top | item 32222864

(no title)

hansword | 3 years ago

I want to very much second excluding Veritasium. Whenever he talked about something I was knowledgeable in, he made mistakes. This combined with branding himself as 'the element of truth' and the increasing over-clickbaity titles and thumbs made me stop watching him.

It's an entertainment channel, and if you want light science entertainment, and expect to forget everything within a few hours, it's a good channel. If you want a science/learning/education channel, it isn't.

discuss

order

bil7|3 years ago

>the increasing over-clickbaity titles and thumbs

an unfortunate appeal to the recommendation algorithm that is now a must. You are leaving views on the table without employing these clickbait methods. One solution that many channels use including Veritasium is trying out various clickbait packaging for the first 24-48h, then swapping to something more descriptive.

When these videos represent not only one person's livelihood but also the salaries of a team of producers, camera operators, scriptwriters, etc it just makes unfortunate sense to appeal to the algorithm

bison3|3 years ago

To me it's more the topics he's covering that are clickbaity, I personally can live with the titles but I feel like Veritasium intentionally find topics that have some controversy(or fabricates some if they don't) like the physics debate one, and the "misconception" about electricity one. Instead of focusing on teaching and explain practically how things work in our world he chooses examples that are very abstract and frankly not relevant to most viewers. I feel like it's the Mr. Beast model of doing youtube and one that I'm not a fan of. This combined with the issues other commenters have noted about getting things wrong which in itself if fine but when others have called him out on it he hasn't handled the feedback well. I only noticed this trend the past few years, but really turns me off.

hansword|3 years ago

You are right. And I do understand why he does it. I can see his side.

But I sit on the other side. I hate it and will tell everyone how much I hate it.

--- Edit:

Or, if you prefer, in market terms: Because I am not alone, there is a market for non-clickbaity titles, non-exaggerated thumbs, and there are channels that cater to this market.

gwd|3 years ago

> the increasing over-clickbaity titles and thumbs made me stop watching him.

He actually talks about that here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

Apparently an early video of his about a spinning basketball originally had a non-clickbait title; someone else posted it with a clickbait title and got at least an order of magnitude more views. So now, he makes clickbaity titles.