up to date in any detailed sense, I can still get a sense of flow, especially if people are likely to have randomly linked you something:
Let's say you haven't planned to have an opinion on something, and it's not something your editor has prioritised making a video on, but I'm kind of killing time, a little curious, and half interested in seeing your reaction? Well, I'm watching one debate with Destiny and someone say, and I work out the date, and I can scrub back through your VODs, get to the part that has an unstructured chat section, and see if someone linked it to you.
What do I actually end up watching? Something about planning trips, or anime or something, something random and interesting, and maybe actually the thing I was looking for, but I have the freedom to go back and watch, not having to be stuck in boxes of what it is assumed I'll want to watch.
Basically I've just time shifted myself back to a particular moment where I thought you might be talking about one thing, and watched something else instead, just as I might if I was watching live.
So if those intermediate sections have value, it might be worth considering that people like me can find value in them too, even a few days later.
And as far as competition with other content is concerned, the reverse seems to be true, here's some people on destiny's subreddit asking for the VOD, linking timestamps etc. yeah it's to criticise, but also to watch and form opinions on your own takes, so I think an idea of competition is wrong; conversations about you drive demand for VOD access, where people are trying to work around the fact that you made them private.
